Showing papers in "Journal of Legal Education in 1996"

Asking Better Questions: Approaching the Process of Thesis Supervision.

Abstract: The crux of postgraduate learning is the thesis, and the crux of the thesis is supervision. Yet little has been written on the subject, certainly in the field of law.1 The reasons for this silence are not hard to find. The traditional approach to an academic career in law, especially in the United States, has not included any kind of postgraduate education such as is required of an aspiring scholar in almost any other discipline. In other fields, and even in law faculties in Canada, Australia, and Great Britain, the Ph.D. or similar degree serves as an apprenticeship, an acculturation in the ways and means of the discipline. In law, the path to a teaching career has been very different: via the law review as an undergraduate,2 a judicial clerkship, and perhaps a year or two of practice.

Negotiation and Psychoanalysis: If I'd Wanted to Learn About Feelings I Wouldn't Have Gone to Law School.

Abstract: I first became interested in the relationship between psychoanalysis and negotiation fifteen years ago, when I began teaching lawyers and law students negotiation skills. Most of the books on legal negotiation at the time focused on the bag-of-tricks approach to successful negotiation: the top ten ways to outwit your adversary. As I began to think about different approaches, one thing that consistently struck me was that when I gave a negotiation problem to a pair of students a set of facts regarding a lawsuit or a business deal the results of the negotiations based on those facts varied widely from pair to pair.1 If there was a $50,000 range within which settlement was possible under the instructions, there would be settlements throughout the range. Each pair of students would have reached a mutually satisfactory end point that was clearly dictated only partially by the information they had received from me. Some of the differences could be explained by some students' learning the top ten list better than others: if you reveal your bottom line to your opponent, it will be difficult to settle much above it. But, having said that, I began to wonder why some people do consistently reveal their bottom line, or do the spiritual equivalent; why others routinely mow down their opponents in single-minded pursuit of the last possible dollar; and why still others pursue a collaborative approach that benefits both parties.2 How, in other words, do

Virtual Reality Testing: The Use of Video for Evaluation in Legal Education.

Abstract: Kimberlee K. Kovach is Assistant Professor, South Texas College of Law, and Adjunct Professor, University of Texas School of Law. My sincere gratitude goes to Sandra DeGraw, Teresa Stanton Colle tt, J. P. Ogilvy, James Paulsen, Stephen K. Huber, and Catherine G. Burnett for their suggestions on earlier drafts of the article. And a special thanks to Kathy Gresham, Director of Multi-Media Production Services, South Texas College of Law, not only for her comments on the article, but also for providing the audiovisual expertise that allows and encourages innovation.

Facing the Millenium: Law Schools, Law Librarians, and Information Technology

Abstract: Bob Berring's comment aptly describes the extent to which information technology is changing the legal profession and legal education in the late 1990s. Yet it has not been so very long since legal educators thought about information technology solely in terms of the law library. And even twenty years ago, when the Journal of Legal Education featured an article on the roles of law librarians, the potential effects of computers on legal research could only be hinted at.2 In 1996, however, information technology affects all aspects of legal education, and the information and technology issues facing law schools are not limited to the library. As a consequence, the issues require new and creative institutional responses. This article presents some of the administrative and organizational questions that technology poses for legal education, describes the solutions developed at one law school, and discusses possible new roles for library directors in managing and planning the growing integration of information technology into all aspects of legal education.

The Global Law School Program at New York University.

Abstract: There are certain inevitabilities about the next century. One is that the world will become smaller and increasingly interdependent. Another is the importance of law specifically the rule of law as the basis of economic interdependence and the foundation of national and international human rights. As totalitarian governments and developing nations adopt legal systems based on the rule of law, more and more people will experience for the first time political and economic justice. Indeed, the rule of law permeates the emerging global village. Lives will be affected and even saved by a process which may be captured in two broad contemporary movements: transformation and globalization. Transformation. Russia struggles toward capitalism without plunging into the economic turmoil that might jeopardize nascent democracy; Violeta Barrios de Chamorro vies in Nicaragua with the remnants of the Sandinistas as she strives to create a market economy; the People's Republic of China welcomes the contributions of capitalists to an economy that its leaders hope some day will rival that of the United States. Around the world, totalitarian societies struggle toward democracy, and entire economies are being transformed into free markets.

Designing Law Curricula for a Transnational Industrial and Science-Based Civilization.

Abstract: The challenges to planning and designing programs oflegal education that are, at once, professionally relevant and intellectually enriching come from a number of coinciding world revolutions. These revolutions render ineffective or obsolete many of the institutions and practices of our inherited systems of governance and the political-philosophical conceptions on which they rest. Their result, the reality with which our graduates will contend, will be so different from the reality we know that our usual historical and comparative techniques of scouring past and CUlTent practices in our own and other advanced systems for alternatives may provide little guidance. Since the end of the Second World War, the great imperial trading systems have largely yielded to an inclusive world system marked by progressive reductions in tariffs, subsidies, and other nontariffbarriers-techniques long used to manage domestic political economies. At the same time, there has been a progressive narrowing ofareas that governments had immunized from this global system. The ascendance of capitalism virtually everywhere and the eclipse of anticapitalist economic and moral theories have reinforced the internationalizing economic trends. These trends have increased the need for competitive capacity of virtually every entity and have set off, within states, rapid and disjunctive social changes, which are driven, as well, by other intersecting trends. The resulting spread of a single, inclusive industrial and science-based civilization has, of course, generated and diffused new technologies and opportunities, but it has also put great stress on traditional moral and religious doctrines and on those for whom these ideas are central struts of their existence. As more and more of the planet has become part of a single market, skills have diffused at a differential pace, often creating population explosions, thanks to the introduction of relatively rudimentary medical technology without the transplantation of comparable economic developments that would have permitted larger populations to self-sustain and that also would have led

