Symposium: Teaching ADR, Mediation, Negotiation, And Client Counseling

Symposium, Teaching ADR, Mediation, Negotiation, and Client Counseling, 69 St. Louis U. L.J. 433-640 (2025): 

• Debra Berman (South Texas) & Denise Peterson (South Texas), Pracademically Speaking: Incorporating Real-World Legal Practice into the Dispute Resolution Curriculum, 69 St. Louis U. L.J. 433 (2025)
• Christine Rollins (St. Louis), Integration of Mediation Skills as Required by the Nextgen Bar Exam, 69 St. Louis U. L.J. 473 (2025)
• Taren E. Wellman (US Air Force Academy), Katherine Simpson (Simpson Dispute Resolution) & Richard Bales (Ohio Northern; Google Scholar), Novel Ways of Creating Experiential ADR Problems, 69 St. Louis U. L.J. 499 (2025)
• Helen M.E. Winter (Pepperdine) & Harshit Rathore (Terkiana, PC), Inaugural ADR and Social Entrepreneurship Course, 69 St. Louis U. L.J. 511 (2025)

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The NextGen Bar Exam Meets The NextGen Law Student: A Revised Approach To Legal Analysis

Scott Caron (Widener), The NextGen Bar Exam Meets the next Generation Law Student: A Revised Approach to Legal Analysis, 50 U. Dayton L. Rev. 43 (2024):

The bar exam is changing, and soon. The National Conference of Bar Examiners (“NCBE”), the entity that supplies the bar exam for a majority of U.S. jurisdictions, is in the later stages of development of the NextGen Bar Exam, a new bar exam that is scheduled to be implemented gradually beginning in July 2026, with full implementation by July 2028. Twenty-six U.S. jurisdictions have signed on to adopt the NextGen Bar Exam thus far, with seven of them (Connecticut, Guam, Maryland, Missouri, Northern Mariana Islands, Oregon, and Washington) announcing adoption at the earliest date of July 2026. This means that there are students currently enrolled in law school who will take the NextGen Bar Exam—for example, full-time students who began their studies in the fall of 2023 or 2024, and who plan to take the bar exam in one of those four jurisdictions. Other jurisdictions may follow. The race is on to prepare our students for an exam that appears, in many ways, to be unconventional. 

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State Law Tests And Apprenticeships With The New Uniform Bar Exam?

Jeffrey Parness (Northern Illinois; Google Scholar), State Law Tests and Apprenticeships with the New Uniform Bar Exam?, 58 Creighton L. Rev. 1 (2024):

A new approach to the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE), propounded by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE), will be available in July 2026. The current approach to UBE testing will no longer be available from the NCBE in a few years. Over one third of the states have already signed on to be the new UBE.

All indications are that the revised UBE will reflect a seismic shift in how bar applicants are assessed. It will likely also prompt at least some changes in how and what students are taught in law schools. The stated goal of the NCBE in pursuing a revised UBE is for the “next generation of the bar exam” to focus on “topics and tasks . . . that are most essential for newly licensed lawyers.”

In undertaking assessments of bar applicants differently, the new UBE will not have, as it has now, separate essay, performance, and multiple-choice components. Further, it is scheduled to run a day and a half, not two days.

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Bar Examination: A Verb, Not A Noun

Marsha Griggs (St. Louis; Google Scholar), Bar Examination: A Verb, Not a Noun, 77 Wash. U. J.L. & Pol’y 6 (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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Diversity Messaging After Affirmative Action

Nancy Leong (Denver; Google Scholar), Diversity Messaging After Affirmative Action, 109 Minn. L. Rev. 1059 (2025):

Many colleges and universities communicate publicly that they value racial diversity—a practice this Article will call diversity messaging. Yet growing hostility to race-consciousness by courts, legislators, and other public figures has made diversity messaging increasingly fraught.

This Article examines empirically whether law schools changed their diversity messaging following the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA), and, if so, how. I surveyed three sources of diversity messaging from law schools: admissions materials, hiring announcements, and DEI websites. Analysis of these materials revealed that schools significantly reduced or eliminated their diversity messaging after SFFA. 

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Many Authors Approve Of Harvard Law Review's Use Of Race And Ideology In Article Selection

Following up on my previous post, Harvard Law Review Rejects 85% Of Submissions Using Race-Conscious Rubric:  Harvard Crimson, A Mass Leak Showed the Harvard Law Review Assessed Articles for DEI Values. Some Authors Say That’s Not a Problem.:

After a massive leak, the Harvard Law Review was accused of using a racially conscious and ideologically discriminatory rubric to evaluate article submissions. But many of the authors whose works were evaluated in the leaked documents didn’t see it that way.

The Harvard Law Review — a student-edited publication that is America’s most prominent law journal — has found itself engulfed in a public battle over accusations that it unfairly boosted Black and Latino authors.

Since April, the Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing news site, has published a steady drumbeat of leaked documents from the Law Review’s article submission process, which the Free Beacon alleged documented discrimination against white and Asian authors. In the months since, three federal agencies — the Department of Health and Human Services, the Education Department, and the Justice Department — opened investigations into the allegations.

And then, on June 19, the Free Beacon dropped a bombshell: nearly 2,300 pages showing how the Law Review’s editors evaluated article submissions.

The Free Beacon claimed they had clear evidence that the Law Review’s editors used a racially conscious and ideologically discriminatory rubric. But many authors whose articles were discussed in the leak said they saw nothing to object to in the Law Review’s process — even as others agreed that the process considered race in pernicious ways.

The leaked documents show individual editors’ assessments of 416 articles submitted for the most recent volume of the Law Review, all anonymized at this stage of the review process. The Crimson was able to identify and contact 360 of the authors.

