Retention Issues in Legal Education: The Roles of Undergraduate Educators and of Academic Support in the Law School

2001 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Cabrera
Keyword(s):  
Student Retention ◽  
Academic Support ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Education Literature ◽  
Undergraduate Institutions ◽  
School Preparation

Retention of law students, particularly minorities, is an issue for undergraduate schools as well as for law schools. This article looks at the decline in the number and quality of law school applications. It examines legal education literature and recent law school admissions statistics. The author concludes that the significant increase in academic support services over the last several years is not enough to improve student retention in law school. Preparation for graduate legal education must also be improved at undergraduate institutions, and law schools should be involved in that process.

The Disastrous First Fund-Raising Campaign in Legal Education: The Harvard Law School Centennial, 1914–1920

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-578
Author(s):  
Bruce A. Kimball
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fund Raising ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
New Venture ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
The Law ◽  
The University

Between 1915 and 1925, Harvard University conducted the first national public fund-raising campaign in higher education in the United States. At the same time, Harvard Law School attempted the first such effort in legal education. The law school organized its effort independently, in conjunction with its centennial in 1917. The university campaign succeeded magnificently by all accounts; the law school failed miserably. Though perfectly positioned for this new venture, Harvard Law School raised scarcely a quarter of its goal from merely 2 percent of its alumni. This essay presents the first account of this campaign and argues that its failure was rooted in longstanding cultural and professional objections that many of the school's alumni shared: law students and law schools neither need nor deserve benefactions, and such gifts worsen the overcrowding of the bar. Due to these objections, lethargy, apathy, and pessimism suffused the campaign. These factors weakened the leadership of the alumni association, the dean, and the president, leading to inept management, wasted time, and an unlikely strategy that was pursued ineffectively. All this doomed the campaign, particularly given the tragic interruptions of the dean's suicide and World War I, along with competition from the well-run campaigns for the University and for disaster relief due to the war.

AALS Panel – Global Legal Education – Can American Law Schools Respond to the Opportunities?

2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Bakken
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Foreign Law ◽  
American Law ◽  
Foreign Governments ◽  
Simultaneous Movement

During the past decade many American law schools have identified and responded to the opportunity and necessity of training law students and lawyers for the challenges created by globalization. Opportunities are certainly available to schools with strong business, international trade and human rights programs. Opportunities are, however, also available to schools with interests and strengths in the newer disciplines such as conflict resolution, intellectual property and environment protection. Law schools which have ventured into global oriented training have recognized that the market is not simply a one-way-street for domestic students but also includes training of foreign law students and lawyers. Private foundations in the United States and abroad, foreign governments and our national government have helped finance foreign lawyer visits and training events throughout America. When international lawyers visit the United States, domestic law schools are involved as hosts, training sites, and sources of professional expertise. There has also been a simultaneous movement of domestic lawyers and law students through foreign law school programs and other study abroad opportunities. When all these international experiences are taken together one realizes the need for law schools to become more involved in the development and implementation of training and development of globally oriented legal education.

scholarly journals De-Secularizing Legal Education in Indonesian Non-Islamic Law School: Examining The �Intorduction to Jurisprudence� Textbooks on The �Norm Classification� Chapter

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fajri Matahati Muhammadin ◽  
Hanindito Danusatya
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Literature Study ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
The Law ◽  
Undergraduate Programs

The Indonesian legal system is not secular, but the legal education in non-Islamic universities are secular. This article will highlight the �Introduction to Jurisprudence� course (ITJ) at law undergraduate programs. More specifically, one chapter will be analyzed i.e. �Classification of Norms� because it is an early fundamental chapter in ITJ which shapes the jurisprudential reasoning of the law students. This article uses a literature study to observe the most used textbooks for the (ITJ) course in the top law schools in Indonesia. It will be found that the approached used by these textbooks are secular and incompatible with the Indonesian non-secular legal system. Islamization of knowledge is needed to �de-secularize� this �Classification of Norms� chapter.

scholarly journals Innovators, Esq.: Training the Next Generation of Lawyer Social Entrepreneurs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie A. Dangel ◽  
Michael J Madison
Keyword(s):  
Social Entrepreneurship ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
School Program ◽  
Social Entrepreneurs ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
University Of Pittsburgh ◽  
Law School Graduates ◽  
The University

Today’s law school graduates need to be entrepreneurial to succeed, but traditional legal education tends to produce lawyers who are “strange bedfellows” with entrepreneurs. This article begins by examining the innovative programs at many law schools that ameliorate this tension, including the programs offered by our Innovation Practice Institute (IPI) at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Although these programs train law students to represent entrepreneurs and to be entrepreneurial in law-related careers, few (if any) law schools train law students to be “business” entrepreneurs. Drawing on our own experiences and the writings of Bill Drayton, the lawyer who pioneered the field of social entrepreneurship, we discuss how some lawyers have applied their legal education to be successful “social” entrepreneurs. Finally, we outline the IPI’s three-year law school program explicitly designed to train law students to be social entrepreneurs.

