Help Me, Help You: What You Should Know Before You Ask Your LRW Professor For Help

Meredith Geller (Northwestern), Help Me, Help You: What You Should Know Before You Ask for Help: 

I got an email the other day from a student who was having some difficulty writing his arguments. The student wrote that he kept rewriting his arguments in response to my comments but that he still had not been able to get them written satisfactorily. I could tell the student was frustrated and I could also tell that, for the moment, at least, I was the target of that frustration. Essentially, the student was telling me that he had changed things in accordance with my comments, but I still was not happy. Having been teaching for fifteen years, the frustration alone neither surprised nor upset me. However, I certainly know that there are times when it would and that there are colleagues who can and do get irritated by emails like this. So, I created a guide to help provide my students with tips on what they need to know about asking me for help. 

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Generative AI And The Purpose Of Legal Scholarship

Following up on my previous post, Andrew Perlman (Dean, Suffolk), Generative AI and the Future of Legal Scholarship: Michael L. Smith (St. Mary's), Generative AI and the Purpose of Legal Scholarship: 

What does generative AI mean for the future of legal scholarship? The topic has been the talk of the town around academic water coolers. Some legal scholars have tried their hand at generating legal scholarship using generative AI. The accompanying commentary is varied, but advocates for the technology suggest that generative may become a common tool for legal scholars, leaving those who refuse to adapt at a severe disadvantage.

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Kuehn: The Employment Benefits Of Law Clinics And Externships

Robert R. Kuehn (Washington University; Google Scholar), The Employment Benefits of Law Clinics and Externships, 33 Clin. Legal Educ. Newsletter __ (2025):

One of the reasons law students enroll in a law clinic or externship is the belief that the experience will improve their marketability. Surveys of recent law graduates and employers show that students' perceptions of the positive impact of a clinic or externship experience on their job opportunities upon graduation are well founded. The research summarized herein demonstrates that clinics and externships do aid graduates in obtaining their first job and that potential employers value entry-level candidates with law clinic and externship experience. ...

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Spring 2025 Law Review Article Submission Guide

Nancy Levit (UMKC) & Allen Rostron (UMKC) have updated their incredibly useful document, which contains two charts for the Spring 2025 submission season covering the 196 main journals of each law school.

We have created hyperlinks for each law review to take you directly to the law review’s submissions page. Again the chart includes as much information as possible about what law reviews are not accepting submissions right now and what months they say they’ll resume accepting submissions. 

The most interesting change here is the approximately sixty journals (that aren’t already open) that say they plan to reopen for submissions in February (February 1 is a popular date).

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Wendel: The Good Lawyers Of January 6

W. Bradley Wendel (Cornell; Google Scholar), The Good Lawyers of January 6:

Much of the response by the community of legal ethics and professional responsibility scholars to the 2020 presidential election has been focused on the wrongs committed by lawyers like John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, and Kenneth Chesebro, who created the alternate elector scheme to throw the decision regarding the election to the House of Representatives. Yet there was a group of lawyers, that I will refer to as the good lawyers of January 6, who forcefully and unequivocally opposed this plan, refused to cooperate in its execution, advised Vice President Mike Pence that it was not legally supportable, and in some cases threatened to resign in protest if President Trump went forward with it. These lawyers are, almost without exception, card-carrying movement conservatives, with pedigrees including clerkships for conservative Supreme Court Justices, membership in the Federalist Society, and service in prior Republican administrations. They include Greg Jacob, counsel to Vice President Pence; White House Counsel Pat Cipollone; White House Senior Advisor Eric Hershmann; retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig; Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen; and Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue. 

As a normative legal ethics theorist I am interested in whether there a coherent and attractive ideal or set of principles of ethical conduct by lawyers that would align with the refusal of these lawyers to advice or assist in the overthrow of the election.

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“How Do I Design My New Law Course?”

Steven Arrigg Koh (Boston University; Google Scholar), “How Do I Design My New Law Course?”: 

How should a professor design a new law course? This question is a particular challenge for new law professors, who lack resources for course design. While some scholarship exists on specific law courses and pedagogy, trans-substantive course design literature is comparatively rare. This Essay closes this gap by providing a framework: the four major categories of decisions regard the semester structure, classroom, final exam, plus "professorial personality." It argues that, for each decision, reasonable minds can differ. 

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Rapoport: Training Law Students To Model Civility In An Uncivil Social Media World

Nancy B. Rapoport (UNLV; Google Scholar), Training Law Students to Model Civility When Social Media Makes Civility Harder to Maintain, 85 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 511 (2024): 

This paper, presented as part of a symposium honoring the Hon. Joseph F. Weis Jr., discusses two relatively recent law student behavioral failures, triggered in part by the effect of the anonymity of social media posts on social discourse.  It suggests better ways of dealing with public disagreements.

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Does The 1L Curriculum Make A Difference?