The Use and Effectiveness of Various Learning Materials in an Evidence Class

Abstract: Like many law teachers, I take reasonable care in selecting the outside materials I require my students to use (or recommend to them) in preparing for class and studying for the exam. I base my choice on my own notions of what would be most helpful to them in learning the material, preparing for class, succeeding on the exam, and preparing to be lawyers. I carefully weigh such matters as length of assignment, interest to the students, and active versus passive learning.My assessment, however, is based almost entirely on my own notions of what the students will find most interesting and most beneficial. I will, of course, occasionally discuss course materials with my colleagues over lunch, or even more occasionally get an anecdotal report from a student. But I had never really examined the extent of use and the effectiveness of the materials I had been assigning.The closest I had ever come to doing so was in reviewing the evaluation forms filled out anonymously by all students at the end of the semester. One of the twelve questions on the school's standard form asks students their opinion of “the assigned texts, outside reading and exercises” in the course. I must admit, however, that my greater interest in the other eleven questions, which deal more personally with my performance, and the paucity of information supplied by the students (on most questions and particularly on this one) have conspired to make this exercise less than helpful in evaluating the teaching materials.In the spring of 1994 I decided to conduct a more systematic review of the teaching materials I assigned in my Evidence class. Mainly I wanted to know to what extent the students were completing assignments in each of the materials; why they were or were not completing the assignments; and to what extent, if any, did completing the assignments improve their performance.The results of the study gave me some interesting answers. More important, conducting the study and discovering that very few similar studies have been published in the law school context have convinced me that we law professors need to do more systematic research into student use of the materials we assign and their effectiveness.

Characterization and Legal Discourse.

Abstract: Characterization is the art of taking a problem and (re)framing it in terms that reflect favorably upon the speaker or the particular point of view she wishes to advocate. Lawyers must characterize all the time, whether they aree arguing on behalf of a client in court, writing legal memoranda, or negotiating the terms of a contract. However, characterization is more than an empty legal rhetorical device. It is also a skill commonly used by lawyers and non-lawyers alike in their everyday lives. In this article, Professor Little presents characterization technique both in the context of everyday life and in the context of legal practice and pedagogy. Drawing from real-life examples and a variety of academic disciplines, Professor Little defines the concept of "characterization," and outlines the steps involved in characterizing a particular issue or dispute. Professor Little then provides four different characterization models to guide legal practitioners in choosing an appropriate characterization for different tasks and different audiences. Finally, she discusses the importance of characterization study in legal education, not only as a means of developing law students' lawyering skills, but also as a means of encouraging students to relate the law back to everyday life, embrace different perspectives, work towards responsible lawyering, and appreciate the human aspect of practicing law.

Globalization: The European Experience.

Abstract: My subject is the experience of the United Kingdom and other European countries in the teaching of law, especially in response to the demands of legal practice in the European Union and its single market. The modern system of legal education in England and Wales is based on a three-stage division. The first stage, the academic stage, is provided by the universities. In the early 1970s there were about thirty universities and other institutions offering undergraduate law degree programs of one kind or another. Twenty years later that number had almost trebled. Equally striking has been the increase in the number of students enrolled for such degrees, from about 5,000 in the early '70s to 18,600 in 1992. The second stage, vocational training, is provided by the professional bodies. It is at this stage that the division between solicitor and barrister emerges. Barristers spend an academic year at a school run by the bar known as the Inns of Court School of Law. An enormous increase in the demand for

Administrative Law: The Hidden Comparative Law Course.

Abstract: What does today's Administrative Law course give your students that you might not be aware of and might be helped by knowing? That, as I understand it, is the question I am to answer. But we may also want to think about the overall shape of the curriculum: it may be useful to ask about fundamental issues our students may not be aware of, that may notbe dealt with elsewhere in the law school curriculum. I'll spend most of my time on the question Tve been asked to address, but I hope you will accept a few sentences on this second question. For administrative lawyers, that probable gap remains the one Harold Lasswell and Myres MacDougal suggested long ago, that contemporary law studies should include explicit instruction in the skills of public policy analysis in particular, how to evaluate the need for and probable effectiveness of regulation. Administrative Law is the hidden comparative law course of the public law and adjectival law curriculum. In myjudgment, that is its main contribution to your students' appreciation for your own subjects. Its students come to grips again and again with problems whose contrasts with those of the standard court-centered curriculum can illuminate their other courses. The common

Legislative Processes and Products

Abstract: A little over a decade ago, Robert Weisberg accurately observed: \"The general contemporary American view of statutory interpretation is that there is not a great deal to say about the subject. As a result, nothing else as important in the law receives so little attention.\"' In the past dozen years, an avalanche of scholarly and pedagogical materials on legislative processes and their products has swamped legal education. 2 I have argued elsewhere that this explosion in materials on legislation resulted from a variety of factors, including closer attention to empirical and normative theories of legislative processes, a consideration of statutory interpretation as worthy of both high scholarly theory and practical, professionally oriented pedagogy, and a dramatic series of debates on the Supreme Court about the Court's appropriate role in construing legislative products.3 My goals in this brief essay are to present an overview of some of the most important developments and then suggest several ways in which law professors who teach statutory subjects may profitably enliven their classrooms by situating these developments within the context of their substantive courses.