scholarly journals Pericles Should Learn to Fix a Leaky Pipe – Why Trial Advocacy Should Become Part of the LLB Curriculum (Part 1)

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Willem Hendrik Gravett
Keyword(s):  
Professional Competence ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Law ◽  
Trial Advocacy ◽  
The University

It is a sad fact that at most university law schools in South Africa, a student can graduate without ever having set foot in a courtroom, and without ever having spoken to, or on behalf of, a person in need of advice or counsel. The past several years have witnessed a swelling chorus of complaints that the current LLB curriculum produces law graduates who were "out of their depth" in practice. My purpose is to make a case for the inclusion in the LLB curriculum of a course in trial advocacy. This endeavour of necessity invokes the broader debate over the educational objectives of a university law school – a debate memorably framed by William Twining as the two polar images of "Pericles and the plumber". My thesis is that the education of practising lawyers should be the primary mission of the university law school. The first part of this contribution is a response to those legal academics who hold that the role of the law school is to educate law students in the theories and substance of the law; that it is not to function as a trade school or a nursery school for legal practice. With reference to the development of legal education in the United States, I argue that the "education/training" dichotomy has been exposed as a red herring. This so-called antithesis is false, because it assumes that a vocational approach is necessarily incompatible with such values as free inquiry, intellectual rigour, independence of thought, and breadth of perspective. The modern American law school has shown that such so-called incompatibility is the product of intellectual snobbery and devoid of any substance. It is also often said that the raison d'être of a university legal education is to develop in the law student the ability "to think like a lawyer". However, what legal academics usually mean by "thinking like a lawyer" is the development of a limited subset of the skills that are of crucial importance in practising law: one fundamental cognitive skill – analysis – and one fundamental applied skill – legal research. We are not preparing our students for other, equally crucial lawyering tasks – negotiating, client counselling, witness interviewing and trial advocacy. Thinking like a lawyer is a much richer and more intricate process than merely collecting and manipulating doctrine. We cannot say that we are fulfilling our goal to teach students to "think like lawyers", because the complete lawyer "thinks" about doctrine and about trial strategy and about negotiation and about counselling. We cannot teach students to "think like lawyers" without simultaneously teaching them what lawyers do. An LLB curriculum that only produces graduates who can "think like lawyers" in the narrow sense ill-serves them, the profession and the public. If the profession is to improve the quality of the services it provides to the public, it is necessary for the law schools to recognise that their students must receive the skills needed to put into practice the knowledge and analytical abilities they learn in the substantive courses. We have an obligation to balance the LLB curriculum with courses in professional competence, including trial advocacy – courses that expose our students to what actually occurs in lawyer-client relationships and in courtrooms. The skills our law students would acquire in these courses are essential to graduating minimally-competent lawyers whom we can hand over to practice to complete their training. The university law school must help students form the habits and skills that will carry over to a lifetime of practice. Nothing could be more absurd than to neglect in education those practical matters that are necessary for a person's future calling.

scholarly journals Online Clinical Legal Education: Challenging the Traditional Model

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Les McCrimmon ◽  
Ros Vickers ◽  
Ken Parish
Keyword(s):  
Legal Education ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Traditional Model ◽  
Degree Programs ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Use Of Technology ◽  
Law Degree

<p>It has been suggested that the “Digital Age provides an opportunity to revitalize and modernize legal education and to make it more individualized, relevant, human, and accessible”. Delivery of law degree programs fully online is one way the internet has begun to change, if not (yet) revolutionise, legal education in the twenty-first century.  In Australia, law students have been able to obtain their law degree online for a number of years.  Online clinical legal education, however, is still in its infancy.</p><p>In this article, the authors argue that the greater use of technology in legal education is inevitable, and law schools offering degrees fully online will continue to increase, at least in Australia. The rewards and risks of online legal education are considered from the perspective of a law school in which over 80% of its 855 students study law fully online. The development and implementation of clinical opportunities for students studying online also is discussed.</p><div><div><p> </p></div></div>

scholarly journals To work or not to work... Before law school: apprehension, confidence, and cynicism among law students

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yung-Yi Diana Pan
Keyword(s):  
Work Experience ◽  
Immigrant Students ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Economic Recession ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Work Experiences ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
American Law

<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 200%; -ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph;"> </p><p>Most socio-legal scholarship does not examine pre-law school preparation, more specifically, work experience. The recent American economic recession brought many working adults back into the fold of school. With regard to legal education in particular, how might work experience before law school affect students’ perceptions of the profession, themselves, and their career trajectories? And, how do these experiences vary between law schools, and among law students? Drawing on an ethnographic study at two divergently-ranked American law schools between 2009-2011 (the beginnings of the economic crisis), I argue that student work experiences (or lack thereof) before law school matter for their own perceptions of their school and overall career outlook. I typologize those students who transitioned immediately from undergraduate to law school as "conventionals," and those with work experience prior to commencing legal education as "returnees." I find that overall, returnees are more confident about completing law school, yet cynical about legal education, while their conventional counterparts respect the pedagogy but remain apprehensive regarding their career outlook. In this respect, work experience provides a form of "capital." Notably, most immigrant students in this study are conventionals, and I provide some suggestions to better incorporate these students who already feel as if they are posturing in an unfamiliar cultural and professional environment.</p><p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; text-align: justify; line-height: 200%; -ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph;"> </p>

