Think, Reflect, Refine: Shaping The Modern Lawyer

Camesha Little (Detroit Mercy), Think, Reflect, Refine: Shaping The Modern Lawyer: 

Legal education must undergo a substantive transformation to adequately equip future lawyers for an increasingly complex, technology-driven legal landscape. This article critically examines the limitations of current pedagogical practices, particularly the persistent reliance on traditional methodologies such as the case method, which can engender a hostile and exclusionary learning environment—especially for students from historically underrepresented identities. It contends that the prevailing focus on doctrinal instruction often comes at the expense of cultivating essential humanistic competencies, including emotional intelligence and self-awareness. These attributes are indispensable for promoting professional well-being, sound judgment, and the development of a robust professional identity. 

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Dissecting The Frog: How A Meme Explains The Westlaw/Lexis And Generational Divide

Sam Williams (Idaho), Dissecting the Frog: How a Meme Explains the Westlaw/Lexis and Generational Divide:

One of the most controversial elements of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris was a drag show during the opening ceremony that allegedly parodied Christianity by recreating Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper." A legal meme emerged showing both images side-by-side, labeling da Vinci's painting "Westlaw" and the drag show "Lexis." In this article, I explain why this meme is funny by showing how the differences between Westlaw and Lexis and legal minds' attitudes towards those differences offer fascinating parallels to this controversy. Westlaw's print-focused, grid-oriented organization and aesthetic might appeal to the trained legal mind, but Lexis' emphasis on discrete information and keyword searching might make the database more appealing to new attorneys and law students who are increasingly unfamiliar with print resources. By embracing the beauty of something new and unfamiliar, attorneys of any age can improve themselves and their profession.

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A Guide To Becoming A Law Professor

Tiffany C. Li (San Francisco; Google Scholar), So You Want to Be a Law Professor: An Unofficial and Incomplete Guide to Pursuing a Law Teaching Career:

You’ve reached this guide because you are interested in becoming a law professor. Included are some resources I’ve collected over the years with tips and information.

All career paths are unique, and nothing on this page should be considered the definitive guide on how to become a law professor. I am a law professor at a U.S. law school, and I have gone through various phases of the U.S. legal academic job market, from practitioner writing on the side, to research fellow, to VAP, to entry-level candidate, to lateral candidate. I graduated with a U.S. J.D. and practiced for a few years before starting the academic track. All of the above are factors that shaped my candidacy on the job market/s, and my advice is solely based on what I know, from my personal experiences and those of friends I know in the field.

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Red, Yellow, Green: A New Traffic Light For Legal Education?

Jonathan Bremen (Loyola-L.A.), Red, Yellow, Green: A New Traffic Light for Legal Education?:

This paper examines the evolving role of cold-calling in legal education, particularly through the lens of a controversial tricolor name card system introduced at Yale Law School. Drawing on historical and contemporary debates, the article explores the advantages and disadvantages of cold-calling, a pedagogical technique long associated with the Socratic method. While cold-calling can increase student participation, improve communication skills, and foster a more equitable classroom, it also has significant drawbacks, including heightened anxiety, particularly for neurodivergent students, and potential reinforcement of harmful power dynamics.

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Effects Of Covid-Induced Remote Learning On LSAT And Bar Exam Performance

Michael Conklin (Texas A&M; Google Scholar), Effects of Covid-Induced Remote Learning on LSAT Performance: 

Existing research demonstrates that covid restrictions result in diminished academic performance. This first-of-its-kind study is designed to measure if this same effect is present with LSAT exam results. Additionally, the consistent result that racial minorities experience disproportionately bad educational outcomes from covid restrictions is also tested. The counterintuitive results from this study—that the same correlations between restrictions and race are not present when analyzing LSAT performance—illuminate numerous aspects of the LSAT exam and the people who choose to take it. Furthermore, the findings of this study will hopefully serve as a powerful catalyst to spark debate into issues regarding legal education in general and the unique nature of the LSAT exam more specifically.

Michael Conklin (Texas A&M; Google Scholar), Zoom to the Bar: How Remote Instruction Affected Bar Exam Performance: 

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Fordham Symposium: The Legal And Ethical Implications Of ChatGPT And Other Emerging Technologies

Symposium, The New AI: The Legal and Ethical Implications of ChayGPT and Other Emerging Technologies, 92 Fordham L. Rev. 1785-2012 (2024): 

• Deborah W. Denno (Fordham; Google Scholar) &  Erica Valencia-Graham (Fordham), Foreword, 92 Fordham L. Rev. 1785 (2024)
• Abdi Aidid (Toronto), Toward an Ethical Human–Computer Division of Labor in Law Practice, 92 Fordham L. Rev. 1797 (2024)
• Katherine B. Forrest (Paul Weiss), Of Another Mind: AI and the Attachment of Human Ethical Obligations, 92 Fordham L. Rev. 1815 (2024)
• Margaret Hu (William & Mary; Google Scholar), Eliott Behar & Davi Ottenheimer (Inrupt), National Security and Federalizing Data Privacy Infrastructure for AI Governance, 92 Fordham L. Rev. 1829 (2024)
• Heather Hughes (American; Google Scholar), Educating Deal Lawyers for the Digital Age, 92 Fordham L. Rev. 1855 (2024)
• Jake Karr (NYU) & Jason Schultz (NYU; Google Scholar), The Legal Imitation Game: Generative AI's Incompatibility with Clinical Legal Education, 92 Fordham L. Rev. 1867 (2024)
• Matthew Sag (Emory; Google Scholar), Fairness and Fair Use in Generative AI, 92 Fordham L. Rev. 1887 (2024)
• Daniel J. Solove (George Washington; Google Scholar) & Hideyuki Matsumi (Vrije Universiteit Brussel; Google Scholar), AI, Algorithms, and Awful Humans, 92 Fordham L. Rev. 1923 (2024)

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Nick Saban, ‘The Process’ And The Bar Exam

Donald E. Campbell (Mississippi College), Get Your Head in the Game: Gamifying the Bar Examination, 40 Miss. C. L. Rev. 223 (2022): 

During a recent administration of the bar examination, I observed the following: a student who had a child ten days before the exam passed; a student on law review failed; a student whose predictors indicated he should fail the bar exam passed; two students who were in the library every day studying failed. Even though these folks were all taking the same exam, their outcomes varied dramatically, and there did not seem to be a common variable that predicted whether they would pass or fail. My first inclination was to throw up my hands in frustration and chalk it up to the fact that every student’s situation is unique.

I was satisfied to shrug and mutter, “what can you do?,” until I came across a podcast on Coach Nick Saban. Saban is a successful college football coach at the University of Alabama. As I listened to the podcast, I realized that the bar exam experience is very similar to a football team’s preparation for a championship game. The stakes are high, the preparation is intense and condensed, each individual bar taker will either win (pass) or lose (fail), and there are points assigned based on how well the performer does.

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NY Times Op-Ed: Elite Schools Are Thinking About Black Student Admissions The Wrong Way

New York Times Op-Ed:  Harvard, Brown and Other Top Schools Are Thinking About Black Freshmen the Wrong Way, by  John McWhorter (Columbia; Google Scholar):

Several highly selective universities have recently reported that in their first freshman classes admitted after the Supreme Court banned racial preferences in admissions, the number of Black and Latino students has fallen.

The percentage of Black freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, declined from 15 percent last fall to 5 percent for this fall. At Amherst College the number fell from 11 percent to 3 percent. Other schools have reported less precipitous but still noticeable drops, such as from 18 percent to 14 percent at Harvard, 10.5 percent to 7.8 percent at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill — a taxpayer-supported public university in a state where 23 percent of the population is Black — and 15 percent to 9 percent at Brown University, a school that has spent considerable energy looking at its early ties to the slave trade. Yale and Princeton held relatively steady, but an overall trend is clear.

The conventional wisdom is that this is alarming, but I’m not seeing it that way. We are trained to regard news on racial preferences in a way that makes us see tragedy where, through different glasses, we might just see change.

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The Biden Administration’s Unconstitutional Student Loan Cancellation Plans & Congress’s Responsibility To Address The Root Cause Of The Student Loan Crisis

James M. Truett (J.D. 2024, Louisiana State), Comment, Congress, Tear Down This Educational Wall: The Biden Administration's Unconstitutional Student Loan Cancellation Plans & Congress's Responsibility to Address the Root Cause of the Student Loan Crisis, 84 La. L. Rev. 625 (2024): 

The goal of student loan programs is to offer students financial assistance and to give the students an opportunity to receive an education. However, as an entire country, the United States has lost sight of this once revolutionary and effective goal. Student loans cause more harm than benefit by imposing enormous amounts of debts on to teenagers who just want a chance to receive an education. The harms certainly outweigh the benefits for recent graduates who will not take their dream job because it will not pay enough to finance their student loan repayments. While the burden of repaying student loans should remain with the students, universities must be held accountable for their predatory financial practices.