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2025-26 U.S. News Global Universities Rankings

U.S. News & World Report, 2025-26 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 (97.2)
3. Stanford (94.5)
4. Oxford (88.3)
5. Cambridge (86.8)
6. UC-Berkeley (86.4)
7. University College London (86.2)
8. University of Washington (86.1)
9. Yale (86.0)
10. Columbia (85.8)
11. Imperial College London (85.2)
11. Tsinghua University (85.2)
13. UCLA (84.9)
14. Johns Hopkins (84.4)
15. Penn (84.0)
16. Cornell (83.6)
16. Princeton (83.6)
16. UC-San Francisco (83.6)
16. Toronto (83.6)
20. National University of Singapore (83.4)
21. UC-San Diego (83.2)
21. Michigan (83.2)
23. Cal-Tech (82.9)
24. Northwestern (81.5)
25. Peking University (81.1)

Methodology:

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The Death And New Life Of Law And Religion

Marc O. DeGirolami (Catholic University; Google Scholar), The Death and New Life of Law and Religion, 13 Oxford J.L. & Relig. 16 (2024):

The year 2023 was an end and a beginning. It saw the passing or retirement of many giants in the field of law and religion—scholars who brought their formidable erudition and insight to bear on questions that transcended legal doctrine, venturing upward into the heady realms of political theory, philosophy, history, sociology, and theology.

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Festschrift For Professor Larry Solan (Brooklyn) (1952 – 2024)

Symposium, Festschrift For Professor Larry Solan, 33 J.L. & Pol'y (Issue 1) 1-130 (2024) (obituary):

• James A. Macleod (Brooklyn; Google Scholar), A Festschrift For Professor Larry Solan, 33 J.L. & Pol'y 1 (2024)
• William N. Eskridge Jr. (Yale), The Pet Fish Canon, 33 J.L. & Pol'y 4 (2024)
• Abbe R. Gluck (Yale; Google Scholar) & Laila M. Robbins (J.D. 2024, Yale), The Enduring Relevance of Congress Despite the  Court's Shift to “Ordinary Reader” Statutory Interpretation, 33 J.L. & Pol'y 29 (2024)
• Anita S. Krishnakumar (Georgetown), Grammar & Syntax Arguments on the Roberts Court, 33 J.L. & Pol'y 58 (2024)
• Nicole Steitz (J.D. 2024, Georgetown), Brian G. Slocum (Florida State; Google Scholar) & Kevin Tobia (Georgetown; Google Scholar), The Broad Church of Modern Textualism, 33 J.L. & Pol'y 94 (2024)

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Improving The Signal Quality Of Grades

Adam Chilton (Chicago; Google Scholar), Peter A. Joy (Washington University; Google Scholar), Kyle Rozema (Northwestern; Google Scholar) & James Thomas (Federal Trade Commission; Google Scholar), Improving the Signal Quality of Grades, 40 J. L. Econ. & Org. 820 (2024):

We investigate how improving the signal quality of grades could enhance the matching of students to selective opportunities that are awarded early in academic programs. To do so, we develop methods to measure the signal quality of grades and to estimate the impact of changes to university policies on the identification of exceptional students for these opportunities. We focus on law schools, a setting where students are awarded important academic and professional opportunities after just one year of a three-year program. 

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How Do Continuing Education Requirements Affect A Workforce? Evidence From The Legal Profession

Update:  ABA Journal, Do CLE Requirements Affect Bar Size? New Working Paper Explores

Kyle Rozema (Northwestern; Google Scholar), How Do Continuing Education Requirements Affect a Workforce? Evidence from the Legal Profession: 

I study how requiring lawyers to complete continuing education impacts the American legal profession. I find that continuing education requirements decrease the number of licensed lawyers in a state by 5 percent—a decline that appears to be driven largely by lawyers who do not practice full-time in the state. Next, I find suggestive evidence that the requirements alter the composition of the legal profession, resulting in relatively fewer lawyers available to serve individuals with limited options for legal assistance. Finally, I find some weak evidence that the requirements may modestly improve the quality of services in the state.

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Symposium: Texas And The Future Of Legal Education

Following up on my previous post, Texas Supreme Court May No Longer Require Graduation From ABA-Accredited Law School To Practice Law In The State:  Symposium, Texas and the Future of Legal Education, University of Texas Civitas Institute (2025):

The long-term position the American Bar Association has held, under the authority granted it by the Texas Supreme Court to accredit law schools in Texas and make these institutions the sole pathway to becoming a licensed lawyer in the state, is now in question. The Texas Supreme Court has invited commentary on what, if any, role the ABA should have in determining the legitimacy of legal education in Texas. A similar process is now unfolding in the State of Florida. This online symposium, which has brought together law professors and scholars, inside and outside Texas, aims to make a hopeful contribution to this conversation. 

• Josh Blackman (South Texas; Google Scholar), The Supreme Court of Texas Must Put Texas First, and Liberate Law Students from the ABA ‍("The Supreme Court of Texas should play a crucial role in ensuring that law schools adequately prepare students to be effective lawyers in Texas. However, this can be achieved without the ABA’s stringent and arbitrary standards.")
• Seth J. Chandler (Houston), Accrediting for Tomorrow: Law School Metrics and Interstate Compacts ("Current ABA accreditation has established a common floor for bar admissions and federal loan guarantees, creating a nationally portable credential. Yet that success has created significant costs.")
• Andrew P. Morriss (Texas A&M; Google Scholar), Ending the ABA's Role in Accreditation Will Benefit Texas ("If the Texas Supreme Court ultimately opens doors to alternative routes to the practice of law, it will expand the availability of legal services in the state, primarily benefiting poor and middle-class Texans.")
• Derek T. Muller (Notre Dame; Google Scholar), New Paths for Legal Education Should Be Considered." ("Reconsidering the ABA's monopoly on accrediting law schools is a worthwhile endeavor, but some notes of caution are in order.")
• Ilya Shapiro (Manhattan Institute; Google Scholar), The ABA Deserves to Lose Its Accreditation Monopoly ("The ABA has used its accreditation monopoly to bend law schools to its ideological will.")
• John Yoo (UC-Berkeley; Google Scholar), The Conserving Force of Lawyers in American Democracy ("Law education should not rest in the hands of those who view the legal profession as the handmaiden to change and even revolution.")