Clinical Legal Education and Democracy in India

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sital Kalantry
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Legal Services ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Teaching Clinics ◽  
Global Law ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Voluntary Basis

Formal clinical legal education programs with instructors teaching clinics in a classroom and practice setting are not common in Indian universities. Few programs in which law students provide legal services on a volunteer/voluntary basis to poor communities. This chapter argues that there are many reasons law schools and universities in India should institute clinical legal education programmes—through these classes, students learn practical lawyering skills and at the same time, students provide assistance to people who could not otherwise afford legal services. One less explored rationale for clinical legal education is the relationship between clinical legal education and the promotion of democracy. Through his personal experience in co-teaching a clinic at the Jindal Global Law School, the author develops the connection between democracy in India and clinical legal education.

scholarly journals Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Contemporary Asian Reading of a Seminal Text

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-149
Author(s):  
Andra Le Roux-Kemp
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Education And Training ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Special Administrative Region ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
Administrative Region ◽  
And Training

Law schools are peculiar places occupied by, dependent on, associated with, and exerting influence on a myriad of institutions and stakeholders. From law students’ efforts at mastering the allusive skill of legal reasoning to the challenges both tenured and untenured academic staff face in the neoliberalist higher education model where the legal profession and the consumers of the law school product exert increasing – and sometimes even impossible – demands, law schools and its populace have always been contested, hierarchical and image-conscious spaces. Indeed, as Ralph Shain noted in the Journal of Ideology in 2012, “[a]nyone who has suffered through law school would be grateful to have a good polemic against the institution”. This article offers such a polemic against legal education in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Over a period of four years, a selection of postgraduate law students from one of the (three) higher education institutions responsible for legal education and training in Hong Kong were asked to reflect upon their legal studies and future roles as legal professionals with reference to the 1983 self-published pamphlet by Duncan Kennedy, entitled “Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the System”. Kennedy’s essay offered a critical analysis of the role of legal education in American social life at that time, and the manner in which it reproduced hierarchy in law, legal education, the legal profession, as well as in society generally. The narratives informing this article show that almost 40 years subsequent the publication of Kennedy’s text, and in a jurisdiction with an altogether different social context and facing its own political turmoil and civil rights’ aspirations, many parallels can be drawn with what Kennedy had observed in 1983. Part I of this article sets the scene with a detailed overview of the legal education and training landscape of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region from a legal-historical perspective to date. The discussion and analysis then turn to the narratives of Hong Kong law students, offering a window into their experiences as (unintended) participants in the hierarchies of law and legal education in Hong Kong. Much more, however, can be gleaned from these narratives than just how these students perceive their present legal studies and future roles as legal professionals in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. These narratives also offer a critical reflection on Hong Kong’s colonial past and present status as a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China under the principle of “one country two systems” (Part II). Culture-specific values impacting on these students’ legal studies and career decisions are revealed (Part III), and troublesome shortcomings in the current legal education and training landscape vis-à-vis the legal professional fraternity and political and socio-economic reality of Hong Kong are laid bare (Part IV). Much like Kennedy’s 1983 essay failed to bring about any real change in how law schools go about their business as cogs in the apparatus of social hierarchy, the narratives informing this article also conclude on a rather sombre and futile note. Be that as it may. At least their voices have been heard and the seemingly inescapable power struggles noted. This too is an important function of the law and legal discourse.

Educational Disadvantages and Indigenous Law Students: Barriers and Potential Solutions

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Melville
Keyword(s):  
Legal Education ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Law Schools ◽  
Attrition Rates ◽  
Indigenous Students ◽  
Indigenous Law ◽  
Western Model ◽  
Students First ◽  
Education Academic

Indigenous students are under-represented in Australian universities, including in law school, and have lower educational outcomes relative to non-Indigenous students. First, this article identifies systemic barriers that prevent Indigenous students from enrolling in law school, including entrenched educational disadvantage that prevents many Indigenous students from achieving the grades necessary for university entry. Indigenous students who overcome this disadvantage and enrol in law schools then face higher attrition rates relative to non-Indigenous law students. Indigenous students find law schools to be intimidating, unfamiliar and alienating environments. Law schools privilege a narrow Western model of legal education that continues to deny Indigenous understandings of the law. Second, this article identifies potential solutions that may assist in addressing these barriers. These include alternative entry schemes, building pathways between vocational training and universities and engaged outreach programmes for assisting Indigenous students into higher education. Academic, social and financial support is required to address attrition rates; however, solutions need to go deeper than the provision of additional assistance. This article argues for the need to Indigenize legal education, and for the curriculum to consider law as pluralistic and embedded in power relations, and to provide the focus on social justice which motivates many Indigenous students to study law in the first place.

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