David A. Hyman (Georgetown), Jing Liu (East China University) &  Joshua C. Teitelbaum (Georgetown; Google Scholar), Does the 1L Curriculum Make a Difference?, 21 J. Empirical Legal Stud. 375 (2024): 

Georgetown Law’s Curriculum B (also known as Section 3) offers a unique opportunity to study an alternative 1L curriculum. The standard 1L curriculum has been around for decades and is still offered at the vast majority of U.S. law schools. Leaders in the legal academy often talk about experimenting with the 1L curriculum, but hardly anyone does it. Georgetown Law has. We study whether Georgetown’s Curriculum B yields measurable differences in student outcomes. Our empirical design leverages the fact that enrollment in Curriculum B is done by lottery when it is oversubscribed—meaning our study is effectively a randomized controlled trial. 

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Rankings Without U.S. News: A Revealed Preference Approach To Evaluating Law Schools

Jesse Rothstein (UC-Berkeley; Google Scholar) & Albert Yoon (Toronto; Google Scholar), Rankings without U.S. News: A Revealed Preference Approach to Evaluating Law Schools, 21 J. Empirical Legal Stud. 279 (2024): 

Since their inception in 1989, the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings have influenced how schools, students, and the legal profession itself think about legal education. In the Fall of 2022, however, several of the most selective law schools formally withdrew from the annual rankings. In so doing, these schools laid bare longstanding criticisms of the rankings’ questionable criteria and opaque methodology. While the long-term effect of this boycott remains to be seen, school rankings are likely here to stay. In this Article we design a more informative approach to rankings, based on actual decisions students make. 

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The Great British Bake Off And Critiquing Student Legal Writing

Carolyn Young Larmore (Chapman; Google Scholar) & Abigail Patthoff (Chapman), Flour, Fondant & Feedback: What the Great British Bake Off Can Teach Us About Critiquing Student Legal Writing: 

We've all been there: a stack of legal memos towering, grading deadlines approaching, and suddenly that British baking show on Netflix seems irresistible. But what if your "Great British Bake Off" binge could actually make you a better legal writing professor? As it turns out, this delightful distraction serves up more than just a sweet escape from grading—it offers a surprisingly apt model for critiquing student work.

What is the Great British Bake Off?
The Great British Bake Off, or GBBO as it's affectionately known, has become a global phenomenon, capturing hearts even across the pond in America. While it hardly needs an introduction, we’ll briefly set the scene. Each season, twelve amateur bakers from across Great Britain compete in a giant kitchen tent on the lawn of a picturesque manor home. Weekly themed challenges, such as "French Patisserie Week" or "Bread Week," test the bakers' skills in timed trials. Two witty hosts provide commentary and narration, while judges Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith offer critiques and determine the bakers' fates. Each week, one baker is eliminated and another is crowned "Star Baker." There's no cash prize at stake; the ultimate winner receives only a commemorative cake plate and bragging rights—yet the show's popularity endures.

So what does this baking show have to do with legal writing? GBBO serves up a masterclass in project feedback—a crucial aspect of our roles as legal writing instructors.

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Perlman: Generative AI And The Future Of Legal Scholarship

Andrew M. Perlman (Dean, Suffolk; Google Scholar), Generative AI and the Future of Legal Scholarship:

Since ChatGPT's release in November 2022, legal scholars have grappled with generative AI's implications for the law, lawyers, and legal education. Articles have examined the technology's potential to transform the delivery of legal services, explored the attendant legal ethics concerns, identified legal and regulatory issues arising from generative AI’s widespread use, and discussed the impact of the technology on teaching and learning in law school.

By late 2024, generative AI has become so sophisticated that legal scholars now need to consider a new set of issues that relate to a core feature of the law professor's work: the production of legal scholarship itself.

To demonstrate the growing ability of generative AI to yield new insights and draft sophisticated scholarly text, the rest of this piece contains a new theory of legal scholarship drafted exclusively by ChatGPT. In other words, the article simultaneously articulates the way in which legal scholarship will change due to AI and uses the technology itself to demonstrate the point.

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Using a Status Email Assignment In First-Year Legal Writing To Address Issues With Student Correspondence

Meredith Geller (Northern Illinois), ‘Yo, Prof!’ is Not the Proper Way to Address Me: Using a Status Email Assignment in First-Year Legal Writing to Address Issues with Student Correspondence: 

This article summarizes the status email assignment used in a first year legal writing class in order to help students with professional writing.  

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Critical Curriculum Design To Cultivate Qualities Of ‘Engaged Citizenship’

Rachel López (Temple; Google Scholar), Critical Curriculum Design: 

Legal education in the United States stands at a critical juncture. As democracy faces mounting threats both at home and abroad, law schools must grapple with their role in shaping not just competent lawyers but engaged citizens capable of safeguarding democratic institutions. Yet the traditional model of teaching students to “think like a lawyer” may be inadvertently undermining the very values and norms essential to stabilizing our democracy.

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Professional Identity Formation And The NextGen Bar Open Opportunities For Law Student And Law School Success

Neil W. Hamilton (St. Thomas-MN), Professional Identity Formation and the NextGen Bar Open Opportunities for Law Student and Law School Success, 3 J.L. Teaching & Learning __ (2025):

All law faculty, staff, and students want students and graduates to be successful with respect to: (1) academic performance; (2) bar passage; (3) meaningful post-graduation employment; and (4) excellent service to clients and the legal system.  Both the 2022 changes to ABA accreditation Standard 303  and the ongoing implementation of the NextGen Bar starting in five states in 2026 and ten more states in 2027  open substantial opportunities for law students and law schools to achieve more success at these four goals.

