Mitchell Hamline School of Law
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“The Worst Idea Ever”: Lessons from One Law School’s Embrace of Online Learning
Get PDFThis essay explores one law school\u27s contrarian and pioneering embrace of online education into the core of its J.D. program, a five-year journey undertaken by William Mitchell College of Law (now Mitchell Hamline School ofLaw). This essay makes a simple point. Online pedagogy ought to be part of the palette of tools available for the design of J.D. programs. But placing it at the core of a J.D. program is not universally to be desired. Like any pedagogy, these online tools have their strengths and their weaknesses. The particular combination of tools and methods represents a question of design: of arranging resources to maximize strengths and minimize weaknesses-within a set of constraints. And the key constraint ought to be the particular mission of each law school. Design in the absence of clarity of mission, and without the availability of the full gamut of instructional methods, is impoverished and suboptimal.
An openness to bringing online pedagogy into the core has this salutary effect: it invites, almost requires, intentional, mission-based design. It invites educators to think foundationally about what they seek to accomplish by their J.D. programs, and how that might best be accomplished. It exposes business-as-usual thinking, and forces one to question what seem to be quite foundational assumptions about how to educate lawyers. For this reason alone, online methodologies ought to be clearly and readily available to legal educators.
There are strong sentiments opposing substantial incorporation of online components in legal education, many of which I will explore. Not the least has been the historic, robust embrace of face-to-face teaching by the American Bar Association (ABA). As well, online pedagogy, especially if its adoption is part of a major re-design of the J.D. program, is not cheap and not easy. And the uncertainty surrounding many of the design constraints is high. All of this leads me to conclude that only one variety of law school mission is likely to support substantial online incorporation-that with the goal of expanding access to legal education
Inclusive Economics and Home Loan Policies for Informal Workers
Get PDFThe United States has been suffering from a housing crisis that existed long before the proliferation of sub-prime loans and the Great Recession of 2008-2009. For decades, millions of gainfully employed workers have been institutionally excluded from homeownership, simply because they work in the informal economy. Because of this, the economic growth of households in this demographic has been stymied by discriminatory banking policies that heavily prioritize short-term profit maximization over borrower reliability, or loan viability. Many of those affected are historically disenfranchised people, who systematically have been excluded from the American dream of “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” simply for failing to belong to the narrow demographic for whom home loans were originally designed.
Approximately 37% of working adults in the United States today undertake some type of informal work, and 16% of working adults are employed on a full-time basis in the informal sector. It is a segment of the working population that funds an imposing amount of sales tax revenue. These are not the people who lost their homes in The Great Recession of 2008. Indeed, approximately 70% of the subprime loans issued in 2006 were to upper and upper-middle income borrowers in wealthy neighborhoods, and not middle-class working households, or middle-class neighborhoods. It is still the case today that, for workers of the informal economy, homeownership is largely unavailable due to institutional barriers, no matter how modest the home or neighborhood, and no matter how reliable the loan applicant is.
This article describes the lost macro-economic opportunity in failing to provide home loans to qualified households in the informal economy, then providing a survey of solutions with successful track records. These solutions fall with a framework I refer to as inclusive economics. My analysis focuses on one segment of informal economy: the cultural economy, which largely operates in cash and exemplifies how inclusive economics can create wealth in a sustainable way that includes historically dis-enfranchised households
Trade Secrets and the Right to Information: A Comparative Analysis of E.U. and U.S. Approaches to Freedom of Expression and Whistleblowing
Get PDFBoth the EU Trade Secrets Directive and US trade secret law seek to balance the protection of trade secrets against other values, including freedom of expression, but the EU Trade Secret Directive is more explicit about the need to do so. This article examines EU and US trade secret law through the right to information, a recognized human right under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and implementing laws and conventions. In particular, it discusses how principles of freedom of expression and whistleblowing should apply in the trade secret context in the EU and U.S
Constitutional Law: Courts Should Not Forfeit the Barker Factors in Civil Forfeiture—Olson v. One 1999 Lexus MN License Plate No. 851LDV VIN: JT6HF10U6X0079461, 924 N.W.2d 594 (Minn. 2019).
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Book Review Essay: Jewish and American Law: A Comparative Study. (Vols. 1 and 2) by Samuel J. Levine
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