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AccessLex: Predicting Bar Success — The Mediating Effects Of 1L Law School GPA On Undergraduate GPA And LSAT

AccessLex, Predicting Bar Success: The Mediating Effects of Law School GPA:

Most American law schools evaluate candidates for admission based on final undergraduate GPA (UGPA) and Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores, due in part to accreditation requirements and institutional bar passage goals. However, several studies have demonstrated racial and ethnic score disparities associated with the LSAT, and prior literature suggests that admissions metrics have limited utility for predicting bar passage — especially when accounting for academic performance in law school.

This study uses data from nearly 20,000 lawyers who graduated from 39 law schools to build on previous literature. We propose statistical mediation to achieve a more accurate understanding of the relationship between, and predictive value of, law school admission factors, first-year law school GPA (1L LGPA), and first-time bar passage.

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Rethinking Legal Education: Demystifying Neurodiversity And Building An Inclusive Future

Jennifer Kindred Mitchell (Baltimore; Google Scholar) & Charlie Amiot (Google Scholar), Rethinking Legal Education: Demystifying Neurodiversity and Building an Inclusive Future:

Neurodiverse (ND) students comprise approximately 1/4 of the law school population, yet traditional legal education often fails to meet their needs. This paper critically examines the prevailing challenges faced by ND students within legal education by identifying the inherent limitations of conventional teaching methods. We first examine ND students' early educational experiences, including detrimental deficit-based messaging and pressures to conform. This context illuminates why many ND law students hide their authentic selves and remain reluctant to disclose needs. We then demystify neurodiversity and common ND cognitive traits to reveal how diverse minds process information and perceive environments. Finally, the paper outlines specific strategies to build inclusion at institutional and instructional levels. Law schools can leverage strengths-based frameworks, universal design in curricula/spaces, neurodiversity informed pedagogy, and DEI efforts. Faculty can employ techniques like teaching in knowledge chunks, incorporating professional identity formation across courses, and designing authentic learning activities.

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Wash U Symposium: Advancing DEI In Legal Education And The Legal Profession

Symposium, Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Legal Education and the Legal Profession, 73 Wash. U. J. L. & Pol'y 1-342 (2024): 

• Karen Tokarz (Washington University), Introduction, 73 Wash. U. J. L. & Pol'y 1 (2024)
• Hon. Willie J. Epps, Jr. (Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge, Western District of Missouri) & Katalin M. Minkler (Law Clerk, Judge Bough), Let's Get One Thing Straight, They're Not the Appointment of the First Openly Gay Federal Judges, 73 Wash. U. J. L. & Pol'y 6 (2024)
• Jennifer Fernandez (CUNY), The Time Is Now: ABA Standard 303(c) as the Impetus for a Truly Inclusive 1L Classroom, 73 Wash. U. J. L. & Pol'y 78 (2024)
• Deborah Merritt (Ohio State; Google Scholar), Eileen Kaufman (Touro) & Andrea Anne Curcio (Georgia State), Enhancing the Validity and Fairness of Lawyer Licensing: Empirical Evidence Supporting Innovative Pathways, 73 Wash. U. J. L. & Pol'y 96 (2024)
• Mable Martin-Scott (Cooley) & Kimberly O'Leary (Cooley), When the Students Teach the Professors: Lessons Learned from Teaching an Elective Seminar in Multicultural Lawyering, 73 Wash. U. J. L. & Pol'y 163 (2024)

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Major Reform Of Legal Education With Minor Risk

Sara Berman (USC) & Chance Meyer (New England), Major Reform With Minor Risk: Implementation of Change Initiatives as a Learning Challenge, 22 U.N.H. L. Rev. 151 (2024):

The call for change in legal education has been loud and clear for more than a century. Despite some resistance among powerholders who benefit from status quo, faculty and administrators across the country work earnestly to solve problems, improve learning, and promote equity. Yet time and again, initiatives are logjammed, shot down as unworkable, misimplemented, or abandoned prematurely when they do not meet unrealistically high expectations for immediate, dramatic results. This article builds on the premises that (1) change is needed, (2) a wide range of sound change ideas for reform and progress are available, and (3) effective implementation of those ideas involves learnable knowledge and skills grounded in proven disciplines of evidence-based practice and change management. Written in two voices, one describing implementation strategies (the how-to) and the other surveying current change ideas (the what and why), this article provides polyphonic guidance and inspiration for law schools to make change happen. 

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Professional Identity Development In The 1L Legal Writing Curriculum

Charles Oldfield (Akron), Entertaining and Embracing Professional Identity Development in the 1L Legal Writing Curriculum, 59 Tulsa L. Rev. 415 (2024): 

Because of their already heavy workload, legal writing faculty sometimes resist taking on new curricular responsibilities, including calls to incorporate ethics and professionalism training in the first-year legal writing curriculum. But the ABA now requires law schools to provide students with opportunities to develop their professional identities throughout their time in law school. This requirement means that faculty will need to add professional identity development to their courses. Rather than resist this change, firstyear legal writing faculty should embrace the opportunity by using the Model Rules of Professional Conduct to incorporate concepts of ethics and professionalism in their firstyear courses.

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Alabama Symposium: Legal Education — Our History, Our Future

Our History, Our Future, 75 Ala. L. Rev. 555-817 (2024): 

• Erwin Chemerinsky (Dean, UC-Berkeley; Google Scholar), The Challenges Facing Legal Education, 75 Ala. L. Rev. 555 (2024)
• Eli Wald (Denver), A Liberal Theory of Legal Education, 75 Ala. L. Rev. 563 (2024)
• Paul M. Pruitt Jr. (Alabama; Google Scholar), Capstone Law: The University of Alabama School of Law, 1873-2023, 75 Ala. L. Rev. 607 (2024)
• Melissa H. Weresh (Drake; Google Scholar), Hidden Lessons, Unforeseen Consequences: Interrogating the Hidden Curriculum in Legal Education and Its Impact on Students from Historically Underrepresented Groups, 75 Ala. L. Rev. 655 (2024) 
• Angela Onwuachi-Willig (Dean, Boston University; Google Scholar), Moving Beyond Statements and Good Intentions in U.S. Law Schools, 75 Ala. L. Rev. 691 (2024) 
• Danielle M. Conway (Dean, Penn State-Dickinson), Institutional Antiracism and Critical Pedagogy: A Quantum Leap Forward for Legal Education and the Legal Academy, 75 Ala. L. Rev. 717 (2024) 

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The Making Of Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality And Opportunity In The American Legal Profession

Robert L. Nelson (Northwestern), Ronit Dinovitzer (Toronto), Bryant G. Garth (UC-Irvine), Joyce S. Sterling (Denver), David B. Wilkins (Harvard), Meghan Dawe (Harvard) & Ethan Michelson (Indiana), The Making of Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession (University of Chicago Press 2023) (reviewed by Eli Wald (Denver) here):

An unprecedented account of social stratification within the United States' legal profession.

How do race, class, gender, and law school status condition the career trajectories of lawyers? And how do professionals then navigate these parameters?

The Making of Lawyers’ Careers provides an unprecedented account of the last two decades of the legal profession in the United States, offering a data-backed look at the structure of the profession and the inequalities that early-career lawyers face across race, gender, and class distinctions. Starting in 2000, the authors collected over 10,000 survey responses from more than 5,000 lawyers, following these lawyers through the first twenty years of their careers. They also interviewed more than two hundred lawyers and drew insights from their individual stories, contextualizing data with theory and close attention to the features of a market-driven legal profession.

Their findings show that lawyers’ careers both reflect and reproduce inequalities within society writ large. They also reveal how individuals exercise agency despite these constraints.

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Integrating Legal Research Into The Law School Curriculum

Denitsa Mavrova Heinrich (North Dakota) & Tammy Pettinato Oltz (North Dakota; Google Scholar), Legal Research Just in Time: A New Approach to Integrating Legal Research into the Law School Curriculum, 88 Tenn. L. Rev. 469:  

This Article discusses an innovative way of integrating legal research instruction into the law school curriculum without detracting from the time and resources necessary for intensive legal writing and analysis instruction. Building on the concept of "just-in-time" learning, a pedagogical method based on the theory that students learn better when there is an immediate need for the information they are receiving, this Article proposes infusing legal research instruction into the law school curriculum at key moments, or "checkpoints," rather than in isolated blocks of time. 