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Symposium: Tributes To Michael Olivas

Symposium, Tributes to Michael Olivas, 61 Hous. L. Rev. 881-952  (2024): 

• Gerald Torres (Yale), Celebrating Michael Olivas, 61 Hous. L. Rev. 881 (2024)
• Steven W. Bender (Seattle) & Ediberto Román (Florida Int'l), Sin Vergüenza: Michael Olivas and Crop Cultivation, 61 Hous. L. Rev. 889 (2024)

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After Affirmative Action: Contextual Admissions And The Future Of African American Law School Enrollment

Nathan L. Bennett Fleming (Wake Forest), After Affirmative Action: Contextual Admissions and the Future of African American Law School Enrollment, 76 Okla. L. Rev. 629 (2024): 

The Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (“SFFA v. Harvard”) signaled the end of affirmative action in higher education, launching higher education law into unchartered territory. The Court’s mandate of race neutrality in admissions is expected to lead to a steep decline in higher education participation for underrepresented minorities, particularly African Americans. For law schools, the impact of the Court’s decision is expected to be even more harmful because the underrepresentation of African Americans persisted during the affirmative action era. Many scholars have called for implementing socioeconomic admissions preferences as a substitute for race-conscious admissions; however, experts predict that one-third of Harvard’s Latino admits and at least half of Harvard’s African American admits would likely be rejected through use of a class-based admissions. Universities must explore all available tools to secure diversity in higher education.

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Symposium: The Rocky Mountain Collective On Race, Place, And Law

Symposium, The Rocky Mountain Collective on Race, Place, and Law (RPL), 101 Denv. L. Rev. 443-517 (2024):

• Rashmi Goel (Denver; Google Scholar), The RPL Effect, 101 Denv. L. Rev. 447 (2024)
• Katherine Steefel (Denver), From Whiteboard to Statement of Principles: The Development of the Rocky Mountain Collective on Race, Place & Law's Principles, 101 Denv. L. Rev. 455 (2024)
• Alexi Freeman (Denver), The Staying Power of RPL: Fostering Belonging Among Students, 101 Denv. L. Rev. 465 (2024)

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Value-Centered Lawyering: Reshaping The Law School Curriculum To Promote Well-Being, Quality Client Representation, And A Thriving Legal Field

Katya S. Cronin (George Washington), Value-Centered Lawyering: Reshaping the Law School Curriculum to Promote Well-Being, Quality Client Representation, and a Thriving Legal Field, 101 U. Det. L. Rev. 257 (2024): 

For three long and harrowing years in law school, students learn to think like lawyers, to put their clients first, to interpret the law as it stands, to deftly advocate for positions they do not believe in, and to strive for successful and prestigious careers. These lessons help them develop analytical and advocacy skills, creativity and perseverance, a strong work ethic, and ambition. But there is a darker side to these learning objectives. What law students often take away from their time in law school is that their own personal beliefs, values, and experiences are irrelevant to the practice of law. They quickly learn that they must serve clients and employers, however personally distasteful or damaging it may be to them. And they begin to measure their worth and success by the yardsticks of prestige and money. Hearing these consistent albeit subliminal messages, law students frequently disassociate from the expectations that their future careers should reflect their inner selves, and they soon find themselves trapped in jobs they consider morally taxing or meaningless. When faced with such recurring conflicts between their work obligations and personal values, or with an overarching feeling of professional meaninglessness, most lawyers experience chronic cognitive dissonance, turn to alcohol or controlled substances for comfort, or develop anxiety, depression, and a host of other emotional, mental, and physical ailments. They lose interest in their work, perform worse, and experience burnout, thus jeopardizing not only their own well-being, but also client outcomes and the stability of the legal field in the long run.

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Ukrainian-U.S. Legal Education Collaboration And Clinics

Davida Finger (Loyola-New Orleans), Susan Felstiner (Lewis & Clark) & Michelle Greenberg-Kobrin (Cardozo), Empowering Ukraine’s First Legal Responders: Ukrainian-US Collaboration and Clinics, 31 Int’l J. Clin. Legal Educ. 147 (2024):

At the onset of the full-scale Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, U.S. law clinic professors worked alongside the leadership of the Association of Legal Clinics of Ukraine. The mutual objective was to support Ukrainian law professors and facilitate the continued legal education of their students, particularly the acquisition of skills typically taught in law clinics. Ultimately, the online partnership that developed focused on skills training and included seven Ukrainian law schools, faculty from over six U.S. law schools and one private law firm, and USAID Justice for All Activity in Ukraine. 

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Happiness And The Law: Lifelong Learning As A Path To Meaning And Purpose

Isaac Mamaysky (Potomac Law Group, New York), Happiness and the Law: Lifelong Learning as a Path to Meaning and Purpose, 63 Santa Clara L. Rev. 65 (2023): 

We begin with the premise that the happiest and most fulfilled attorneys are those who live a life of meaning and purpose. While many in the legal profession have achieved this goal, many others are unsatisfied with their career trajectories but feel, for a variety of reasons, that they aren’t empowered to make a change. Unfortunately, study after study finds that many attorneys are stressed and unhappy with their professional lives, and would even leave the law entirely if they could.