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Assessing Experiential Education In Law Schools: Toward A Modern Diploma Privilege

Catherine Martin Christopher (Texas Tech), Assessing Experiential Education in Law Schools: Toward a Modern Diploma Privilege, 93 Miss. L J. 1137 (2024):

Experiential education is an essential part of legal education because it moves law students from theoretical to practical understanding of the law and its implications. Legal education experts recommend significant experiential education in order to make law graduates practice-ready.1 Practical, experiential skills must be taught, and furthermore, students’ learning must be assessed, so all stakeholders—including employers and clients—can be assured that new attorneys are competent to practice.

Assessing the competence of students, and assessing the institution’s program of legal education, can be particularly daunting when considering experiential education; while knowledge can be assessed objectively, assessing skills is more subjective. Consistent, accurate assessment is particularly important because I believe law faculty are better situated to assess a broader range of competencies, over a more realistic timeframe, than the bar exam and its graders can. 

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The New Glass Ceiling

Andrea Kupfer Schneider (Cardozo), Abigail R. Bogli (Quarles & Brady, Milwaukee) & Hannah L. Chin (School District of Whitefish Bay), The New Glass Ceiling, 2024 Wis. L. Rev. 1687:

Until the last decade, gender inequality in the legal profession was self-evident. Law school classrooms and law firm offices were overwhelmingly filled with men. In recent years, women have outnumbered men in law school classes and reached parity with men among first-year associates. These developments have created the misperception that gender equality has been achieved. In this Article, we challenge this complacency. 

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Texas A&M Symposium: Artificial Intelligence In Legal Scholarship

Texas A&M Symposium, The ‘Why’ & How’ of Artificial Intelligence in Legal Scholarship, 11 Texas A&M J. Prop. L. 543-703 (2025):

• Spencer Nayar (J.D. 2025, Texas A&M) & Michael I. Cooper (J.D. 2025, Texas A&M), Foreword: The ‘Why’ & How’ of Artificial Intelligence in Legal Scholarship, 11 Texas A&M L. Rev. 543 (2025)
• Andrew W. Torrance (Kansas; Google Scholar) & Bill Tomlinson (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar), Invasives: The How of Biodiversity Loss, 11 Texas A&M L. Rev. 573 (2025)
• Andrew W. Torrance (Kansas; Google Scholar) & Bill Tomlinson (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar), Overharvesting: The Why of Biodiversity Loss, 11 Texas A&M L. Rev. 615 (2025)
• Andrew W. Torrance (Kansas; Google Scholar) & Bill Tomlinson (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar), Pollution: The What of Biodiversity Loss, 11 Texas A&M L. Rev. 643 (2025)
• Andrew W. Torrance (Kansas; Google Scholar) & Bill Tomlinson (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar), Population: The Who of Biodiversity Law, 11 Texas A&M L. Rev. 673 (2025)

ABA Journal, AI Takes on Starring Role in 4 Articles Published by Law Journal:

The Texas A&M Journal of Property Law has published a collection of four articles on the loss of biodiversity that were drafted with the help of artificial intelligence.

Above the Law covered the project and the footnote that ran with each article. It states that portions of the article “were drafted and/or revised” with the help of ChatGPT and Anthropic’s LLM Claude. All content was reviewed and verified by a research team, the footnote said.

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The Impact Of Post-Tenure Review On Faculty Productivity And Retention

Simon Quach (USC; Google Scholar) & Zhengyi Yu (USC; Google Scholar), Fight or Flight: The Impact of Post-Tenure Evaluations on Faculty Productivity and Selection:

This paper examines the labor market effects of Florida's 2022 post-tenure review policy, which weakened tenure protections at public universities. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we compare faculty outcomes in Florida to nearby states. We find the policy increased faculty exits-particularly among high-performing researchers-indicating a brain drain rather than improved selection. Additionally, we detect no productivity gains among incumbents and observe a decline in the research output of new hires. Overall, the findings suggest that reducing tenure protections negatively affects the research capacity and competitiveness of public universities.

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USC Call For Papers: 2026 Poverty Law Conference (Scholarship, Pedagogy, And Community In A Time Of Attacks On The Vulnerable)

Call For Papers: 

This year's conference will take place in Los Angeles on February 20–21, 2026, with a welcome reception on the evening of Thursday, February 19. This national event brings together scholars, educators, and advocates whose work focuses on poverty, inequality, and access to justice. Like previous gatherings, the event will feature paper presentations, roundtable discussions about teaching and advocacy, and opportunities to build community across disciplines and institutions.

We welcome paper abstract and panel submissions in the following areas:

• Critical Issues in Poverty and Inequality: Covering any topic relevant to poverty, including but not limited to housing, healthcare, public benefits, criminal justice, labor and employment, education, fiscal policy, and racial and economic justice.

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AI Gets Its First Law School A+s (And An A In Tax)

Update:  Reuters, Artificial Intelligence Is Now an A+ Law Student, Study Finds

Andrew Blair-Stanek (Maryland; Google Scholar), Donald G. Gifford (Maryland), Mark Graber (Maryland; Google Scholar), Guha Krishnamurthi (Maryland; Google Scholar), Jeff Sovern (Maryland; Google Scholar), Donald B. Tobin (Maryland; Google Scholar) & Michael P. Van Alstine (Maryland), AI Gets Its First Law School A+s:

We had o3, OpenAI's new reasoning model, take our Spring 2025 law school final exams with the "reasoning effort" parameter set to high. We graded o3's answers on the same curve as our students. Three semesters ago, we found the older model GPT-4-turbo's outputs would have received grades ranging between B+ and D. This semester, we find o3 got three A+s, one A, one A-, two B+s, and a B. We find clear, fixable explanations for two of o3's lowest grades.