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The 64 Most-Cited Law Faculties

Gregory C. Sisk (St. Thomas-MN; Google Scholar), Adam Bent (Florida), et al., Scholarly Impact of Law School Faculties in 2024: Updating the Leiter Score Ranking for the Top Third:

This updated 2024 study explores the scholarly impact of law faculties, ranking the top third of ABA-accredited law schools. Refined by Brian Leiter, the “Scholarly Impact Ranking” for a law faculty is calculated from the mean and the median of total law journal citations over the past five years to the work of tenured faculty members. In addition to a school-by-school ranking, we report the mean, median, and weighted score, along with a list of the tenured law faculty members at each school with the ten highest individual citation counts.

The law faculty at Yale continues to hold the top ranked position in the 2024 Scholarly Impact Ranking, with the University of Chicago at second, Harvard at third, New York University at fourth, and Columbia at fifth. The University of California-Berkeley remains in the sixth position with Pennsylvania moving up one spot to seventh. Stanford is at eight, and Vanderbilt remains at nine. Virginia, which had climbed from sixteenth in 2018 to ninth in 2021, remains in the top 10. ... 

Rank	School	Most Cited Scholars (* indicates 70 or older in 2024)	U.S. News Peer Rank	U.S. News Overall Rank
1	Yale	*Ackerman, Bruce A.; Amar, Akhil R.; Ayres, Ian; Balkin, Jack M.; *Eskridge, William, Jr.; Gluck, Abbe R.; Macey, Jonathan R.; *Post, Robert C.; *Resnik, Judith; Siegel, Reva B.	3	1
2	Chicago	Baude, William; BenShahar, Omri; Bradley, Curtis A.; Ginsburg, Tom; Huq, Aziz; *Nussbaum, Martha; Posner, Eric; *Stone, Geoffrey R.; Strahilevitz, Lior; *Strauss, David A.	3	3
3	Harvard	Bebchuk, Lucian A.; *Fallon, Richard H.; Goldsmith, Jack Landman; Kaplow, Louis; Klarman, Michael; Lessig, Lawrence; Manning, John F.; *Shavell, Steven M.; *Sunstein, Cass R.; Vermeule, Adrian	1	4
4	NYU	Barkow, Rachel E.; Choi, Stephen; *Epstein, Richard; Friedman, Barry; Hemel, Daniel; *Issacharoff, Samuel; Kahan, Marcel; *Miller, Arthur R.; *Miller, Geoffrey Parsons; Pildes, Richard H.; *Waldron, Jeremy	3	9
5	Columbia	*Coffee, John C., Jr.; Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams; *Fagan, Jeffrey A.; *Gordon, Jeffrey N.; Greene, Jamal; Hamburger, Philip; *Merrill, Thomas W.; Metzger, Gillian E.; Pozen, David; Wu, Timothy	3	8
6	UC-Berkeley	Bridges, Khiara M.; *Chemerinsky, Erwin; *Farber, Daniel A; Haney Lopez, Ian F.; Kerr, Orin; Menell, Peter S.; Merges, Robert P.; *Samuelson, Pamela; Solomon, Steven Davidoff; Yoo, John Choon	7	12
7	Penn	Coglianese, Cary; Fisch, Jill E.; Hoffman, David; *Hovenkamp, Herbert; Mayson, Sandra G.; Parchomovsky, Gideon; Pollman, Elizabeth; Roberts, Dorothy E.; *Robinson, Paul H.; Skeel, David Arthur	10	4
8	Stanford	Engstrom, David Freeman; Karlan, Pamela S.; Lemley, Mark A.; McConnell, Michael W.; O’Connell, Anne Joseph; Ouellette, Lisa Larrimore; Persily, Nathaniel; *Polinsky, A. Mitchell; *Rabin, Robert L.; Sklansky, David Alan	1	1
9	Vanderbilt	Bressman, Lisa S.; Guthrie, Chris; King, Nancy J.; Rossi, Jim; *Rubin, Edward L.; Ruhl, J.B.; Sitaraman, Ganesh; *Slobogin, Christopher; Stack, Kevin; Thomas, Randall S.	17	19
10	Virginia	Cahn, Naomi R.; Citron, Danielle K.; Duffy, John F.; Gulati, G. Mitu; Nelson, Caleb E.; Prakash, Saikrishna; Re, Richard M.; *Schauer, Frederick; *Solum, Lawrence B.; *White, G. Edward	8	4
11	Duke	Adler, Matthew; Blocher, Joseph; *Cox, James D.; Garrett, Brandon; Lemos, Margaret H.; Purdy, Jedediah; Rai, Arti K.; *Schwarcz, Steven L.; Siegel, Neil S.; Young, Ernest A.	10	4
11	UCLA	Bainbridge, Stephen M.; Carbado, Devon Wayne; Crenshaw, Kimberle W.; Cummings, Scott L.; Eagly, Ingrid V.; Harris, Cheryl I.; Hasen, Richard L.; Kang, Jerry; Schwartz, Joanna; Winkler, Adam	13	13
13	Cornell	*Clermont, Kevin M.; Dorf, Michael C.; Grimmelmann, James; Heise, Michael; *Johnson, Sheri Lynn; Lahav, Alexandra D.; Omarova, Saule; Pasquale, Frank; Rachlinski, Jeffrey J.; Rahman, K. Sabeel; Tebbe, Nelson	13	14
14	Michigan	Avi-Yonah, Reuven S.; Bagley, Nicholas; Crane, Daniel; Fletcher, Matthew L.M.; Litman, Leah; *MacKinnon, Catharine A.; Mortenson, Julian Davis; Price, Nicholson; Primus, Richard; Schlanger, Margo; Walker, Christopher J.	8	9
15	Georgetown	*Barnett, Randy E.; Butler, Paul; Cohen, Julie E.; Cole, David D.; Goodwin, Michele; *Gostin, Lawrence O.; *Langevoort, Donald C.; Ohm, Paul; *Thompson, Robert B.; Vladeck, Stephen	13	14
16	Northwestern	*Black, Bernard; Calabresi, Steven G.; Clopton, Zachary; *Diamond, Shari; Koppelman, Andrew M.; McGinnis, John O. ; Pfander, James E.; *Redish, Martin H.; Schanzenbach, Max M.; Schwartz, David L.; Tuerkheimer, Deborah	10	9
17	George Washington	Abramowicz, Michael; Dodge, William; Franks, Mary Anne; *Glicksman, Robert L.; *Kovacic, William E.; Lee, Cynthia; Murphy, Sean D.; *Pierce, Richard J., Jr; Rosen, Jeffrey; Solove, Daniel J.	27	41
18	Emory	Ajunwa, Ifeoma; *Fineman, Martha Albertson; Hutchinson, Darren; Jacobi, Tonja; Nash, Jonathan; Quinn, Kevin M.; Roberts, Jessica L.; Sag, Matthew; Shepherd, Joanna M.; Smith, Fred, Jr.; Witte, John, Jr.	19	42
18	UC-Davis	Amar, Vikram D.; Bhagwat, Ashutosh; Chin, Gabriel (Jack); Horton, David; Joh, Elizabeth E.; Johnson, Kevin R.; Joslin, Courtney G.; Lee, Peter; Shanske, Darien; Ziegler, Mary	24	55
20	Fordham	*Brudney, James J.; Capers, Bennett; Davidson, Nestor M.; Green, Bruce A.; Griffith, Sean J.; Kent, Andrew; Leib, Ethan J.; Pearce, Russell G.; Pfaff, John F.; Squire, Richard; Teachout, Zephyr; Zipursky, Benjamin C.	32	33
20	Texas	Chesney, Robert M. (Bob); *Forbath, William E.; Golden, John M.; Grove, Tara; *Levinson, Sanford; *McGarity, Thomas O.; *Sager, Lawrence G.; Silver, Charles M.; Spence, David B.; Wagner, Wendy E.	16	16
22	UC-Irvine	Baradaran, Mehrsa; Barnes, Mario; Fleischer, Victor; Gold, Andrew; Jiménez, Dalié; Lee, Stephen; Leslie, Christopher; *MenkelMeadow, Carrie; Reese, R. Anthony; Richardson, L. Song; Waldman, Ari Ezra; Whytock, Christopher	24	42
23	Minnesota	Bodie, Matthew; *Carbone, June; Cotter, Thomas F.; Hickman, Kristin E.; Hill, Claire A.; McDonnell, Brett; McGeveran, William; Parisi, Francesco; Schwarcz, Daniel; Wurman, Ilan	19	16
23	St. Thomas-MN	Berg, Thomas C.; Grenardo, David; *Hamilton, Neil W.; Kaal, Wulf; Kelly, Daniel; Organ, Jerome M.; Osler, Mark; Paulsen, Michael S.; *Reid, Charles J., Jr.; Sisk, Gregory C.	126	98