The Article argues that these attorneys have a far more dynamic set of options than simply leaving the profession or staying unhappy. It’s not just possible—but, for many attorneys, should be the goal—to merge personal and professional interests to achieve a career filled with meaning and purpose.

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Empower The Imposters In The Legal Field: Teaching & Practicing Mindfulness For Letting Go Of Unproductive Thoughts

Katerina Lewinbuk (South Texas) & Kurstin Grady (Martin, Disiere, Jefferson & Wisdom, Houston), Empower the Imposters in the Legal Field: Teaching & Practicing Mindfulness for Letting Go of Unproductive Thoughts, 44 N. Ill. Univ. L. Rev. 109 (2024): 

Imposter syndrome, initially coined “imposter phenomenon” by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, refers to “a psychological experience of intellectual and professional fraudulence.” Those who suffer from imposter syndrome typically experience an all-encompassing fear they are not as intelligent, successful, or accomplished as their qualifications suggest, and thus are bound to ultimately be exposed as “frauds.” To counter these feelings, those who struggle with imposter syndrome set unrealistically high goals for themselves, only to be dissatisfied with any performance that is short of perfection. Over time, this ongoing psychological pressure leads to poor emotional well-being, decreased senses of self-confidence and self-worth, and increased rates of frustration, anxiety, depression, and burnout.

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Visible Learning: Adapting Primary And Secondary Pedagogical Approaches To Legal Education

Dawn Young (Loyola-Chicago), Visible Learning: Adapting Primary and Secondary Pedagogical Approaches to Legal Education, 72 J. Legal Educ. ___ (2023):

As a new generation of students, Generation Z, enter law school, educators must continually adapt and improve to be the most effective in their roles. While traditional teaching methods like Socratic dialogue, the case method, and experiential learning are all valuable to varying degrees, law professors can gain further insight by exploring additional teaching approaches.

As law professors welcome Gen Z to their classrooms, how can they ensure they are adapting to the needs of this cohort? Could gaining an understanding of Gen Z’s prior educational experiences provide law professors with additional insight?

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Symposium: Legal Research Pedagogy

Symposium, Legal Research Pedagogy, 43 N. Ill. Univ. L. Rev. 248-299 (2024): 

• Tanya M. Johnson (Connecticut), On Bringing Alternative Methods to Legal Research Instruction, 43 N. Ill. U. L. Rev. 248 (2023)
• Nicholas Mignanelli (Yale; Google Scholar), Notes for a New Legal Research Pedagogy, 43 N. Ill. U. L. Rev. 265 (2023)

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Ten Empowering Strategies For Nondirective Clinical Supervision

Michele Estrin Gilman (Baltimore), Ten Empowering Strategies for Nondirective Clinical Supervision, 31 Clinical L. Rev. 211 (2024):

Nondirective clinical supervision is the signature pedagogy of clinical teaching. It encourages students to take ownership over their cases and assume their role as attorneys through a supported process of decision-making. While the goals of non-directive supervision are well developed, there is less discussion of how to achieve those goals. The scant literature on non-directive methodology focuses on Socratic dialogue. Socratic questions can help students unpack their assumptions, but they can also reinforce an educational hierarchy and create anxiety for students. 

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First-Gen In The Field

Carolyn Young Larmore (Chapman; Google Scholar), First-Gen in the Field, 31 Clinical L. Rev. 239 (2024):

First-generation law students are often at a disadvantage in law school, having no family experience in higher education and few connections with attorneys or other professionals. These difficulties are only compounded when first-gen students leave the classroom and venture into the real world of legal externships, where professional identity formation may begin to take place, but where the landscape is even more foreign. The expectation that first-gen students should be able to navigate courtrooms and legal offices can be a heavy burden on these students, often leading to added stress and imposter syndrome.

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Finding Our Way: Teaching Legislative Advocacy Clinics

Elizabeth B. Cooper (Fordham) & Anita Weinberg (Loyola-Chicago), Finding Our Way: Teaching Legislative Advocacy Clinics, 31 Clinical L. Rev. 41 (2024):

Legislative advocacy clinics are excellent vehicles for teaching lawyering skills, for achieving broad-based social change, and for imparting to law students the important roles they can play in preserving and strengthening our democracy. Notwithstanding their growth over the last 15 years, there has been little scholarly reflection about the pedagogy of teaching such clinics. This Article helps to fill this gap.

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Collaborative Holistic Services And Education In Law School Clinical Programs

Melina A. Healey (Touro), Opening Up the In-House: A Model for Collaborative Holistic Services and Education in Law School Clinical Programs, 75 Wash. U. J.L. & Pol’y 152 (2024): 

Individual in-house clinics too commonly operate autonomously behind separate walls. These barriers impair the meaningful holistic representation of clients and the educational opportunities of clinic students. This article provides an argument and framework for opening the doors between clinics to enrich clinic student education and enhance client representation. Part I identifies the benefits of holistic inter-clinic collaboration for both clinic students and the clients they serve. Part II shares a model for how to integrate education and client service across practice areas of clinical programs. A forthcoming article, published separately, will further describe how clinical programs can be improved by removing silos in evaluation and creating unified programmatic-level clinical student and course assessment tools, which can in turn also illustrate the essential value of clinic to legal education.