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Do Bar Exam Waivers Hurt Lawyer Quality?

Adam Chilton (Chicago; Google Scholar), Jacob Goldin (Chicago; Google Scholar), Kyle Rozema (Northwestern; Google Scholar), & Sarath Sanga (Yale; Google Scholar), Occupational Licensing and Labor Market Mobility: Evidence from the Legal Profession:

We study how state occupational licensing requirements shape labor mobility across U.S. legal markets. Drawing on newly collected data, we link variation in state bar exam waiver policies to lawyers’ license acquisitions, professional disciplinary records, and educational histories. We find that bar exam waivers increase the number of experienced lawyers obtaining a new license by 38 percent, but that the additional lawyers are subject to more professional discipline and tend to have graduated from less selective law schools. Our results suggest that state-level occupational licensing regimes can create a trade-off between the supply and quality of professionals in an industry.

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Velasco: Shortcomings Of Law School And Big Law

Julian Velasco (Notre Dame), Shortcomings of Law School and Big Law, 93 Fordham L. Rev. 1279 (2025): 

The present Colloquium, on Lawyers and Their Institutions, seeks to consider how various legal institutions shape lawyers’ professional norms, values, and conduct. In this Essay, I will consider the two legal institutions with which I have been most involved, law school and “big law”—more specifically, transaction practice at an elite law firm. I will argue that these institutions exert a problematic influence on developing attorneys by inculcating opposing types of disrespect for the law.

Consider first law schools.

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Kuehn & Joy: Measuring The Impacts Of Experiential Legal Education

Robert R. Kuehn (Washington University; Google Scholar) & Peter A. Joy (Washington University; Google Scholar), Measuring the Impacts of Experiential Legal Education, 73 J. Legal Educ. 598 (2024):

Experiential legal education has become an essential component of the law school curriculum, emphasizing "learning by doing" through practical experiences in law clinics, externships, and simulation courses. This pedagogical approach offers law students the critical skills and professional values required for effective and ethical practice. Despite its recognized importance and parallels with other professional disciplines, legal education still requires minimal experiential education compared to other professions. This reluctance likely stems from lingering skepticism by some legal educators about its value, even though many stakeholders, including other educators, students, recent graduates, and other legal professionals, acknowledge its significance.

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Law Jobs: Professional Regulation, The Division Of Legal Labor, And Institutional Change

Emily S. Taylor Poppe (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar), Law Jobs: Professional Regulation, the Division of Legal Labor, and Institutional Change, 93 Fordham L. Rev. 1217 (2025): 

Over the past century, changing economic conditions, technological advances, and shifts in the composition of the American workforce have transformed the organization of many fields. Meanwhile, the legal field has remained stubbornly unchanged. Although multiple forces underlie this stasis, the extensive regulation of the legal industry is an important factor. For example, prohibitions on the unauthorized practice of law paired with a broad definition of “legal advice” have helped to maintain the role of lawyers as the dominant source of legal services. Likewise, limitations on lawyers’ ability to share fees or enter into business with nonlawyers have hindered outside investment and further entrenched a business model centered on the legal profession.

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The Tradition Of History At Harvard Law School

Note, The Tradition of History at Harvard Law School, 138 Harv. L. Rev. 775 (2025): 

There has been a noticeable trend at the Supreme Court in the last half-century toward using history to determine constitutional meaning. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, Justice Thomas’s majority opinion announced a new methodology for Second Amendment jurisprudence, which rejected the old “means-end scrutiny” test in favor of comparison to “historical tradition.” The upshot of this new test is that “judges . . . are supposed to analogize modern laws directly to historical sources, unmediated by a legal rule or standard like the tiers of scrutiny.” Using this method, judges would no longer be asked to judge in the traditional sense, but rather to engage in historical analysis. To the Court, this method is preferable because “reliance on history to inform the meaning of constitutional text . . . is . . . more legitimate, and more administrable, than asking judges to ‘make difficult empirical judgments’ about ‘. . . costs and benefits . . .’ especially given their ‘lack [of] expertise’ in the field [of firearms regulation].”

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Seattle Symposium: The Role Of Affirmative Action, Race, And Diversity In University Admissions

EPOCH 2023 Symposium, Going Forward: The Role of Affirmative Action, Race, and Diversity in University Admissions and the Broader Construction of Society, 47 Seattle U. L. Rev. 1003-1425 (2024):

• Steven W. Bender (Seattle), Foreword, 47 Seattle U. L. Rev. 1003 (2024)
• Margaret E. Montoya (New Mexico; Google Scholar), Memories of an Affirmative Action Activist, 47 Seattle U. L. Rev. 1029 (2024)
• Francisco Valdes (Miami), Defeat Fascism, Transform Democracy: Mapping Academic Resources, Reframing the Fundamentals, and Organizing for Collective Actions, 47 Seattle U. L. Rev. 1057 (2024)
• Meera E. Deo (Southwestern; Google Scholar), After Affirmative Action, 47 Seattle U. L. Rev. 1231 (2024)
• Stella Emery Santana (Indiana-McKinney), We Shall Overcome: The Evolution of Quotas in the Land of the Free and the Home of Samba, 47 Seattle U. L. Rev. 1243 (2024)
• Anthony E. Varona (Seattle), Michèle Alexandre (Dean, Loyola-Chicago), Michael J. Kaufman (Santa Clara) & Madeleine M. Landrieu (Loyola-New Orleans), Panel Discussion: Religious Freedom and Diversity Missions: Insights from Jesuit Law Deans, 47 Seattle U. L. Rev. 1247 (2024)

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Symposium: Law School 101—An Exploration Of Legal Pedagogy

Symposium, Law School 101: An Exploration Of Legal Pedagogy, 102 U. Detroit Mercy L. Rev. 1-208 (2024) (Part 2): 