23	William & Mary	Bellin, Jeffrey; Bruhl, Aaron; Criddle, Evan J.; Devins, Neal E.; Gershowitz, Adam; Hu, Margaret; Larsen, Allison Orr; Porter, Nicole Buonocore; Spencer, A. Benjamin; Zick, Timothy	27	36
26	USC	Barnett, Jonathan; Clarke, Jessica; Epstein, Lee; Gruber, Aya; Guzman, Andrew T.; Keating, Gregory; Klerman, Daniel M.; Rasmussen, Robert K.; Sokol, D. Daniel; Tolson, Franita	19	20
27	Boston University	Beermann, Jack M.; *Fleming, James E.; Hartzog, Woodrow; Hylton, Keith N.; McClain, Linda C.; Onwuachi-Willig, Angela; Shugerman, Jed; Van Loo, Rory; Webber, David H.; Meurer, Michael J.	19	24
28	Washington University	Boyd, Christina; Epps, Daniel; *Joy, Peter A.; Kim, Pauline T.; *Kuehn, Robert R.; *Levin, Benjamin; Levin, Ronald M.; Richards, Neil M.; *Seligman, Joel; Tamanaha, Brian Z.	18	16
29	Brooklyn	Araiza, William D.; Baer, Miriam H.; Bernstein, Anita; Godsoe, Cynthia; Janger, Edward J.; Kim, Catherine Y.; Ristroph, Alice; Roberts, Anna; *Schneider, Elizabeth M.; Simonson, Jocelyn	74	114
30	Florida	Bambauer, Derek; Bambauer, Jane; Lawson, Gary; Lidsky, Lyrissa Barnett; *LoPucki, Lynn M.; Maclin, Tracey; Noah, Lars; Rhee, Robert J.; Stinneford, John F.; *Wolf, Michael Allan	32	28
30	George Mason	Bernstein, David; Butler, Henry; Garoupa, Nuno; *Ginsburg, Douglas; Greve, Michael; Kleinfeld, Joshua; *Lund, Nelson; Mossoff, Adam; *Muris, Timothy; Somin, Ilya; Zywicki, Todd	64	28
30	North Carolina	Ardia, David; *Conley, John M.; Coyle, John F.; Gerhardt, Michael J.; *Hazen, Thomas L.; Hessick, Carissa Byrne; Hessick, F. Andrew; Jacoby, Melissa B.; Jain, Eisha; *Marshall, William P.; Su, Rick; Wilson, Erika	24	20
30	Utah	Anderson, Jonas; Anghie, Antony T.; Brown, Teneille Ruth; Cassell, Paul G.; Contreras, Jorge; *Francis, Leslie; Jones, RonNell Andersen; Peterson, Christopher L.; Tokson, Matthew; Warner, Elizabeth Kronk	44	28
34	Cardozo	Gilles, Myriam; Herz, Michael Eric; Levine, Kate; Markowitz, Peter; Reinert, Alexander A.; *Rosenfeld, Michel; Schneider, Andrea Kupfer; Sebok, Anthony; *Sterk, Stewart E.; *Zelinsky, Edward	51	61
34	Florida State	Bayern, Shawn J.; *Johnson, Steve R.; Landau, David E.; Logan, Wayne A.; Morley, Michael T.; O’Hara O’Connor, Erin A.; Ryan, Erin; *Seidenfeld, Mark B.; Slocum, Brian G.; Tsesis, Alexander	47	48
34	Ohio State	Akbar, Amna; Barnett, Kent; Berman, Douglas A.; Colker, Ruth; Foley, Edward B.; Garcia Hernández, César; Schmitz, Amy J.; Simmons, Ric L.; Strang, Lee; Yearby, Ruqaiijah A.	27	26
34	San Diego	*Alexander, Lawrence A.; Bell, Abraham; Dripps, Donald A.; Fox, Dov; *Hirsch, Adam; Lobel, Orly; McGowan, David; Ramsey, Michael D.; Rappaport, Michael B.; Schapiro, Robert; Sichelman, Ted; *Smith, Steven D.	51	68
38	Illinois	*Finkin, Matthew W.; Hurd, Heidi M.; Lawless, Robert M.; Mazzone, Jason; *Moore, Michael S.; Robbennolt, Jennifer K.; Sherkow, Jacob S.; Thomas, Suja A.; Wilson, Robin Fretwell	38	36
38	Notre Dame	Alford, Roger P.; Bellia, Anthony J., Jr.; Bray, Samuel; Garnett, Nicole S.; Garnett, Richard W.; Kozel, Randy; Miller, Paul; Muller, Derek T.; Pojanowski, Jeffrey; Tidmarsh, Jay	19	20
38	University of Arizona	Coan, Andrew; Engel, Kirsten H.; Miller, Marc L.; Orbach, Barak Y.; Puig, Sergio; Sepe, Simone M.; Tsosie, Rebecca; Williams, Robert A., Jr.; Woods, Andrew Keane; Woods, Jordan Blair	38	55
41	Colorado	Anaya, S. James; Carpenter, Kristen A.; Gulasekaram, Pratheepan; Kaminski, Margot; Krakoff, Sarah; Norton, Helen; Roithmayr, Daria; Schlag, Pierre; SkinnerThompson, Scott; Surden, Harry	38	48
42	BYU	Asay, Clark D.; Baradaran Baughman, Shima; *Fleming, J. Clifton, Jr.; Grow Sun, Lisa; Jennejohn, Matt; Jensen, Eric Talbot; Lee, Thomas R.; Plamondon, Stephanie Bair; Shobe, Jarrod; Smith, D. Gordon	51	28
43	Arizona State	Beydoun, Khaled; Bodansky, Daniel M.; Bublick, Ellen M.; Hodge, James G., Jr.; Luna, Erik; Marchant, Gary E.; Miller, Robert J.; *Saks, Michael J.; Selmi, Michael L.; *Weinstein, James	32	36
43	Case Western	Adler, Jonathan H.; Chaffee, Eric C.; Hill, B. Jessie; Hoffman, Sharona; Korsmo, Charles R.; Nard, Craig A.; Robertson, Cassandra Burke; Rose, Paul; Rosenblatt, Betsy; Scharf, Michael P.	64	89
43	Kansas	Bhala, Raj; Craig, Robin Kundis; Drahozal, Christopher R.; *Hoeflich, Michael H.; Jefferson-Jones, Jamila; Levy, Richard E.; Outka, Uma; Velte, Kyle; Ware, Stephen J.; Yung, Corey Rayburn	64	46
43	UC-San Francisco	Depoorter, Ben; Dodson, Scott; Faigman, David L.; Feldman, Robin; *Marcus, Richard; Ming H. Chen; Owen, Dave; Price, Zachary; Reiss, Dorit Rubinstein; Short, Jodi	64	82
47	Chicago-Kent	Baker, Katharine K.; Dinwoodie, Graeme B.; Heyman, Steven J.; Katz, Daniel; Kim, Nancy; Krent, Harold J.; Marder, Nancy S.; Reilly, Greg; Rosen, Mark D.; Schmidt, Christopher W.	90	108
47	Georgia	Bruner, Christopher M.; Burch, Elizabeth Chamblee; Cade, Jason A.; Chapman, Nathan S.; *Coenen, Dan T.; Foohey, Pamela; Levin, Hillel Y.; Rodrigues, Usha; Rutledge, Peter B.; *Wells, Michael L.; West, Sonja R.	27	20
47	San Francisco	Bazelon, Lara; Dibadj, Reza R.; Freiwald, Susan A.; Harris, Lindsay M.; *Hing, Bill Ong; Kalb, Johanna; Kaswan, Alice; Leo, Richard A.; Nice, Julie A.; *Rosenberg, Joshua D.	138	165
47	Temple	Burris, Scott C.; Dunoff, Jeffrey L.; Gugliuzza, Paul R.; Hollis, Duncan B.; Lin, Tom C.W.; Lipson, Jonathan; RamjiNogales, Jaya; Rebouche, Rachel; Spiro, Peter J.; Wells, Harwell	51	54
47	Washington & Lee	Drumbl, Mark A.; Fairfield, Joshua A.T.; Haan, Sarah; Hasbrouck, Brandon; Malveaux, Suzette; Miller, Russell A.; Seaman, Christopher B.; Smith, Catherine E.; Trammell, Alan; Woody, Karen	38	33

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The Gray Box Of Legal Analysis: Disentangling Knowledge And Skill

Chance Meyer & Nicole Noël (New England), The Gray Box of Legal Analysis: Disentangling Knowledge and Skill, 101 U. Detroit Mercy L. Rev. 101 (2024):  

Problem-solving abilities critical in legal analysis are thought to be transferable skills when, according to cognitive science, they are benefits of domain knowledge. As a result, learners and faculty attempt to improve through practice-based skill-development abilities that can only be improved through domain-specific schema-development. Domain knowledge facilitates critical thinking, issue-spotting, reading comprehension, and test-taking speed by optimizing use of working memory, semantic inference-making, and analogical transfer of solution models from precedent cases to isomorphic fact patterns. Because knowledge-based problem-solving abilities depend on deep, structured, functional packages of knowledge, we recommend schema-development through ECHO outlining (Elaborative, Contextualized, Hierarchical, Operative). 