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Clinics And Emergencies

Sabrina Balgamwalla (Wayne State) & Elizabeth Keyes (Baltimore; Google Scholar), Clinics and Emergencies, 31 Clinical L. Rev. 1 (2024):

Clinical programs—and the clinicians who run them—are regularly called upon to respond to emergency situations. These engagements can be rewarding, personally and professionally. But, as we know from our own work as immigration clinicians, emergency lawyering also presents pressure points for clinicians. Our hope in writing this article is to surface and critique the dynamics that arise when clinicians are called upon to engage in emergency work. Specifically, we aim to expand on the literature of clinics and emergency responses by reflecting on the ways in which emergency responses have drawn significant energy and time from clinicians, including ourselves. 

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The Rise Of The Critical–Contextual Legal Education Reform Movement

Cara R. Shaffer (Colorado), Context at the Periphery: The Rise of the Critical–Contextual Legal Education Reform Movement, 30 Cardozo J. Equal Rts. & Soc. Just. 55 (2023):

Despite challenges faced by Generation Z (“Gen Z”), research shows that they are resilient and deeply committed to impacting positive political and social change. This is no surprise. Gen Z students have been bombarded with an embroiled within polarized political messaging for years. This messaging is often partisan, balkanized, and delivered right to their iPhones. Indeed, forty-four percent of Gen Z reads no traditional new sources and receives all of their news from TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and similar sources. Further, the United States education system fails its students, both compared to other countries and to the country’s own historical standards. Scores in history, civics, and critical reading have decreased in recent years. Educators agree this may be, in part, because these contextual subjects are marginalized within the system. Moreover, we now have students entering law school who are the victims of reinvigorated regressive political moves to censure history, literature, and social context. Culturally, de-emphasis on humanities-based ideas and frameworks may be having an effect. Interestingly, recent polling by Nord Anglia revealed that only thirty-eight percent of Gen Z respondents believed critical thinking was one of the top skills for a successful career. Now, in the law school classroom, educators remark that this group of students face serious issues with critical thinking and contextualizing information.

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Lawsky: The Intersection Of Tax Law And Computational Law

John Nay (Stanford; Google Scholar) & Sarah Lawsky (Northwestern; Google Scholar) et. al, Large Language Models as Tax Attorneys: A Case Study in Legal Capabilities Emergence, 382 Phil. Transactions of the Royal Society A (2024):

Better understanding of Large Language Models’(LLMs) legal analysis abilities can contribute to improving the efficiency of legal services, governing artificial intelligence and leveraging LLMs to identify inconsistencies in law. This paper explores LLM capabilities in applying tax law. We choose this area of law because it has a structure that allows us to set up automated validation pipelines across thousands of examples, requires logical reasoning and math skills, and enables us to test LLM capabilities in a manner relevant to real-world economic lives of citizens and companies. Our experiments demonstrate emerging legal understanding capabilities, with improved performance in each subsequent OpenAI model release. We experiment with retrieving and using the relevant legal authority to assess the impact of providing additional legal context to LLMs. Few-shot prompting, presenting examples of question–answer pairs, is also found to significantly enhance the performance of the most advanced model, GPT-4. The findings indicate that LLMs, particularly when combined with prompting enhancements and the correct legal texts, can perform at high levels of accuracy but not yet at expert tax lawyer levels. As LLMs continue to advance, their ability to reason about law autonomously could have significant implications for the legal profession and AI governance. This article is part of the theme issue ‘A complexity science approach to law and governance’.

Sarah Lawsky (Northwestern; Google Scholar), Computational Law and Epistemic Trespassing, 2 J. Cross-Disciplinary Research in Computational L. 1 (2024):

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Teaching Fails: Celebration and Adaptation

Brian Flaherty (Boston University), Teaching Fails: Celebration and Adaptation:

This paper is about publicly (or at least in our teaching community) celebrating those occasional classroom SNAFUs, those dreaded teaching fails, which we would all rather put behind us as soon as we stop cringing. Why celebrate them you ask? I suggest that there is no greater way of developing trust, centering students, and ultimately creating a powerful teaching community than to find communal joy in the occasional classroom catastrophe. In exploring the celebration of teaching fails, this article will begin by briefly explaining and giving examples of what this looks like. Next, I will talk about some of the benefits of creating a culture that celebrates teaching fails — individual benefits, community benefits, pedagogical benefits, and benefits to our students. 

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QuizBot: An Innovative AI-Assisted Assessment In Legal Education

Sean A.Harrington (Oklahoma; Google Scholar), Introducing QuizBot an Innovative AI-Assisted Assessment in Legal Education: 

This Article explores an innovative approach to assessment in legal education: an AI-assisted quiz system implemented in an AI & the Practice of Law course. The system employs a Socratic method-inspired chatbot to engage students in substantive conversations about course materials, providing a novel method for evaluating student learning and engagement. The Article examines the structure and implementation of this system, including its grading methodology and rubric, and discusses its benefits and challenges.