• Mary Lu Bilek (Former Dean, UMass & CUNY), Claudia Angelos (NYU), Joan W. Howarth (UNLV; Google Scholar) & Deborah Jones Merritt (Ohio State; Google Scholar), Langdell's Subjects, 102 U. Det. Mercy L. Rev. 1 (2024)
• Courtney A. Griffin (Detroit Mercy), Stories of Those Untold: Identifying and Overcoming Obstacles of Black Women Pursuing Legal Education, 102 U. Det. Mercy L. Rev. 29 (2024)
• Joseph A. Custer (Case Western), Cancel Culture and Censorship Effects Before and After the Introduction of Social Media, 102 U. Det. Mercy L. Rev. 51 (2024)
• Amelia J. Uelmen (Georgetown), Religious Lawyering in a Polarized Society, 102 U. Det. Mercy L. Rev. 99 (2024)

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Preparing Law Students For The Artificial Intelligence Era

Samantha A. Moppett (Suffolk), Preparing Students for the Artificial Intelligence Era: The Crucial Role of Critical Thinking Skills, 52 Mitchell Hamline L. Rev. __ (2025):

As artificial intelligence transforms the legal profession, the role of critical thinking skills among legal professionals becomes increasingly vital. This Article argues that while AI will automate many routine legal tasks, successful legal practice in the AI era will require lawyers to possess robust critical thinking abilities to effectively evaluate AI outputs, develop strategic solutions, and handle complex analytical work that AI cannot replicate. However, at this crucial juncture, evidence suggests a significant deficit in critical thinking skills among incoming law students. This deficit poses particular challenges as the legal profession increasingly integrates generative AI tools that can handle routine legal tasks but require human oversight and evaluation.

This Article examines the intersection of AI technology, critical thinking skills, and legal education. It begins by analyzing the current state of AI in legal practice, with particular attention to generative AI's capabilities and limitations. The Article then explores the nature of critical thinking, including both its cognitive skills and dispositional components, and explains why these skills are essential for legal practice in the AI era.

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Religious Lawyering In A Polarized Society

Amelia J. Uelmen (Georgetown), Religious Lawyering in a Polarized Society, 102 U. Det. Mercy L. Rev. 99 (2024):

I am deeply humbled to be included in the stellar lineup of speakers in this lecture series and delighted for the occasion to be in conversation with the University of Detroit-Mercy Law School community. Thank you for the invitation. I open my reflections with a few autobiographical notes as a way to illustrate some insights into the history and trajectory of what is termed the "religious lawyering movement." Then I would like to offer a few suggestions for developments in the field against the backdrop of our current cultural terrain.

I came to the legal profession as part of an effort to live an integrative spirituality of unity as developed within one of the Catholic ecclesial movements that flourished in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, the Focolare Movement. Having lived the Focolare spirituality since childhood, for me the first work of unity is interior: I see my work not as something to be "balanced" with the rest of my life, but rather as integrated into the whole of my identity as a religious and spiritual person. ...

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Taking Integrity Risks Seriously In Legal Education

Miriam H. Baer (Brooklyn; Google Scholar), Taking Integrity Risks Seriously, 93 Fordham L. Rev. 1119 (2025):

Several recent scandals in higher education have illuminated notable weaknesses in the academy’s scholarly self-monitoring function. Plagiarism, undisclosed conflicts of interest, and shocking allegations of data fraud have arisen in contexts suggesting real weaknesses in peer review and other internal monitoring mechanisms.

Although the legal academy is different in many ways from the rest of higher education, it is hardly immune to the familiar precursors of fraud—opportunity, pressure, and rationalizations. Moreover, the academy's reliance on student-written law reviews creates additional challenges for holding wayward legal scholars accountable for their integrity violations.

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Law Professors Have Become More Liberal, But They Also Have Become More Conservative Than Their Students

Following up on my previous post on the article by Adam Bonica (Stanford; Google Scholar), Adam Chilton (Chicago; Google Scholar), Kyle Rozema (Northwestern; Google Scholar) & Maya Sen (Harvard; Google Scholar), The Legal Academy's Ideological Uniformity:  the authors have a new paper, Ideological Concordance Between Students and Professors:

The largely liberal composition of American university faculties is frequently lamented in academic discourse and public debate, largely out of concern that professors "brainwash" younger generations with left-leaning principles. However, these complaints often fail to acknowledge that university students are also overwhelmingly liberal. It is thus possible that university professors are more liberal than the American public but more conservative than their students. In this article, we develop a measure of student-professor ideological concordance based on the share of faculty members who are more liberal than the students at a given school. We then use data on the ideology of students and professors in American law schools over more than a twenty-year period to estimate the degree of ideological concordance in the legal academy. We find that although professors have become more liberal over time, they have also become more conservative than their students. ...

We also explore differences in ideological concordance at the law school level. Different schools have developed reputations as having more liberal or more conservative faculty and students, which could translate into notable differences in ideological concordance across law schools. Table 2 reports our concordance measure separately for the top 50 law schools. Among these law schools, four were ideologically balanced during our sample period: Baylor, Northwestern, UCLA, and Yale. The three law schools with the most liberal professors compared to students are three public law schools that are located in relatively conservative states: Indiana University, Bloomington (+23 points), Ohio State University (+18 points), and Florida State University (+16 points).

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Does Artificial Intelligence Have A Role In Legal Scholarship?

ABA Journal, Does Artificial Intelligence Have a Role in Legal Scholarship?:

Now that artificial intelligence is actively used by many in academia—in the classroom, for syllabus development and in research—what is its proper role in legal scholarships while maintaining academic integrity?

It’s a question that’s largely left unanswered, says Nachman N. Gutowski, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law.

