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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Mississippi Symposium: Tributes To Dean Deborah Hodges Bell

Symposium, Tributes to Dean Deborah Hodges Bell, 93 Miss. L.J. 569-616 (2024):

• Frederick G. Slabach (Dean, Mississippi), The Legend of Debbie Bell: A Skinny on Service and Impact, 93 Miss. L.J. 569 (2024)
• Guthrie T. Abbott (Mississippi), Tribute to Deborah Hodges Bell, 93 Miss. L.J. 573 (2024)
• I. Richard Gershon (Mississippi; Google Scholar), Tribute to Professor Debbie Bell, 93 Miss. L.J. 575 (2024)
• Morris H. Stocks (Mississippi; Google Scholar), A Letter for Professor Deborah H. Bell, 93 Miss. L.J. 577 (2024)
• David W. Case (Mississippi), Tribute to Professor Deborah Hodges Bell, 93 Miss. L.J. 579 (2024)
• Jack Wade Nowlin (Texas Tech), Dean Debbie Bell: Extraordinary Administrator, 93 Miss. L.J. 595 (2024)

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Can AI Hold Office Hours?

Lisa Larrimore Ouellette (Stanford; Google Scholar), Amy Motomura (Loyola-L.A.; Google Scholar), Jason Reinecke (Marquette) & Jonathan S. Masur (Chicago; Google Scholar), Can AI Hold Office Hours?: 

Rapid improvements in AI tools offer transformative opportunities in legal education, including the possibility of students using AI tools to answer questions that students might otherwise ask during office hours. But a critical challenge is the accuracy of these tools’ responses. Both general-purpose and law-specific AI models have been shown to “hallucinate” incorrect responses to a range of legal questions. Here, we evaluate the current capabilities of AI models when given the more constrained task of answering questions about a specific legal text. We provided three AI tools—OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Google’s NotebookLM—with the text of Masur & Ouellette’s Patent Law: Cases, Problems, and Materials, a free patent casebook that has been adopted at over seventy law schools. We then asked each tool to answer 185 questions based solely on the casebook, including questions asked by students in our own patent law classes, and we graded the responses. 

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Mazur & Thimmesch: Beyond ChatGPT: Transforming Government With Augmented LLMs

Orly Mazur (SMU; Google Scholar) & Adam B. Thimmesch (Nebraska; Google Scholar), Beyond ChatGPT: Transforming Government with Augmented LLMs, 92 Tenn. L. Rev. ___ (2025):

The release of ChatGPT demonstrated the remarkable capabilities and the existing limitations of large language models (LLMs) and the natural language chatbots that they power. One area that is ripe for innovation using this new technology, but that has often been bypassed in mainstream discussions, is the public sector. This Article redirects attention towards this overlooked area, acknowledging the limitations of LLMs, while specifically exploring their potential to transform government operations.

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A Critical Perspective On Formative Assessment Mandates

Joshua M. Silverstein (Arkansas-Little Rock; Google Scholar), A Critical Perspective on Formative Assessment Mandates, 47 U. Ark. Little Rock L. Rev. 189 (2025):

Formative assessment is a hot topic in legal education. Numerous commentators maintain that such assessment improves student learning of legal skills and content. Many law schools have adopted formative assessment requirements. And the American Bar Association recently proposed changing law school accreditation standards to mandate formative assessment in the first year. This essay challenges these trends. There is a paucity of evidence that formative assessment enhances learning among law students. Much of the broader assessment literature has limited relevance in legal education. 

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Teaching Law In The Age of Generative AI

John Bliss (Denver; Google Scholar), Teaching Law in the Age of Generative AI, 64 Jurimetrics 111 (2024): 

With the rise of large language models capable of passing law school exams and the Uniform Bar Exam, how should legal educators prepare their students for an age of transformative technological change? As text-generating AI is being integrated in legal research platforms and word processing software, which automate the drafting of legal documents based on human prompts, lawyers are increasingly adopting this technology as a standard tool of legal research and writing. This Article explores the implications of these developments for legal education, focusing on pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment.

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AALS Call For Papers: Reflecting On The Journal of Legal Education

AALS, A Symposium Issue of the Journal of Legal Education

The Journal of Legal Education is the official scholarly journal of the AALS and in that role it has and continues to play an important role in chronicling the development of legal education in the United States. For a special symposium issue dedicated to analyzing that role, the editors invite submissions of articles that reflect on one or more articles published in the journal which at the time of publication discussed the future of United States legal education and then assess how the events in the years following the publication exhibited the arguments put forward by the authors. For example, publication of the McCrate and Carnegie reports inspired articles on the what the future should hold in light of those studies. How prescient were the authors of those articles? Other articles have discussed and assessed what at the time were new developments in pedagogy, scholarship, and the profession in general. Have those developments simply continued, flourished, or withered away?

