Weekly Legal Education Roundup

Because the week between Christmas and New Years is typically slow for legal education news, I am going to discuss the best legal education articles for 2016.

• Patti Alleva (North Dakota) & Jennifer A. Gundlach (Hofstra), Learning Intentionally and the Metacognitive Task, Journal of Legal Education, Volume 65, Number 4, Summer 2016.  The article explores the importance of metacognition and learning about learning to legal education and lawyering.
• Louis D. Bilionis (Cincinnati), Professional Formation and the Political Economy of the American Law School, Tennessee Law Review, Vol. 83, No. 3, 2016.  This article proposes that a comprehensive model for doing professional formation in law school is now in sight.

• Steven Friedland (Elon) & Ian Holloway (Calgary), The Law School of 2020.  Our view is that the 2020 law school will indeed be different. But how different depends on who wins the war between traditional education, tracing back to the days of Professor Christopher Columbus Langdell in the 1870s, and the current drivers influencing legal education from inside and out. In a word, we are living in a time of struggle – struggle for control of the soul of legal education.
• Alli Gerkman (IAALS) and Logan Cornett (IAALS), Foundations for Practice: The Whole Lawyer and the Character Quotient.  Study of the skillset lawyers want in new graduates and the skillset lawyers believe new graduates have.
• Peter H. Huang (Colorado), Meta-Mindfulness: A New Hope, 19 Richmond Journal of Law and Public Interest 303-24 (2016).  This essay analyzes meta-mindfulness, defined as mindfulness about mindfulness.
• Lucy A. Jewel (Tennessee), Old-School Rhetoric and New-School Cognitive Science: The Enduring Power of Logocentric Categories, JALWD, Vol. 13, 2016.  A fascinating article that examines legal reasoning through the lens of cognitive science
• Adam Lamparello (Indiana Tech), Assessing a Law School's Program of Legal Education to Comply with the American Bar Association's Revised Standards and Maximize Student Attainment of Core Lawyering Competencies.  This article discusses the very timely topic of assessing outcomes in legal education.
• Adam Lamparello (Indiana Tech) and Charles E. MacLean (Indiana Tech), Creating the New Law School by Fully Integrating Experiential Education Across the Entire Curriculum.  Law schools must integrate experiential learning across the entire curriculum to create an assessment-driven and outcome-based program of legal education that enables students to develop core lawyering competencies and solve real-world problems.  Law schools must collapse the distinction between analytical, practical skills, and clinical training and develop a cohesive curricular model that bridges the divide between legal education and law practice.
• Joni Larson (Indiana Tech), To Develop Critical Thinking Skills and Allow Students to Be Practice Ready, We Must Move Well Beyond the Lecture Format, Elon Law Review, Vol. 8:443.  If students are to emerge from law school with practice ready skills, they must be given the opportunity to learn and practice a variety of skills and develop the necessary qualities that will allow them to effectively and efficiently enter the practice of law.
• Harold Anthony Lloyd (Wake Forest), Cognitive Emotion and the Law, Law & Psychology Review, forthcoming.  This article shows that cognitive emotion affects law and legal analysis.
• Deborah Jones Merritt (Ohio State), Cognition and Justice: New Ways to Think Like a Lawyer, Arkansas Law Review, forthcoming.  Functional justice includes two sub-types: rule-abiding justice and rule-changing justice. Law schools focus primarily on rule-changing justice, while practicing attorneys most often pursue rule-abiding justice.

Finally, Professor Louis Schulze wrote a series of posts on the Faculty Lounge, explaining in detail how he and his colleagues at Florida International University grabbed the top spot on the Florida bar for first-time takers for the last three exams.  The quick answer is that they used techniques from general education research.

• Louis Schulze, Ask Not What You Can Do For Your Students; Ask What Your Students Can Do For Themselves
• Louis Schulze, Using Cognitive Psychology to Improve Student Performance, Part Two: Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning
• Louis Schulze, Using Cognitive Psychology to Improve Student Performance, Part Three: Spaced Repetition
• Louis Schulze, Using Cognitive Psychology to Improve Student Performance, Part Four: Cognitive Schema Theory
• Louis Schulze, Using Cognitive Psychology to Improve Student Performance, Part Five: Putting it All Together
• Louis Schulze,Using Cognitive Psychology to Improve Student Performance, Part Six: Putting it All Together II