As new tools, such as ChatGPT’s Deep Research, are unveiled and scholars experiment with generative AI for research, drafting and writing, what scholarly authorship means is called into question, adds Gutowski, the author of a forthcoming article, titled “Disclosing the Machine: Trends, Policies, and Considerations of Artificial Intelligence Use in Law Review Authorship,” accepted by the Jacksonville University Law Review.

Law journals are the gatekeepers for legal scholarships, Gutowski says, but his research found that many law reviews have been slow to adapt to the influence of AI and don’t have policies about demanding disclosure about its use. ...

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Journal Of Legal Education Publishes New Issue

The Journal of Legal Education has published Vol. 73, No. 2 (Winter 2025):

From the Editors

• Kris Franklin (New York Law School), Bill LaPiana (New York Law School), Alison Mikkor (UC-Irvine) & Austen Parrish (Dean, UC-Irvine; Google Scholar), From the Editors, 73 J. Legal Educ. 271 (2025)

Articles 

• Megan McAlpin (Oregon), Impact Beyond the Classroom: Teaching for Transfer, 73 J. Legal Educ. 273 (2025)
• Ezra Ross (UC-Irvine), Amorality in the Lawyering Skills Classroom, 73 J. Legal Educ. 307 (2025)
• Janet Kearney (NYU), A Research Process for the Entire World? Challenges in Foreign, Comparative, and International Law Instruction, 73 J. Legal Educ. 356 (2025)
• Jonathan H. Choi (USC; Google Scholar) & Daniel Schwarcz (Minnesota; Google Scholar), AI Assistance in Legal Analysis: an Empirical Study, 73 J. Legal Educ. 384 (2025)
• James Fallows Tierney (Chicago-Kent; Google Scholar), Grade Insurance, 73 J. Legal Educ. 421 (2025)

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Brennen: The Chilling Effect Of SFFA v. UNC/Harvard On Race-Based Affirmation By Tax-Exempt Charities

David A. Brennen (Kentucky), The Chilling Effect of SFFA v. UNC/Harvard on Race-Based Affirmation by Tax-Exempt Charities, 29 Fla. Tax Rev. __ (2025):

In 2023, the Supreme Court decided in SFFA v. Harvard/UNC that colleges and universities are significantly restricted in their ability to engage in race-based affirmative action when making admissions decisions. Post-SFFA, many have wrongly suggested that the SFFA opinion means that race may never be considered in admissions decisions or in decisions–whether by colleges or others–concerning related matters like awarding scholarships or in employment.  This Article asserts that this expansive view of SFFA is inappropriate and leads to a chilling effect on affirmative action in higher education and related areas. 

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Reconciling Tenure And Faculty Accountability

Stuart Chinn (Oregon), Reconciling Tenure and Faculty Accountability, 128 W. Va. L. Rev. __ (2025):

Part of the very identity of the American university is its insulation from society—a crucial contributor, at least in some instances, toward facilitating the search for knowledge and the disruption of established orthodoxies. Yet American higher education does not exist and cannot function separately from societal pressures. This is most obviously true in the context of public institutions that directly rely on state governmental entities for financial support and that may be subject to some mechanisms of control by governmental actors or their appointees. But it is also obviously true in the context of private institutions that may rely on various forms of governmental support, and that are no less subject to the pressures of applicant, student, and alumni preferences—especially if the latter may impact potential financial gifts.

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Kuehn: How New Lawyers Value Law School Experiential Training

Robert R. Kuehn (Washington University; Google Scholar), How New Lawyers Value Law School Experiential Training:

While the legal academy continues to debate the appropriate role of experiential training in preparing graduates for practice, one group consistently embraces its value: newly-licensed lawyers. In repeated surveys over the past twenty years, early career lawyers, as well as experienced attorneys, report that law clinic, externship, and simulation courses play an important role in legal education. The research summarized herein demonstrates that newly-licensed lawyers highly value their law school experiential courses, deem them important in their transition to practice, and believe their legal education did not sufficiently prepare them for practice.

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Pervasive Pattern Of Racial Discrimination At Harvard Law Review

Washington Free Beacon (Aaron Sibarium), Internal Documents Reveal Pervasive Pattern of Racial Discrimination at Harvard Law Review:

Will this law review article "promote DEI values"? Does it cite scholars from "underrepresented groups"? Will it have "any foreseeable impact in enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion"? And why did one team of editors solicit "only white, male authors"?

Those are some of the questions that editors at the Harvard Law Review asked in internal documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The documents, which span more than four years and have not been previously reported, include article evaluations, training materials, and data on the race and gender of journal authors. They reveal a pattern of pervasive race discrimination at the nation’s top law journal and threaten to plunge Harvard, already at war with the federal government, into even deeper crisis.

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The Seven Essential Law School Simulation Courses

Mitch Zamoff (Minnesota; Google Scholar), The Seven Essential Law School Simulation Courses , 2024 Utah L. Rev. 997:

As we mark the ten-year anniversary of the American Bar Association’s six-credit experiential learning requirement and the launch of the NextGen bar exam, it is critical for U.S. law schools to conduct rigorous assessments of their experiential education curricula. While most law schools now offer students meaningful opportunities to develop lawyering skills in clinics and field placements, there is much less consistency in their simulation course offerings. Simulation courses are a critical component of experiential legal education. While students in clinics and field placements gain valuable, realistic experience addressing the issues presented by their actual clients, those issues may sometimes be atypical and unlikely to recur in the students’ law practices after graduation. 