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Deans' Leadership In Legal Education Symposium

16th Deans' Leadership In Legal Education Symposium, 55 U. Tol. L. Rev. 159-294 (2023):

• Gregory W. Bowman (Dean, Roger Williams), Strategic and Operational Leadership: Building a Diverse and Talented Leadership Team, 55 U. Tol. L. Rev. 155 (2023)
• Todd J. Clark (Dean, Widener-DE), Reversing DEI: The Consequence - "IED" Indoctrination and Elimination of Diversity, 55 U. Tol. L. Rev. 169 (2023)
• Courtney A. Griffin (Assistant Dean, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, Detroit Mercy), Championing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Legal Education: A Critical Imperative in Challenging Times, 55 U. Tol. L. Rev. 195 (2023)
• Kevin R. Johnson (Dean, UC-Davis), Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as an Institutional Imperative, 55 U. Tol. L. Rev. 207 (2023)
• Michelle M. Kwon (Interim Associate Dean for Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Engagement, Tennessee), Tapping Into The Talent Pipeline While Repairing The Leaky Pipe, 55 U. Tol. L. Rev. 219 (2023)

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From Briefs To Bytes: How Generative AI Is Transforming Legal Writing And Practice

Joe Regalia (UNLV), From Briefs to Bytes: How Generative AI is Transforming Legal Writing and Practice, 59 Tulsa L. Rev. 193 (2024): 

ChatGPT is having a moment in the legal field. And for good reason: Generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) was already disrupting the practice of law before OpenAI’s new chatbot came on the scene. But ChatGPT marks a new era. The brain behind OpenAI’s latest AI contains up to a trillion artificial neurons and was trained on hundreds of billions of pieces of text gathered on the web. All that data makes for the smartest AI ever.

But what’s more important is that all that computational muscle is aimed at things lawyers do every day: (1) Understanding complex concepts, (2) analyzing convoluted language, and (3) conveying that understanding effectively in writing. The result is technology that can understand text, parse it for insights, and apply those insights with striking competence—just like lawyers do. And now, these tools are multi-modal: They can see, hear, and speak. They can carry out complex tasks and integrate with all the other technology lawyers use. They can program new software, analyze legal data, and create stunning visuals for the courtroom. And new features and functions and integrations are released daily. Perhaps most exciting (and scary): Generative AI (“GAI”) greatly enhances the evolution of legal technology itself. In other words, GAI is rapidly increasing the speed at which we develop new technology relevant to legal practice. If experts are right, we are on the cusp of a legal technology revolution.

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The History Of American Student-Edited International Law Journals

Harlan Grant Cohen (Fordham; Google Scholar), A Short History of the Early History of American Student-Edited International Law Journals, 64 Va. J. Int'l L. 357 (2024):

While to some the “invisible college of international lawyers” may invoke images of open spaces between buildings and airy quads, to others the picture will be something much more clubbish and cloistered. And at least at their start, American student-edited international law journals decidedly resembled the latter. The Harvard International Law Journal began as the Bulletin of the Harvard International Law Club. Its first issue in 1959 detailed the club’s lectures and events, including a sherry party and membership growth from thirteen to thirty-three. “The principal function of the Club [was] the sponsorship of talks both by men actively engaged in the field of international law and by graduate students of the Harvard Law School.” (Its first two editors were future Boston College Law Professor Charles Baron and Wilmot Reed Hastings, a future Nixon administration lawyer whose son would co-found Netflix.) 

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St. Louis Symposium: Teaching Legal Research, Writing, Communication, And Feedback

Symposium, Teaching Legal Research, Writing, Communication, and Feedback, 68 St. Louis U. L.J. 399-556 (2024): 

• Ellie Margolis (Temple; Google Scholar), Doing Less—Reflections on Cognitive Load and Hard Choices in Teaching First-Year Legal Writing, 68 St. Louis U. L.J. 399 (2024)
• Katrina Lee (Ohio State; Google Scholar), The Adaptable Legal Writer, 68 St. Louis U. L.J. 419 (2024)
• Brenda D. Gibson (Wake Forest; Google Scholar), Teamwork Makes a Dream Work: Collaboration in the Legal Writing, 68 St. Louis U. L.J. 431 (2024)
• Sylvia Lett (Arizona), Flattening the Learning Curve for International J.D. Students, 68 St. Louis U. L.J. 441 (2024)
• Olympia Duhart (Nova), Better Together: Building Community in the LRW Classroom, 68 St. Louis U. L.J. 459 (2024)

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Grimmelmann Reviews Lawsky's Coding the Code: Catala And Computationally Accessible Tax Law

James Grimmelmann (Cornell; Google Scholar), When Law Is Code (JOTWELL) (reviewing Sarah B. Lawsky (Northwestern; Google Scholar), Coding the Code: Catala and Computationally Accessible Tax Law, 75 S.M.U. L. Rev. 535 (2022)):

Sarah B. Lawsky’s Coding the Code: Catala and Computationally Accessible Tax Law offers an exceptionally thoughtful perspective on the automation of legal rules. It provides not just a nuanced analysis of the consequences of translating legal doctrines into computer programs (something many other scholars have done), but also a tutorial in how to do so effectively, with fidelity to the internal structure of law and humility about what computers do and don’t do well.

Coding the Code builds on Lawsky’s previous work on formal logic and its advantages for statutory interpretation. (Formal logic, sometimes called “symbolic” or “mathematical” logic, involves the precise and rigorous analysis of symbolic expressions representing arguments, such as “p & ¬q” to mean “p is true and q is not true”.) In her 2017 A Logic for Statutes, [21 Fla. Tax Rev. 60 (2017) (reviewed by Alice Abreu (Temple) & Richard Greenstein (Temple) here),] she observed that many statutory provisions have a characteristic structure: rules subject to exceptions. A typical rule says that WHEN certain conditions are satisfied, THEN certain consequences follow, UNLESS one of several exceptions applies. Exceptions have exceptions of their own: interest payments are deductible, unless they are personal, unless they are mortgage payments.

Lawsky’s great insight about law and logic is that this characteristic structure of nested exceptions is most naturally modeled using a branch of formal logic called “default logic.” 

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AI And Tools For Expanding Access To Justice

Quinten Steenhuis (Suffolk; Google Scholar), AI and Tools for Expanding Access to Justice, in The Cambridge Handbook of AI in Civil Dispute Resolution (Cambridge University Press 2025):

Access to justice is a fundamental right, yet for millions of people around the world resolution of legal problems via both formal and informal means isn't available, affordable, accessible, or understandable. The high cost of legal help, now between $200 and $400/hour across the United States, and the limited number of attorneys providing free legal aid, is just one of these barriers. This chapter explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is making a practical difference in the problems of everyday people by automating legal processes and making legal systems more affordable and accessible. This chapter discusses generative AI, traditional expert systems, and computational approaches each as tools that can help legal aid and private lawyers, and as tools that can help unrepresented people.

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Peer Review In Advanced Legal Writing Course

Patricia Montana (St. John's), Peer Review in Advanced Legal Writing Course, 68 St. Louis U. L.J. 1 (2023):

This Article adds to the conversation about peer review, discussing specifically the numerous benefits peer review brings to an advanced legal writing course. The Article illustrates how to effectively integrate peer review into an advanced legal writing course. Peer reviews can support student learning and improve students’ legal analysis and writing, among other things. Thus, the Article encourages law professors to experiment with peer review exercises and incorporate them into their advanced legal writing courses.

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Effective Law Professor Feedback For Today's Students

Randall Ryder (Minnesota), "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility": Improving Your Feedback and Hallmarks of Effective Feedback, 68 St. Louis U. L.J. 537 (2024):

Effective feedback can change a law student’s trajectory in law school and beyond. The feedback-centric nature of experiential learning courses allows law students to both develop their skills and personal lawyering style. However, many experiential instructors are from a different generation, with different expectations and communication styles than today’s law students. 