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On Women Professors Who Teach Legal Writing: Addressing Stigma And Women's Health

Amanda L. Stephens (St. Mary’s) & Sean M. Viña (University of the Incarnate Word), On Women Professors Who Teach Legal Writing: Addressing Stigma and Women's Health, 48 Vt. L. Rev. 237 (2023): 

Since the late 1980s, legal writing (LW) professors have been disproportionately white women because the LW field has been stigmatized as “women’s work.” As a result, these teaching positions typically have been low status and afforded with less pay and job security in comparison to tenure-track doctrinal law professor positions. Compounding—or intersecting—with the stigma of teaching LW are LW professors’ social statuses as women and/or other marginalized statuses. These statuses intersect and influence how and what they teach and the legal academy’s attitudes toward them.

Although previous scholarship has briefly addressed legal skill classes’ stigmatization, no scholarship to date has applied a systematic, feminist sociological approach to this problem. The benefit of this interdisciplinary approach is that it unveils not only the gender equity but also the health equity aspects of this issue in law schools.

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Breaking The Cycle: Rethinking Bar Exam Scoring And Portability For NextGen Examinees

Steven Foster (Oklahoma City) & Nachman N. Gutowski (UNLV; Google Scholar), Breaking the Cycle: Rethinking Bar Exam Scoring and Portability for NextGen Examinees, 2024 U. N. Tex. Dall. L. Rev. __ :

The development of the NextGen Bar Exam presents a crucial opportunity to address longstanding challenges in both bar exam scoring and portability concerns. The reliance on recent graduates' performance on the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE) as a baseline for setting future standards is flawed due to relative scoring and scaling. In addition to concerns regarding how the future bar exam is scored, there are also concerns regarding how the new scoring metric on the NextGen bar exam will be used for portability and, more specifically, what will happen between 2026 and 2028 as the NextGen bar exam is progressively adopted by jurisdictions. 

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Bar Examination: A Verb, Not A Noun

Marsha Griggs (St. Louis; Google Scholar), Bar Examination: A Verb, Not a Noun, 76 Wash. U. J.L. & Pol’y __ (2025):

The legal profession, long steeped in tradition, is witnessing a transformative shift in the protocols for licensing new attorneys. Ironically, the proposed NextGen Bar exam has been a major catalyst in the transformation away from reliance on standardized testing as the sole gateway to law practice, toward individualized and potentially reciprocal systems of state licensure. This shift has the potential to realign the regulatory hierarchy in attorney admission. Such a realignment is vital to the preservation of lawyer self-governance, and it offers great promise for a more client-centered focus in legal education. These retooled protocols for attorney licensure reflect evolving generational attitudes about professional competency and an increased appetite for judicial innovation. As with all forward-looking developments, the new and proposed regulatory protocols present challenges for the legal profession and the state supreme courts who seek to implement them—the greatest of which might be limited resources and systemic resistance to change.

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A New Inclusive Scholar Rank

Rob Willey (George Mason; Google Scholar), Melanie Knapp (George Mason; Google Scholar) & Ashley Matthews (George Mason), A New Inclusive Scholar Rank, 45 Women's Rts. L. Rep. 124 (2024):

For a variety of reasons, most existing legal scholarship ranking systems fail to identify the authors who are currently producing the most impactful scholarship. Most current ranks also rely on a methodology that minimizes the impact of women and other time-limited groups. Here, we present a more current and inclusive ranking.

We previously authored a paper that provides a detailed discussion of the issues with current ranking systems and why our new ranking methodology should produce more up-to-date results and open the door to underrepresented groups [Constructing Inclusive & Current Scholarship Impact Rankings]. To quickly summarize our findings, most current ranking systems look at citations to all-time publications. This typically means that ranking well requires thirty to forty years of nearly continuous scholarly output. Women tend to have less time to write than men and take more career breaks. Consequently, women average fewer articles over the course of their careers than their male peers. Relying on all-time publications exacerbates this publishing gap and results in a lower-than-expected representation of women in existing rankings, especially at the upper end. Looking at all-time publications also prevents existing rankings from surfacing the current top scholars: because all articles a scholar has ever authored count towards their rank, papers authored decades ago are factored in and can play a significant role in where an author ranks today. So, while some authors who perform well in existing rankings are still producing scholarship, others rank solely or primarily based on their prior work.

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Symposium: Roadmap For Law School Modernity — Teaching Technology Competence

Symposium, Roadmap for Law School Modernity: Teaching Technology Competence, 20 U. St. Thomas L.J. 1-374 (2024): 

• Michael Robak (St. Thomas-MN), An Introduction to A Roadmap for Law School Modernity: Teaching Technology Competence, 20 U. St. Thomas L.J. 1 (2024)
• Jessica de Perio Wittman (Connecticut) & Kathleen (Katie) Brown (Charleston; Google Scholar), Navigating Legal Ethics and Law School Curricula: Attempting to Find Technology Competency without a Compass, 20 U. St. Thomas L.J. 9 (2024)
• Patrick Parsons (Georgia State; Google Scholar), Michelle Hook Dewey (Georgia State) & Kristina L. Niedringhaus (Georgia State; Google Scholar), Georgia State Legal Technology Competency Model: A Framework for Examining and Evaluating What It Means to Be a Technologically Competent Lawyer, 20 U. St. Thomas L.J. 53 (2024)
• Hon. John G. Browning (Spencer Fane, Faulkner), Ignorance Is Not Bliss: Educating Lawyers and Law Students about the High Cost of Shirking the Duty of Technology Competence, 20 U. St. Thomas L.J. 83 (2024)
• Iantha Haight (BYU), A Rubric for Analyzing Legal Technology Using Benefit/Risk Pairs, 20 U. St. Thomas L.J. 107 (2024)
• Drew Simshaw (Gonzaga), Technology Competence as a Compass for Helping to Close the Justice Gap, 20 U. St. Thomas L.J. 129 (2024)