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New Legal Ed Articles

• Claudia Angelos (NYU), Mary Lu Bilek, Joan Howarth (UNLV; Google Scholar) &  Deborah Jones Merritt (Ohio State; Google Scholar), Langdell's Subjects, 102 U. Detroit Mercy L. Rev. 1 (2024)
• Catherine Martin Christopher (Texas Tech), Assessing Experiential Education in Law Schools: Toward a Modern Diploma Privilege, 93 Miss. L. J. 1137 (2024)
• Kelly Collinsworth (South Dakota) & Marilyn Trefz (Southern Illinois), Leveraging Technology and Law School Pro Se Clinics to Enhance Rural Access to the Courts, 69 S.D. L. Rev. 637 (2024)
• Amy Cyphert (West Virginia), Sam Perl (Carnegie Mellon; Google Scholar) & S. Sean Tu (West Virginia; Google Scholar), AI Cannibalism and the Law, 22 Colo. Tech. L.J. 301 (2024)
• John Foley (Touro) & Robin Boyle Laisure (St. John's; Google Scholar) et al., Merging the Bench, Bar, and Law Schools: How a Student Scholars Program Achieves Professional Identity Through Scholarly Writing, Mentorship, and Presentation, 93 UMKC L. Rev. 1 (2024)

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Journal Of Legal Education Publishes New Issue

The Journal of Legal Education has published Vol. 73, No. 1 (Fall 2024):

From the Editors

• Robert Dinerstein (American) & Ezra Rosser (American; Google Scholar), From the Editors, 73 J. Legal Educ. i (2024)

Articles

• Nancy Ehrenreich (Denver), When Professors Get in Their Own Way: Law Teaching and Academic Perfectionism, 73 J. Legal Educ. 1 (2024)
• Jeremy R. Paul (Northeastern; Google Scholar) & Steven Wilf (Connecticut), Fifty More Ways to Promote Scholarship Within a Law School Community, 73 J. Legal Educ. 39 (2024)
• Lindsey P. Gustafson (Arkansas-Little Rock), The Compounding Effects of Assessment: How Our Failure to Coordinate Formative Assessments May Impact Their Validity, 73 J. Legal Educ. 59 (2024)
• Neil W. Hamilton (St. Thomas-MN; Google Scholar) & Jerome M. Organ (St. Thomas-MN), Learning Outcomes that Law Schools Have Adopted: Seizing the Opportunity to Help Students, Legal Employers, Clients, and Law Schools, 73 J. Legal Educ. 87 (2024)

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Journal Of Legal Education Publishes New Issue

The Journal of Legal Education has published Vol. 72, Nos. 3 & 4 (Spring 2023-Fall 2023):

From the Editors

• Swethaa Ballakrishnen (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar), Janie Chuang (American; Google Scholar), Austen Parrish (Dean, UC-Irvine; Google Scholar) & Ezra Rosser (American; Google Scholar), From the Editors, 72 J. Legal Educ. 271 (2023)

General Articles

• Nicholas Mignanelli (Yale; Google Scholar), Kirby’s on My Mind: A Material Culture Approach to Critical Legal Information Literacy, 72 J. Legal Educ. 274 (2023)
• Andrew J. Turner (Wisconsin; Google Scholar), Let’s Not Be Creative: “Rigid IRAC” and the Hidden Power of Formalistic Legal Writing, 72 J. Legal Educ. 283 (2023)
• Jeffrey M. Lipshaw (Suffolk; Google Scholar), A Law Professor’s Love-Hate Relationship with the Restatement (Second) of Contracts, 72 J. Legal Educ. 307 (2023)
• Timothy Fisher (Dean, Connecticut (2013-2020); Google Scholar), Lessons Learned: The Experiences of Non-Traditional Law Deans and the Law Schools That Hire Them, 72 J. Legal Educ. 328 (2023)
• Sherod Thaxton (UCLA), When Old Habits Die Hard: A Comment on Sander and Steinbuch’s “Mismatch and Bar Passage”, 72 J. Legal Educ. 382 (2023)

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New Legal Ed Papers

• Edwin Eboigbe (Illinois), AI in Legal Analytics: Balancing Efficiency, Accuracy, and Ethics in Contract and Predictive Analysis
• Amy Emerson (Villanova), Assessing Information Literacy in the Age of Generative AI: A Call to the National Conference of Bar Examiners
• Meredith Geller (Northwestern), Law Students Lie and Other Practical Information for First-Year Students
• Nachman Gutowski (UNLV; Google Scholar) & Jeremy Hurley (Appalachian), Forging Ahead or Proceeding with Caution; Developing Policy for Generative Artificial Intelligence in Legal Education, 63 U. Louisville L. Rev. ___ (2025)
• Kari Milligan (Mitchell|Hamline), NextGen Bar Success: A Student-Tested, Student-Approved Method for Completing Counseling Integrated Question Sets
• Kathleen Morris (UC-Berkeley), Legal Education, Democracy, and the Urban Core

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Scholastica Law Review Submission Insights: 2025 Edition

Scholastica Law Review Submission Insights: 2025 Edition:

When do law reviews open?
As was the case in all previous Scholastica submission cycle data pulls, most law reviews began opening in late January and late July, and the days with the most law review openings were February 1st, followed by August 1st.