This article highlights hallmarks of effective feedback for the modern law school classroom.  As the field of law continues to evolve, law schools will need to as well. This article discusses four key hallmarks: (1) provide feedback in multiple formats, (2) help each student develop their personal style, (3) explain the why, and (4) highlight both the “good” and areas of opportunity. 

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Questioning The Inevitability Of The NextGen Bar Exam

Nachman N. Gutowski (UNLV; Google Scholar), Ashley London (Duquesne; Google Scholar), Steven Foster (Oklahoma City) & Taylor Israel (Thomas Jefferson), Questioning the Inevitability of the NextGen Bar Examination: 

The National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) is actively promoting the NextGen Bar Exam (NextGen) as an inevitable and necessary replacement for the current Uniform Bar Examination (UBE). This new exam has been advertised as a modern solution to legal licensure, with the NCBE publicizing commitments from a growing list of jurisdictions as what can only be described as an inference of evidence to its inevitable nationwide adoption. However, a closer examination reveals a more complex and nuanced picture, raising questions about the true inevitability of NextGen and highlighting the significant remaining hurdles. The article delves into these complexities, challenging the narrative of widespread acceptance and emphasizing the need for a more thoughtful and inclusive approach. 

While the NCBE touts early commitments to the NextGen Bar Exam, these commitments represent only a fraction of the total jurisdictions and even less of the examinees nationally. Many jurisdictions, particularly those with the largest numbers of bar exam takers, have yet to commit to adopting the new exam.

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Using Technology To Promote Well-Being And Foster Professional Identity Formation In The 1L Classroom

Kendall Kerew (Georgia State; Google Scholar), Using Technology to Promote Well-Being and Foster Professional Identity Formation in the 1L Classroom, 20 U. St. Thomas L.J. ___ (2024): 

Critical components of professional identity are associated with self-determination theory.  While all three of the basic psychological needs contribute to well-being, autonomy is considered the most important.  Moreover, when student autonomy is supported, “by giving them (1) as much choice as possible, (2) a meaningful rationale to explain decisions, and (3) a sense that authorities are aware of and care about their point of view,” it leads to “(1) higher self-determined career motivation; (2) higher well-being; and (3) higher academic performance.”  

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2024 Meta-Ranking Of Flagship U.S. Law Reviews

Bryce Clayton Newell (Oregon), 2024 Meta-Ranking of Flagship US Law Reviews:

This is an updated ranking of the top flagship law reviews at US law schools (updated as of August 7, 2024). For a summary and more details about method, see below the table. You can also compare MetaRanking from 2018-2024, including changes in ranking over time here: MetaRank Comparison 2018-2024.

For specialty/secondary journal rankings (not yet updated for 2024), see:

• Meta-Ranking (Law & Tech Journals) – 2023
• Meta-Ranking (Online/Companion Journals) – 2023

The MetaRank was computed by averaging ranks (using a 25% weighting from each) of the following rankings:

prRank = US News Peer Reputation score ranking (averaged over 10 years);
usnRank = overall US News school ranking (averaged over 10 years);
wluRank = Washington & Lee Law Journal Ranking;
gRank = Google Scholar Metrics ranking (note: “1000” means journal was not indexed).

Journal	MetaRank	prRank	usnRank	wluRank	gRank
Harvard Law Review	1	2	3	1	1
Yale Law Journal	2	3	1	4	2
Stanford Law Review	3	1	2	3	5
Columbia Law Review	4	4	5	2	3
University of Chicago Law Review	5	5	4	12	4
New York University Law Review	6	6	6	10	6
California Law Review	7	7	11	5	6
University of Pennsylvania Law Review	8	9	6	6	10
Michigan Law Review	9	8	9	7	9
Virginia Law Review	10	10	8	13	11
Duke Law Journal	11	11	9	11	13
Georgetown Law Journal	12	14	14	9	13
Northwestern University Law Review	13	13	12	14	15
Cornell Law Review	14	12	13	8	25
Vanderbilt Law Review	15	17	17	15	11
UCLA Law Review	16	15	15	20	18
Boston University Law Review	17	22	21	18	8
Minnesota Law Review	18	19	20	16	17
Texas Law Review	19	16	16	22	23
Washington University Law Review	20	18	18	26	23
Southern California Law Review	21	19	19	27	22
Iowa Law Review	22	30	25	17	18
Notre Dame Law Review	23	22	22	24	26
Boston College Law Review	24	29	30	21	18
Fordham Law Review	25	33	36	19	15
George Washington Law Review	26	25	24	28	28
UC Davis Law Review	27	26	43	25	18
Indiana Law Journal	28	34	40	23	26
UC Irvine Law Review	29	27	27	35	39
Wisconsin Law Review	29	28	33	33	34
Emory Law Journal	31	21	23	43	42
Florida Law Review	32	36	34	30	30
William & Mary Law Review	32	32	36	31	31
North Carolina Law Review	34	24	31	38	40
Alabama Law Review	35	37	26	36	37
University of Illinois Law Review	36	40	41	29	29
Washington Law Review	37	38	42	31	32
Georgia Law Review	38	34	29	42	47
Ohio State Law Journal	39	31	32	40	51
Arizona State Law Journal	40	39	28	51	52
Arizona Law Review	41	42	46	39	45
UC Law Journal	42	44	58	37	35
University of Colorado Law Review	43	41	46	49	40
Wake Forest Law Review	43	45	38	48	45
Washington and Lee Law Review	45	43	39	52	43
Cardozo Law Review	46	53	60	34	32
Maryland Law Review	47	48	50	47	35
Utah Law Review	48	49	45	41	48
Brigham Young University Law Review	49	50	34	46	62
Connecticut Law Review	50	51	56	50	52
American University Law Review	51	51	83	44	48
SMU Law Review	52	64	48	54	62
Houston Law Review	53	60	57	66	55
Tulane Law Review	54	46	55	59	84
Denver Law Review	55	56	76	55	59
George Mason Law Review	56	59	44	67	79
University of Richmond Law Review	57	66	54	63	68
Temple Law Review	58	54	53	72	79
Georgia State University Law Review	59	60	69	73	57
Florida State University Law Review	60	47	49	81	84
Lewis & Clark Law Review	61	89	93	45	38
Oklahoma Law Review	62	80	66	68	52
Pepperdine Law Review	63	60	51	69	91
Nevada Law Journal	64	75	72	57	76
Seton Hall Law Review	65	87	61	62	72
San Diego Law Review	66	58	80	83	62
Villanova Law Review	67	77	67	74	69
South Carolina Law Review	68	82	88	64	57
Case Western Reserve Law Review	69	68	73	96	59
Brooklyn Law Review	70	73	91	61	72
Missouri Law Review	71	73	64	89	72
Chicago-Kent Law Review	72	79	90	71	59
Nebraska Law Review	72	88	74	75	62
University of Kansas Law Review	74	67	63	86	84
Tennessee Law Review	75	65	59	78	101
Buffalo Law Review	76	104	106	53	43
University of Miami Law Review	77	57	70	113	69
Marquette Law Review	78	98	98	58	56
Loyola University Chicago Law Journal	79	71	77	79	84
Penn State Law Review	80	93	71	70	84
Michigan State Law Review	81	90	97	56	79
Texas A&M Law Review	81	84	82	65	91
Oregon Law Review	83	54	85	98	0
Howard Law Journal	84	70	113	77	1000
Kentucky Law Journal	85	76	65	105	104
University of Cincinnati Law Review	86	91	79	97	84
University of Pittsburgh Law Review	87	69	81	108	95
Rutgers University Law Review	88	72	86	103	95
Seattle University Law Review	88	92	118	80	66
CUNY Law Review	90	109	130	60	1000
Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review	91	63	68	127	104
Syracuse Law Review	91	96	102	88	76
Saint Louis University Law Journal	93	96	92	91	84
Northeastern University Law Review	94	81	75	109	1000
UMKC Law Review	95	108	122	76	69
FIU Law Review	96	132	94	85	66
St. John's Law Review	97	100	78	84	121
Arkansas Law Review	98	95	89	112	93
West Virginia Law Review	99	112	107	95	76
Louisiana Law Review	100	103	96	101	101

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The Open Casebook Revolution

Samuel Beswick (British Columbia; Google Scholar) & Maddison Zapach (British Columbia), The Open Casebook Revolution, 3 Sup. Ct. L. Rev. __ (2024): 

The open-access casebook revolution is gaining momentum. Open casebooks are compiled and edited teaching materials, typically hosted as webpages and available as downloadable, searchable, printable, mark-up-able documents. In the United States, dozens of open casebooks can be found on platforms such as eLangdell, H2O Open Casebook, Open Textbook Library and SSRN. Outside of the United States, however, open casebooks for law school courses remain underutilized. This paper provides insights on the power and limits of open casebooks from the perspectives of a teacher and a student. It draws on our experience creating an open casebook for a Canadian law school torts course. It addresses some practicalities of designing and creating an open casebook and the benefits and challenges of doing so.