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Detroit Law Review Symposium: Law School 101—An Exploration Of Legal Pedagogy

Symposium, Law School 101: An Exploration Of Legal Pedagogy, 101 U. Det. L. Rev. 257-374 (2024): 

• 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)
• Chance Meyer (New England) & Nicole Noël (New England), The Gray Box of Legal Analysis: Disentangling Knowledge and Skill, 101 U. Det. Mercy L. Rev. 287 (2024)

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Large Language Scholarship: Generative AI In The Legal Academy

Alan Z. Rozenshtein (Minnesota; Google Scholar) & Kevin Frazier (Texas), Large Language Scholarship: Generative AI in the Legal Academy:

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have ushered in an era where machines meaningfully assist—and in some cases independently produce—legal reasoning, doctrinal synthesis, and scholarly writing. This Article introduces the concept of “Large Language Scholarship,” arguing that AI’s integration will significantly transform legal academia, altering both the quantity and quality of scholarship with profound implications for law professors, law schools, and the legal system. Unlike existing scholarship that focuses on preliminary demonstrations of AI’s capabilities and the associated ethical concerns, we offer a comprehensive analysis of the systemic institutional impacts of AI adoption.

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Forward Looking Academic Impact Rankings For U.S. Law Schools

Matthew Sag (Emory; Google Scholar), Forward Looking Academic Impact Rankings for U.S. Law Schools, 51 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 763 (2024):

Although the very concept of law school rankings is currently under fire, rankings abolitionism is misplaced. Given the number, diversity, and geographic dispersion of the more than 190 law schools fully accredited by the American Bar Association, rankings are essential to enable various stakeholders to make comparisons between schools. However, the current rankings landscape is dire. The U.S News law school rankings rely on poorly designed, highly subjective surveys to gauge “reputational strength,” rather than looking to easily available, objective citation data that is more valid and reliable. Would-be usurpers of U.S. News use better data but make other arbitrary choices that limit and distort their rankings. One flaw common to U.S. News and those who would displace it is the fetishization of minor differences in placement that do not reflect actual differences in substance. This information is worse than trivial: it is actively misleading. This Article proposes a new set of law school rankings free from all of these defects.

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Are Appellate Clinics Effective?

Xiao Wang (Virginia), Are Appellate Clinics Effective?, 31 Clin. L. Rev. 427 (2025):

Law school clinics are integral to legal education, offering students practical experience while serving clients in need and affecting the law more broadly. But despite the enormous investments in experiential learning that law schools make each year, there remains a lack of comprehensive research assessing the efficacy of clinics in serving clients.

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Washington University Symposium: New Developments In Clinical Education, Dispute Resolution, And Professional Identity

Symposium, New Developments In Clinical Education, Dispute Resolution, And Professional Identity, 75 Wash. U. J. L. & Pol'y 1-215 (2024): 

• Karen Tokarz (Washington University), New Directions in Clinical Education, Dispute Resolution, and Professional Identity: Introduction, 75 Wash. U. J. L. & Pol'y i (2024)
• Bryan L. Adamson (Case Western; Google Scholar), Case Western Reserve University School of Law's Academy for Inclusive Leadership Development: A New Pedagogy Integrating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusive Belonging into Legal Education, 75 Wash. U. J. L. & Pol'y 1 (2024)
• Steven J. Alagna (Washington University), The Pedagogical Value of Clinical Amicus Advocacy, 75 Wash. U. J. L. & Pol'y 47 (2024)
• Megan Bess (Illinois-Chicago; Google Scholar), Nira Geevargis (UC Law-SF) & June T. Tai (Iowa), Case Rounds Redefined: Multidisciplinary Perspectives in Reflective Practice, 75 Wash. U. J. L. & Pol'y 71 (2024)

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Boston University Law Review: Diversity & Inclusion Book

Diversity & Inclusion Book, 104 B.U. L. Rev. 1-287 (2024):

• Carmen Alvarado-Hernandez (J.D. 2024, Boston University) & Madeline A. Freeman (J.D. 2024, Boston University), Editors’ Foreword, 104 B.U. L. Rev. (2024)
• Asad Rahim (UC-Berkeley), The Legitimacy Trap, 104 B.U. L. Rev. 1 (2024)
• Ndjuoh MehChu (Seton Hall; Google Scholar), Neither Cops nor Caseworkers: Transforming Family Policing Through Participatory Budgeting, 104 B.U. L. Rev. 73 (2024)
• Brenda D. Gibson (Wake Forest; Google Scholar), Affirmative Reaction: The Blueprint for Diversity and Inclusion in the Legal Profession After SFFA, 104 B.U. L. Rev. 123 (2024)

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Principia Bibliometrica: Modeling Citation And Download Data In Legal Scholarship

James Ming Chen (Michigan State; Google Scholar), Principia Bibliometrica: Modeling Citation and Download Data in Legal Scholarship, 2023 Mich. St. L. Rev. 455:

A stretched exponential function taking the form f(x) = e^(〖-x〗^β ); x∈ [0,∞), β∈(0,1] characterizes decay, diffusion, and relaxation phenomena known as Kohlrausch-Williams-Watts processes. Recent work on relaxation kinetics in metallic glasses has described the conditions under the shape parameter β deviates from its usual value. Where β > 1, the corresponding exponential function is compressed rather than stretched.

The β-generalized exponential function provides good parametric fits for two measures of influence in legal academia: law review impact factors and Social Science Research Network (SSRN) downloads per author. A stretched exponential function (β ≈ 0.805823) models impact factors from 2007 through 2019. The shape parameter for impact factors has changed dramatically relative to citation data for 2006 to 2013, when β was approximately 1.027133. A compressed exponential function (β ≈ 1.219476) describes SSRN downloads per author by law school, except the single outlier atop the rankings. A power law distribution fits the SSRN data, but only for the top 100 schools. This result is consistent with the observation that power laws rarely model the entirety of a distribution, but only its tail.

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The High Cost Of Law School Casebooks

Jeffrey Bellin (William & Mary; Google Scholar), The High Cost of Law School Casebooks:

Commentators have forecasted the demise of high-priced commercial casebooks for two decades. Yet little has changed. This Symposium Essay explores the headwinds facing free and low-cost books in the law school casebook market. It suggests that the biggest problem is “casebook selection inertia.” Given the centrality of the assigned casebook to a typical law school course, professors face strong incentives to make a safe choice from among the leading casebooks—typically those published by a handful of established academic presses who set the highest prices. These choices stick, not only determining the book that will be used for that professor’s future classes but influencing the choices of generations of law professors for years to come.