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Professional Identity Formation And The NextGen Bar Open Opportunities For Law Student And Law School Success

Neil W. Hamilton (St. Thomas-MN; Google Scholar), Professional Identity Formation and the NextGen Bar Open Opportunities for Law Student and Law School Success, 3 J.L. Teaching & Learning ___ (2025): 

All law faculty, staff, and students want students and graduates to be successful with respect to: (1) academic performance; (2) bar passage; (3) meaningful post-graduation employment; and (4) excellent service to clients and the legal system. Both the 2022 changes to ABA accreditation Standard 303 and the ongoing implementation of the NextGen Bar starting in five states in 2026 and ten more states in 2027 open substantial opportunities for law students and law schools to achieve more success at these four goals.

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The Law Professor's Role In Legal Education: Theory v. Practice

Carlo A. Pedrioli (Southern), Exploring Conflict over the Professor's Role in U.S. Legal Education: Theory v. Practice (Carolina Academic Press 2024): 

In the United States, the professionalization of the role of the law professor began in the late nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth century, occurring along with the professionalization of the legal field in general.  Although the current role of the law professor is well-established as mainly academic, much controversy has taken place over this role throughout the decades.  With longstanding critiques of legal education as impractical preparation for the practice of law, which came with renewed vigor after the economic meltdown of 2008, this controversy acquired new intensity and significance. 

This monograph opens with an overview of post-2008 critiques of U.S. legal education, which implicated the role of the law professor.  The project then offers historical background on legal education in mainland Europe, England, and the U.S. before the late nineteenth century.  The book proceeds by examining the development of the law professor role in the U.S. from the late nineteenth century to the present and discusses, in detail, the ongoing conflict between supporters of the scholar model and the practitioner model of the law professor.  Several hybrid models also receive attention. 

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Kuehn: Whither Coursework And NextGen Bar Exam Success?

Robert R. Kuehn (Washington University; Google Scholar), Whither Coursework and NextGen Bar Exam Success?, 7 Raising the Bar 2 (2024):

The NextGen bar exam will focus on an expanded range of essential lawyering skills and a reduced set of legal topics. Moving toward less reliance on knowledge of the black letter law concepts of past exams, it seeks to build on the successes of clinical legal education, alternative dispute resolution, and legal writing and analysis programs. 

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Deo: Building Belonging In Law Schools

Meera E. Deo (Southwestern; Google Scholar), Building Belonging:

Given the end of affirmative action as we know it, a decline in numeric representation of students of color in higher education is inevitable—resulting in devastating losses for legal education, the legal profession, and American leadership. Yet, those who seek to maintain diversity cannot focus their attention solely on cultivating novel admissions strategies. We must couple recruitment with retention.

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On Academic Lawyers In The U.S. Government: Walter's Wisdom

Harold Hongju Koh (Yale), On Academic Lawyers in the U.S. Government: Walter's Wisdom, 102 N.C. L. Rev. 1321 (2024): 

Walter Dellinger was one of the most effective lawyers ever to work in the United States government. He was also a natural mentor, which made him a source of joy and wisdom for generations. In remembering Walter, we should recall his wisdom regarding the difference between academic and government lawyers, the government lawyer’s duty to explain, and the human qualities that, over a storied career, earn lawyers genuine affection and respect.

Conclusion
That was the Walter Dellinger I knew. One of a kind. Where others trudged, he flew and danced. He was so generous with his wisdom—“Walter’s Wisdom”—but even more so with his generosity and his love. There was never bitterness or pettiness in Walter, just love and joy and fun.

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Walter Dellinger: The Lawyer As Consummate Teacher

Michael J. Gerhardt (North Carolina), Walter Dellinger: The Lawyer as Consummate Teacher, 102 N.C. L. Rev. 1403 (2024): 

In this short Essay, Professor Michael Gerhardt shares the ways in which Walter Dellinger was an exemplary teacher. As Professor Gerhardt explains through several interactions, Walter Dellinger’s humility, intellectual curiosity, and insights were inspiring and contagious.

Conclusion
A great teacher leaves a legacy in not only the knowledge they convey to their students but also in the enthusiasm for learning they inculcate in their students. To me, Walter always seemed like the proverbial kid in the candy store when it came to constitutional history—or any other subject in which he was deeply interested.

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What Law Schools Teach When They Don’t Teach About State Constitutions

Ellie Margolis (Temple; Google Scholar) & Leonore Carpenter (Rutgers; Google Scholar), What Law Schools Teach When They Don’t Teach About State Constitutions, 55 N.M. L. Rev. ___ (2025):

State constitutional law has always been an essential component of federalism and a key to understanding the fabric of American law. It is even more important today. In the last few terms, the Supreme Court of the United States has upended established principles of U.S. Constitutional law and left many consequential legal issues in the hands of state courts and state constitutions. Yet despite the critical importance of state constitutions, few lawyers graduate from law school with a working knowledge of state constitutions and the role they play in federalism or the legal system more broadly. While virtually all students learn about the United States Constitution as part of the required law school curriculum, many don’t have the opportunity to even take an elective course in state constitutional law. This article addresses the mismatch between the importance of state constitutional law and the way that it is taught – or not taught – in American law schools. It quantifies the gap in state constitutional law instruction in American law schools and considers the consequences when law schools fail to provide every American lawyer with a foundational knowledge of state constitutional law.