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Trauma-Informed Pedagogy In Law School

Angela P. Harris (UC-Davis) & Monika B. Kashyap (Seattle), From Trauma to Transformation: Trauma-Informed Pedagogy in Law School, 27 U. Pa. J.L. & Soc. Change 1 (2023): 

In this essay, we seek to expand the meaning of “trauma” by aligning trauma-informed pedagogy with principles of disability justice and progressive critiques of legal education. We argue first that the existence of trauma is not a sign of individual brokenness or deficiency, but rather should be taken as a warning about broken or deficient social institutions or practices. This approach to trauma recognizes the potential of those who experience trauma—whose bodies and minds bear the marks of both subordination and resilience—to contribute to institutional and structural transformation. We use as an example the trauma too often experienced in law school by students and faculty with stigmatized identities. 

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Inaugural Issue: The Journal Of Law Teaching And Learning

The Journal of Law Teaching and Learning has published its inaugural issue, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2024):

• Debra Moss Vollweiler (Nova), The Year of Magical Teaching: Lessons Learned from One Class in Three Modalities, 1 J. Law Teaching & Learning 1 (2024)
• Hillary A. Wandler (Montana; Google Scholar), Pacing Beside the Pool: Coaching Champion Writers to a Strong Finish in Clinic (Without Jumping in and Finishing for Them), 1 J. Law Teaching & Learning 56 (2024).
• Jennifer A. Gundlach (Hofstra) & Jessica R. Santangelo (Hofstra; Google Scholar), An Empirical Study of the Relationship Between Metacognitive Skills, Performance in a Bar Prep Course and Bar Passage, 1 J. Law Teaching & Learning 100 (2024)
• Jane Mitchell (BYU), Legal Education and the Threat Response, 1 J. Law Teaching & Learning 155 (2024)

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Onwuachi-Willig: Roberts's Revisions: A Narratological Reading Of The Affirmative Action Cases

Angela Onwuachi-Willig (Dean, Boston University; Google Scholar), Roberts's Revisions: A Narratological Reading of the Affirmative Action Cases, 137 Harv. L. Rev. 192 (2023):

In law, one of the stories told by some scholars is that legal opinions are not stories. The story goes: legal opinions are mere recitations of facts and legal principles applied to those facts; they are the end result of a contest between opposing sides that have brought the parties to an objective truth through a lawsuit. In these scholars’ eyes, legal opinions are objective, neutral, disinterested, and free from the emotion of narratives. Yet, as feminist legal scholars, Critical Race scholars, and law-and-humanities scholars have long asserted, legal opinions themselves can also be read as narratives, narratives constructed in a way to offer one version of the facts and the legal principles applied to them as the objective truth.

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Law Review And Finding A Place In The Academy

Jenny E. Carroll (Texas A&M; Google Scholar), Law Review and Finding a Place in the Academy, 100 Tex. L. Rev. Online 60 (2021):

Membership on the Texas Law Review created opportunities for me, taught me a lot about editorial processes, and served as a reminder that I was a law outsider. The last of these is the focus for this essay, not because it is the most important or because it stands alone (it doesn’t), but because I believe there are other rooms in which to reminisce fondly about law review. 

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An Empirical Study Of The Bar Examination’s Disparate Impact On Applicants From Communities Of Color

Scott Devito (Ave Maria; Google Scholar), Kelsey Hample (Furman; Google Scholar) & Erin Lain (Drake; Google Scholar), Onerous Disabilities and Burdens: An Empirical Study of the Bar Examination’s Disparate Impact on Applicants From Communities of Color, 43 Pace L. Rev. 205 (2023):

This Article provides the results of the most comprehensive and detailed analysis of the correlation between bar passage and race and ethnicity. It provides the first proof of racially disparate outcomes of the bar exam, both for first-time and ultimate bar passage, across jurisdictions and within law schools. Using data from 63 public law schools, we found that examinees from Communities of Color underperform White examinees by between 12.3 and 72.72 percentage points with all but one racial/ethnic group underperforming by more than 20 percentage points.

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Zywicki: How Law School Got Woke

National Review Special Section: Defending the Rule of Law (Sept. 2024):

Todd Zywicki (George Mason), How Law School Got Woke:

Students learn to seek outcomes, not justice.

Law schools are the training ground of the next generation of lawyers, judges, and public officials, and for many decades, beginning with the emergence of critical legal studies at Harvard in the 1980s, they have promoted ideas that are fundamentally hostile to the rule of law. For most of that time, this radical thinking remained on the periphery. In recent years, however, “woke law” has taken over the schools. The George Floyd murder and its aftermath, in particular, accelerated the trend. Understanding this anti-rule-of-law philosophy helps to explain the alarming intensification of lawfare tactics against Donald Trump and his supporters today.

The nostrums of woke law reject the rule of law precisely because it attempts to apply fair, neutral principles to everyone (even if it does so imperfectly in practice). The traditional focus on fair processes and procedures should now be subordinated, the thinking goes, to equity in results. Under this worldview, the gauge of an institution’s fairness or justice is not rigorous adherence to formal rules but certain outcomes, such as elimination of racial disparities. Equal formal treatment of all individuals through consistent application of principles of procedural justice violates the concept of equity. The ongoing attack on the criminal-justice system as “systemically racist” and illegitimate illustrates this mind-set. The system is no longer judged according to the traditional notion of a fair trial, which relies on unbiased jurors’ applying the law neutrally to the facts of the case. What matters instead is that the system deliver specific results thought to correct historical injustices. The ideal of impartiality is thus replaced with transparent activism. ...

What, if anything, can be done to reform law schools and pull them back from this abyss? Several practical steps might help rescue the rule of law.

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Fall 2024 Law Review Article Submission Guide

Nancy Levit (UMKC) & Allen Rostron (UMKC) have updated their incredibly useful document, which contains two charts for the Fall 2024 submission season covering the 196 main journals of each law school.

The following are two charts useful for the law review/journal article submission process. The first chart contains information gathered from the journals’ websites about the following topics:

• Methods for submitting an article (such as by e-mail, Scholastica, or regular mail);
• Any special formatting requirements;
• How to request an expedited review; and
• How to withdraw an article after it has been accepted for publication elsewhere.

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Symposium: Immigration And Taxation

Symposium, Immigration and Taxation, 21 Pitt. Tax Rev. 153-243 (2024):

• Francine J. Lipman (UNLV; Google Scholar), Taxing Undocumented Immigrants Redux, 21 Pitt. Tax Rev. 153 (2024)
• Jackie Vimo (National Immigration Law Center), The History and Future of ITINs and Taxigration Policy for Undocumented Taxpayers in the United States, 21 Pitt. Tax Rev. 169 (2024)
• Gaby Pacheco (TheDream.US.), A Beacon of Hope: Dreamers and Taxation, 21 Pitt. Tax Rev. 187 (2024)

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Teaching Character-Based Skills To 1Ls In Light Of ABA Standard 303(B)(3)'s Professional Identity Requirement

Marni Goldstein Caputo (Boston University) & Kathleen Luz (Boston University), Beyond "Hard" Skills: Teaching Outward—and Inward—Facing Character-Based Skills to 1Ls in Light of ABA Standard 303(B)(3)'s Professional Identity Requirement, 89 Brook. L. Rev. 809 (2024):

Newly adopted American Bar Association Standard 303(b)(3) requires law schools to provide “substantial opportunities to students for . . . the development of professional identity” throughout their three-year legal education. For 1Ls, the ideal place to start this process is in their lawyering skills classrooms, which is our domain at Boston University School of Law. Professional identity exploration necessarily requires students to look inward and outward to reflect upon their own role in the legal system and how they interact with others. In our classrooms, we divide what have been referred to as “soft” skills into two distinct categories—outward-facing and inward-facing character-based skills.