When do authors submit to law reviews?
The graph below details, by day, when articles were submitted to law reviews during the 2024 article selection cycle (January 1, 2024 - December 31, 2024).

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The Top 100 Legal Scholars Of 2024

Rob Willey (George Mason; Google Scholar), Melanie Knapp (George Mason; Google Scholar) & Ashley Matthews (George Mason), The Top 100 Legal Scholars of 2024: 

This article presents the third iteration of our ranking of the current top 100 legal scholars. The ranking addresses some of the limitations of traditional legal scholarship rankings by focusing on recent publications rather than career-long outputs. This approach allows for the recognition of a broader range of scholars who have produced influential work, including those with career interruptions, non-traditional academic roles, and careers with limited time for scholarship.

The methodology emphasizes inclusivity and current impact, highlighting the achievements of all scholars who are actively and substantially contributing to legal scholarship. As we did last year, we include a separate ranking that considers the impact of co-authorship. New this year, we rank law schools by the number of scholars who made our top 100. In another first, we attempt to quantify the surprisingly high impact career publications have in other rankings that do not share our methodology. 

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Call For Papers: Why Now? Women, Equality, And The Legal Academy

Call for Papers: Why Now? Women, Equality, and the Legal Academy:

In 2012, the prior chairs of WLE – 22 in number, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Herma Hill Kay – wrote individually to generate collaboratively a history of the Section of Women in Legal Education. Reflections of Women in Legal Education: Stories from Four Decades of Section Chairs, 80 UMKC L. Rev. 659 (2012). Now, more than a decade later, we see a world made by their innovations as well as efforts to limit the deployment of categories of identity in higher education. The UMKC Law Review has agreed to host another symposium on these issues.

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Bob Jones University In The 21st Century: Religious Colleges That Discriminate Against LGBTQ+ Students

Sydney Smith (J.D. 2024, USC), Note, Bob Jones University in the 21st Century: An Examination of Charitable Tax-Exempt Status and Religious Exemption from Title IX for Religious Colleges That Discriminate against LGBTQ+ Students, 97 S. Cal. L. Rev. 737 (2024): 

On March 30, 2021, the Religious Exemption Accountability Project (“REAP”) filed a historic class action lawsuit with the goal of challenging the abusive conditions that many private religious colleges and universities have created for LGBTQ+ students. These unsafe conditions have been permitted for decades by the U.S. Department of Education’s policies surrounding religious freedom. In the complaint, plaintiffs criticize the privileges—tax-exempt status and government funding—that are bestowed upon these institutions despite their discriminatory practices, denouncing the special treatment they receive simply for shrouding their behavior in religious justifications for protection. The complaint went on to criticize the religious exemption to Title IX, alleging that it “permits the Department to breach its duty as to the more than 100,000 sexual and gender minority students attending religious colleges and universities where discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is codified in campus policies and openly practiced.”

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Lawless: The Miseducation Of America's Elites

Ilya Shapiro (Manhattan Institute), Lawless: The Miseducation of America's Elites (2025):

In the past, Columbia Law School produced leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now, it produces window-smashing activists.

What happens when America’s top law schools stop believing in legal education?When protestors at Columbia broke into a building and created illegal encampments, the student-led Columbia Law Review demanded that finals be canceled because of “distress.” At Stanford, chanting activists, egged on by an associate dean, drove away a federal judge. Yale’s hostility to free speech led more than a dozen federal judges to boycott the school for clerkship hiring.

Law schools used to teach students how to think critically, advance logical arguments, and respect opponents. Now, those students cannot tolerate disagreement and reject the validity of the law itself. And yet, rioting Ivy Leaguers are the same people who will hold important government positions, fight constitutional lawsuits, and advise Fortune 500 companies.

In Lawless, Ilya Shapiro explains how we got here and what we can do about it. The problem is bigger than radical students and biased faculty—it’s institutional weakness. Shapiro met the mob firsthand when he posted a controversial tweet that led to calls for his firing from Georgetown Law. A four-month investigation eventually cleared him on a technicality. but declared that if he offended anyone in future, he’d create a “hostile educational environment” and be subject to the inquisition again. Not being able to do the job he was hired for, he resigned.

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

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

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

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Generative AI And The Purpose Of Legal Scholarship

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

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

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Kuehn: The Employment Benefits Of Law Clinics And Externships

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

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

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Spring 2025 Law Review Article Submission Guide

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

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

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

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Wendel: The Good Lawyers Of January 6

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

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

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

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“How Do I Design My New Law Course?”

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

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

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

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

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

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Does The 1L Curriculum Make A Difference?

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

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

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

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

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

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The Great British Bake Off And Critiquing Student Legal Writing

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

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

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

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

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Perlman: Generative AI And The Future Of Legal Scholarship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Critical Curriculum Design To Cultivate Qualities Of ‘Engaged Citizenship’

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

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

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

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

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

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Symposium: Tributes To Michael Olivas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ukrainian-U.S. Legal Education Collaboration And Clinics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Symposium: Legal Research Pedagogy

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

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

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Ten Empowering Strategies For Nondirective Clinical Supervision

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

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

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First-Gen In The Field

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

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

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