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LLMs Provide Unstable Answers To Legal Questions

Andrew Blair-Stanek (Maryland; Google Scholar) & Benjamin Van Durme (Johns Hopkins; Google Scholar), LLMs Provide Unstable Answers to Legal Questions: 

An LLM is stable if it reaches the same conclusion when asked the identical question multiple times. We find leading LLMs like gpt-4o, claude-3.5, and gemini-1.5 are unstable when providing answers to hard legal questions, even when made as deterministic as possible by setting temperature to 0. We curate and release a novel dataset of 500 legal questions distilled from real cases, involving two parties, with facts, competing legal arguments, and the question of which party should prevail. 

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AI-Powered Lawyering: AI Reasoning Models, Retrieval Augmented Generation, And The Future of Legal Practice

Daniel Schwarcz (Minnesota; Google Scholar), Sam Manning (Centre for the Governance of AI; Google Scholar), Patrick Barry (Michigan), David R. Cleveland (Minnesota; Google Scholar), J.J. Prescott (Michigan; Google Scholar) & Beverly Rich (Ogletree Deakins), AI-Powered Lawyering: AI Reasoning Models, Retrieval Augmented Generation, and the Future of Legal Practice: 

Generative AI is set to transform the legal profession, but its full impact remains uncertain. While AI models like GPT-4 improve the efficiency with which legal work can be completed, they can at times make up cases and “hallucinate” facts, thereby undermining legal judgment, particularly in complex tasks handled by skilled lawyers. This article examines two emerging AI innovations that may mitigate these lingering issues: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which grounds AI-powered analysis in legal sources, and AI reasoning models, which structure complex reasoning before generating output. We conducted the first randomized controlled trial assessing these technologies, assigning upper-level law students to complete six legal tasks using a RAG-powered legal AI tool (Vincent AI), an AI reasoning model (OpenAI’s o1-preview), or no AI. 

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Fischman: A Statistical Approach To Law School Citation Rankings

Joshua Fischman (Virginia; Google Scholar), A Statistical Approach to Law School Citation Rankings, 21 J. Empirical Legal Stud. 632 (2024): 

Citation rankings have emerged as a popular approach to ranking the scholarly impact of law faculties. This paper develops a statistical approach for inferring faculty quality from citation counts and determining when differences among law schools are significant. Statistical tests demonstrate that the distribution of citations within faculties closely follows the lognormal distribution, subject to small adjustments. This suggests a simple test for comparing faculties: whether they could be drawn from lognormal distributions with the same log mean. Under this approach, the geometric mean of citations is the most efficient measure for summarizing faculty quality. Using citation data collected from HeinOnline, this article provides a citation ranking for 195 law schools in the United States. Most differences between peer schools are statistically insignificant, and confidence intervals on citation ranks are extremely wide. Except for the highest-ranked faculties, citation rankings provide little information on the relative quality of faculties.

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Choi, Monahan & Schwarcz: Lawyering In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence

Jonathan Choi (USC; Google Scholar), Amy B. Monahan (Minnesota; Google Scholar) & Daniel Schwarcz (Minnesota; Google Scholar), Lawyering in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, 109 Minn. L. Rev. 147 (2024):

We conducted the first randomized controlled trial to study the effect of AI assistance on human legal analysis. We randomly assigned law school students to complete realistic legal tasks either with or without the assistance of GPT-4, tracking how long the students took on each task and blind-grading the results.

We found that access to GPT-4 only slightly and inconsistently improved the quality of participants’ legal analysis but induced large and consistent increases in speed. AI assistance improved the quality of output unevenly—where it was useful at all, the lowest-skilled participants saw the largest improvements. On the other hand, AI assistance saved participants roughly the same amount of time regardless of their baseline speed. In followup surveys, participants reported increased satisfaction from using AI to complete legal tasks and correctly guessed the tasks for which GPT-4 was most helpful. 

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Symposium: Fifty Years Of Clinical Legal Education At American University Washington College of Law

Symposium, Fifty Years of Clinical Legal Education at American University Washington College of Law, 31 Am. U. J. Gender Soc. Pol'y & L. 257-484 (2023): 

• Robert D. Dinerstein (American), Elliott S. Milstein (American) & Ann C. Shalleck (American), The Evolution of a Movement in Theory, Practice, and People, 31 Am. U. J. Gender Soc. Pol'y & L. 257 (2023)
• Susan Bennett (American), Binny Miller (American), Michelle Assad (Western New England), Maria Dooner, Mariam Hinds (Fordham; Google Scholar), Jessica Millward (Idaho), Citlalli Ochoa (American), Charles Ross (American), Anne Schaufele (District of Columbia) & Caroline Wick (Villanova), Building a Culture of Scholarship with New Clinical Teachers by Writing about Social Justice Lawyering, 31 Am. U. J. Gender Soc. Pol'y & L. 311 (2023)

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Baylor Symposium: Power Of Speech—Creating Environments In Which Free Speech And Civil Discourse Thrive

Symposium, Powers of Speech: Creating Environments in Which Free Speech and Civil Discourse Thrive, 76 Baylor L. Rev. 1-155 (2023):

• Leah Teague (Baylor), Civility Matters: Why Law School Must Teach Students to Disagree Without Being Disagreeable, 76 Baylor L. Rev. 1 (2023)
• Erwin Chemerinsky (Dean, UC-Berkeley; Google Scholar), When Should University Administrators Speak?: Personal Reflections, 76 Baylor L. Rev. 49 (2023)
• Susan Hanley Duncan (Mississippi; Google Scholar), Reviewing Law School Leadership Programs: What Can Business Schools and Social Science Researchers Teach Us?, 76 Baylor L. Rev. 63 (2023)

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