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Harvard Symposium: Latinas In The Legal Academy

Symposium, Latinas in the Legal Academy, 26 Harv. Latin Am. L. Rev. 123-202 (2023): 

• Maritza I. Reyes (Florida A&M), Planning, Executing, and Documenting the 2022 Inaugural Graciela Oliva ́rez Latinas in the Legal Academy (“GO LILA”) Workshop – A Chair’s Account and Introduction, 26 Harv. Latin Am. L. Rev. 123 (2023)
• Leticia M. Diaz (Barry), A Seat at the Table: Advancing, Leading, and Deaning While Battling Presumed Incompetence, 26 Harv. Latin Am. L. Rev. 169 (2023)

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The Legal Tech Bro Blues: Generative AI, Legal Indeterminacy, And The Future Of Legal Research And Writing

Nicholas Mignanelli (Yale; Google Scholar), The Legal Tech Bro Blues: Generative AI, Legal Indeterminacy, and the Future of Legal Research and Writing, 8 Geo. L. Tech. Rev. 298 (2024):

In recent years, a new figure, the tech bro, has arrived in the legal field. He can be found opining on podcasts and social media platforms, selling his wares in the boardrooms of big law firms, and giving guest presentations in law school classrooms. He speaks with unwarranted confidence about the coming technological transformation of law and the brave new world of so-called “AI-driven” law practice that awaits lawyers and judges. He promises that these changes will bring unimaginable efficiencies and profits.

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Symposium: Current Issues In Professional Identity Formation

Symposium, Current Issues in Professional Identity Formation, 75 Mercer L. Rev. 1395-1519 (2024):

• Patrick Longan (Mercer), Foreword: Symposium on Current Issues in Professional Identity Formation, 75 Mercer L. Rev. 1395 (2024)
• Kenneth Townsend (Wake Forest), Purpose, Practical Wisdom, and the Formation of Trustworthy Lawyers, 75 Mercer L. Rev. 1399 (2024) 
• Aric Short (Texas A&M; Google Scholar), Putting the Lawyer First: Framing Well-Being in Law as an Ethical Dilemma, 75 Mercer L. Rev. 1409 (2024)

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As The Percentage Of Accommodated Students In A Law School Increases, Its First-Time Bar Pass Rate Decreases

Scott Devito (Jacksonville; Google Scholar), The Kids Are Definitely Not All Right: An Empirical Study Establishing a Statistically Significant Negative Relationship between Receiving Accommodations in Law School and Passing the Bar Exam, 102 Or. L. Rev. 1 (2023): 

Throughout my career as a law professor and a law school dean, I have had a deep interest in the science of learning, academic support programs, and law school bar passage programming. Because of this, I have noticed that certain categories of students underperformed their peers on the bar examination. For example, students of color who (based on my interactions with them and their law school grades) should have passed the bar exam on their first attempt did not, while comparable White students did. To investigate this phenomenon, my colleagues, Dr. Erin Lain and Dr. Kelsey Hample, and I engaged in two empirical analyses that unequivocally show that the bar examination produces racially biased outcomes (students of color fail at a much higher rate than their White peers) [Examining the Bar Exam: An Empirical Analysis of Racial Bias in the Uniform Bar Examination, 55 U. Mich. J. L. Reform 597 (2022); Onerous Disabilities and Burdens: An Empirical Study of the Bar Examination’s Disparate Impact on Applicants from Communities of Color, 44 Pace L. Rev. (2023). Our most recent study also puts to bed the notion that these differences are due to differing credentials between examinees of color and White examinees. That notion is not true because the difference in outcomes is due to something in the exam or the exam process, not differences among the students.

Similarly, I have noticed that students who received accommodations at law school underperformed their unaccommodated peers on the bar examination. ...

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Teaching Transactional Business Law Through Campus And Community Partnerships

Joan MacLeod Heminway (Tennessee; Google Scholar) & Brian Kingsley Krumm (Tennessee), Teaching Transactional Business Law through Campus and Community Partnerships, 25 Transactions: Tenn. J. Bus. L. 931 (2024):

In this edited transcript, we explain how each of us--a doctrinal law professor and a clinician--use members of our campus and local communities to help instruct transactional business law students. We each have independently realized that there is a value to sharing these outside business and legal experts with our students. Among other things, we have found that we can bring unique areas of legal and business expertise into our teaching and, at the same time, introduce our students to real-life practice experiences and related simulations. All of this is foundational to law practice. 

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The Upper-Level Writing Paper And The Law Review Article: How To Tell Your Story

Lisa Smith-Butler (Charleston), The Upper-Level Writing Paper and the Law Review Article: How to Tell Your Story, 51 Cap. U. L. Rev. 205 (2023): 

This article theorizes the actual writing process for faculty and students is quite similar and mirrors one another. Differences do exist between the two groups, particularly in terms of motivation, expectations, and publication processes. Ultimately, an ideal checklist for both can be composed. The checklist asks the faculty or student writer to consider the following:

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2024-25 U.S. News Global Universities Rankings

U.S. News & World Report, 2024-25 Best Global Universities Rankings:

These institutions from the U.S. and more than 100 other countries have been ranked based on 13 indicators that measure their academic research performance and their global and regional reputations. Students can use these rankings to explore the higher education options that exist beyond their own countries' borders and to compare key aspects of schools' research missions. These are the world's 2,250 top universities.

1. Harvard (100.0)
2. MIT (96.9)
3. Stanford (94.5)
4. Oxford (88.2)
5. UC-Berkeley (87.2)
6. Cambridge (86.9)
7. University College London (86.5)
7. University of Washington (86.5)
9. Columbia (86.4)
10. Yale (86.0)
11. UCLA (85.5)
12. Imperial College London (85.3)
13. Johns Hopkins (85.2)
14. Penn (84.7)
15. UC-San Francisco (84.5)
16. Tsinghua University (84.4)
17. Toronto (84.3)
18. Princeton (83.9)
19. Cornell (83.7)
19. Michigan (83.7)
21. UC-San Diego (83.6)
22. National University of Singapore (83.5)
23. Cal-Tech (83.4)
24. Northwestern (81.8)
25. University of Chicago (81.5)

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ABA Standard 303(C) And Divisive Concepts Legislation And Policies: Challenges And Opportunities

Sherley Cruz (Tennessee; Google Scholar), Karen L. Tokarz (Washington University), Becky L. Jacobs (Tennessee), Kendall Kerew (Montana; Google Scholar), Andrew King-Ries (Montana) & Carwina Weng (Indiana-Maurer), ABA Standard 303(C) and Divisive Concepts Legislation and Policies: Challenges and Opportunities, 73 Wash. U. J. L. & Pol'y 247 (2024): 

This article by six clinicians discusses the challenges and opportunities of new ABA Standard 303 (c), including the implications of and interactions between Standard 303(c) and “divisive concepts” laws and other threats to representation, academic freedom, and free speech in legal education. The article also highlights the intersection of Standard 303(c) and Standard 303(b)(3), which addresses professional identity formation; discusses opportunities to adapt current curriculum and teaching and create new curricular responses to meet the new accreditation standards and interpretations; and explores ways to resist increasing limitations and find a supportive academic community to sustain hope and resilience.

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James Boyd White, Legal Reading, And Bringing Back The Human

David Kenny (Trinity College Dublin; Google Scholar), Reencountering Texts: James Boyd White, Legal Reading, and Bringing Back the Human, 35 Yale J.L. & Human. __ (2024):

This paper, written in honour of James Boyd White and his magisterial work The Legal Imagination, asks what lawyers lose in the process of legal education. It suggests, drawing on White, that lawyers lose the ability to read text in any other than a legal way, and that legal reading is narrow, extractive, utilitarian, and fails to meet text on its own terms. It is the antithesis of the broad possibilities of humanistic reading of text, and pares the human away. White—through his non-didactic approach to legal education, and open-ended consideration of literary subject matter—not only helps us to see the loss we experience with legal reading, but also helps us to combat it. James Boyd White helps us to once again encounter texts as readers rather than lawyers, and to bring the human back.

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AI In 2024: A Year Of Crossroads And Decisions For Legal Education And Law Practice

Patrick Parsons (Georgia State; Google Scholar), Foreword—AI in 2024: A Year of Crossroads and Decisions, 41 Ga. St. U. L. Rev. __ (2025):

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues its rapid evolution, the legal profession stands at a critical juncture. This article serves as a gateway to understanding the profound impact of generative AI on the practice of law and legal education, as well as some of the critical issues with which the legal profession will have to grapple. Through an exploration of recent developments and emerging trends, it illuminates the role AI could play in the future practice of law. From redefining efficiency gains and addressing the justice gap to reshaping legal education's approach to technological competency, the article introduces the complex interplay between AI and the legal landscape. By delving into pressing questions surrounding AI adoption and advocating for proactive engagement with its implications, the article sets the stage for a discussion of generative AI's transformative potential in shaping the legal profession's future.

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