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The Impact Of Mindfulness Education On Law Students

Thomas G. W. Telfer (Western University; Google Scholar), Emily Nielsen (Western University), Sara Ahola Kohut (Hospital for Sick Children; Google Scholar) & Elli Weisbaum (Toronto), Enhancing Lawyers' Well-Being and Competencies Beyond the Traditional Law School Curriculum: The Impact of Mindfulness Education on Law Students, 58 U. Brit. Colum. L. Rev. __ (2025):

High rates of mental health issues have been reported among legal professionals and law students alike. Research conducted in the legal field and beyond has consistently linked mindfulness with improved well-being. Consequently, in 2019, Thomas Telfer launched an upper year credit course called Mindfulness and the Legal Profession at Western University, Faculty of Law with the intention of bolstering student wellness and providing training in skills not traditionally covered in the law school curriculum. The course—believed to be the first credit course on mindfulness at a Canadian law school—combines a daily mindfulness practice with readings and discussion on topics such as mental health, focus and distraction, emotional intelligence, resilience, compassion, mindful listening, negotiation, and legal ethics. 

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Outside The Ivory Tower: How Law Students Benefit When Their Professors Revisit Practice

Katherine T. Vukadin (South Texas; Google Scholar), Outside the Ivory Tower: How Law Students Benefit When Their Professors Revisit Practice, 102 Or. L. Rev. 313 (2024): 

Theory or practice? For nearly a century, law professors and the legal community have debated whether law schools should focus on teaching the theory or the practice of law. At first, the theorists prevailed. Law schools emulated their ivory tower counterparts, teaching theory and producing scholarly research. Law students, they argued, could learn how to practice law after graduation.

Employers and graduates balked, complaining that new lawyers floundered in practice. Clients refused to subsidize their training. Law schools, they pointed out, are more akin to medical schools than traditional colleges, and law students need to learn essential skills alongside theory. After all, they pointed out, most law students attend law school intending to practice law, not to theorize.

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Tennessee Symposium: Legal Education

Symposium, Legal Education, 91 Tenn. L. Rev. 1-218 (2023): 

• Deepa Das Acevedo (Emory; Google Scholar), The War on Tenure, 91 Tenn. L. Rev. 1 (2023)
• Jane Bloom Grise (Kentucky) & Dorothy Evensen (Penn State), Getting It Right from the Start, 91 Tenn. L. Rev. 53 (2023)
• Sandra L. Simpson (Gonzaga), The Ultimate Logic Question: Why Continue to Use the LSAT When the Test Harms Diversity?, 91 Tenn. L. Rev. 113 (2023)

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Demonstrating Civility: A Law School Learning Outcome

Laurel Rigertas (Northern Illinois), Demonstrating Civility: A Law School Learning Outcome, 112 Ky. L.J. 413 (2023-2024): 

There have been calls over the years for law schools to teach their students civility. At least twenty-seven law schools have answered that call and adopted “civility” as a learning outcome. Their learning outcomes have two general approaches—having students understand civility or having students demonstrate or exhibit civility. This article takes the position that the skill of demonstrating civility is the better learning outcome. Civility helps the legal system function and future lawyers will have a key role in continuing to improve that system. 

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Law, Literature, And The Legal Imagination

Simon Stern (Toronto; Google Scholar), Law, Literature, and The Legal Imagination, 35 Yale J.L. & Human. 211 (2024):

Law and literature occupies an unusual place among the interdisciplines in the legal academy. Various interdisciplinary conjunctions have found a home on law faculties over the last half-century or so, such as law and economics, law and sociology, and law and psychology, more recently supplemented by law and neuroscience. Most law professors could summarize the aims of scholarship fairly accurately in these areas. Law and literature has had a place in the legal academy for about the same amount of time, and yet those who do not read current scholarship in this field tend to have a vague or even misinformed understanding of what the work entails. 

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Deo: Equity In Legal Education

Meera E. Deo (Southwestern; Google Scholar), Equity in Legal Education, 63 Santa Clara L. Rev. 95 (2023): 

The pandemic has brought to light myriad inequities, in legal education as elsewhere in society. Many of these barriers have existed for decades; while they have been exacerbated due to COVID, they will likely linger even as the pandemic subsides. This Article draws from both quantitative and qualitative data collected from students and faculty to reveal how the pandemic has heightened existing challenges in legal education, in particular ways and with distinctive effects on different populations. While inequities are a hallmark of legal education, the fissures and fault lines of these hierarchies have expanded during COVID. People of color, women, caregivers, those who are the first in their families to earn a college degree (“first- gen”), and others from backgrounds traditionally excluded from legal education are in particularly precarious positions due to the pandemic—though the inequities they face as law school students or professors have existed for decades. 

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