Business law faculty enjoy the privilege to engage in scholarly activities with a practical bent. As business law faculty learn from their reading, thinking, and writing, they can share this learning with their students. Many of these students will earn leadership positions with direct influence on business practices. When scholarship nudges the…

Interdisciplinary education is gaining prominence in higher education, but little is known about the experiences and professional development needs of interdisciplinary educators. Through the lenses of self-reflection, peer review, and the educational literature, this paper uses a narrative enquiry approach to explore the lived experiences of two…

As legal education incorporates more clinical offerings into the three-year JD curriculum, it becomes more like the training of other professionals. But this isn't enough. Other professionals also are expected to serve post-graduation apprenticeships before they are deemed fully prepared to practice and so licensed to do so. Building an…

This essay is focused on the role which law schools might play in "reinventing" the law student for a more robust role in an increasingly complex global economy. The case is presented for law schools to embrace and promote a collaborative orientation toward legal conflict and the role which lawyers have to play as problem solvers.…

In her provocative book "Rules for a Flat World", Professor Gillian Hadfield makes the important point that our ossified legal system does not meet the needs of our dynamic society. And she rightly notes that legal education is not an ally in meeting this challenge. To move forward, then, legal education must innovate. This essay offers…

Socratic method is associated with law school teaching by which students are asked questions in class that require them to analyze cases and derive legal principles. Despite the method's potential benefits, students usually do not view it as supportive and enriching but rather as a kind of survival ritual. As a pedagogical approach for use in any…

Films depicting educational relationships typically emphasize personal connections between students and teachers over the educational goals that such relations facilitate. In doing so, these films raise the question of how teachers stand in relation to their institutional roles in such a way as to inspire students' desires for knowledge. In this…

Legal studies faculty need to take the long view in their academic and professional lives. Taking the long view would seem to be a cliched piece of advice, but too frequently legal studies faculty, like their students, get focused on meeting the next short-term hurdle--getting through the next class, grading the next stack of papers, making it…

Examines judicial education options, proposing pre-judicial education opportunities. Proposes an academic degree program--an L.L.M. for prospective judges. (EV)

Columnist George Will and others have questioned the continuing need for a federal civil rights commission, because civil rights protections have been on the books since 1964. The chairman of the Commission, Gerald Reynolds, here responds that practitioners of critical legal theory, advocates of the Akaka-Secession bill, some proponents of…

The conceptions of legal ethics or professional responsibility as (1) disciplinary rules or codes; and (2) as the personal moralities of individual lawyers prevail. However, it is the application of general norms to specific circumstances through complex, creative judgment that is the ethical component of the ideal of legal professionalism. (MSE)

Stories give meaning to our lives and create community, offering other worlds of relation and possibilities, contexts for human action, sentiment, and feeling. Until recently, law and literature were assumed to be radically different kinds of intellectual activity, and in law, fiction has not been used to teach important lessons. (MSE)

Adds to the "Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education" with an eighth principle: Good practice in legal education involves identifying and resolving professorial conflicts of interest. Discusses the problem with professorial conflicts of interest, categories of conflict, and effectively resolving such conflicts. (EV)

States that training in legal writing is vital to a lawyer's education and is required by the successful practitioner. Suggests that learning to write as a lawyer is part of the process that creates lawyers. Argues that rhetoric is only effective for the audience and occasion it was written for. (PA)

A discussion of natural law outlines some of the theory and tradition surrounding it and examines its relationship to the social science and legal curriculum and to the teaching of jurisprudence. (MSE)