Law School Courses Research Articles

“Feminist Jurisprudence” – The 1990 Myra Bradwell Day Panel

I’m delighted to have the opportunity to talk with you today about some important aspects of feminist legal theory. My comments will focus on the implications of feminist legal theory for legal education. Feminist legal theory has important ramifications for legal education. Feminist legal theory is theory that is connected to doing and to being. Thus, an important dimension of feminist legal theory is its interconnection with legal practice and with legal education. Here at Columbia, as well as at many other law schools, there has been much discussion concerning problems of gender bias in legal educa- tion. It is now widely acknowledged that law school courses do not ade- quately incorporate issues relating to women and women’s perspectives into the curriculum. As a result, many law professors and law students have begun to rethink every facet of the law school curriculum, particularly first-year courses, from the standpoint of gender. Today I want to suggest some contributions that feminist legal theory can make to the teaching of one of the most important courses in the first-year curriculum–Civil Procedure.

Corporate Finance in the Law School Curriculum

In contemporary corporate law pedagogy, denotes an advanced corporate course combining conventional legal materials on finance with materials on practical and theoretical finance economics. This was a novel curricular concept when Professors Victor Brudney and Marvin A. Chirelstein brought out the first edition of their Corporate Finance casebook in 1973.1 Times have changed. Such mixes of law and economics have become routine,2 and Corporate Finance has joined the establishment of generally offered upper-class law school courses.3 Law students associate Corporate Finance with Securities Regulation as a portal to corporate practice.4 The second edition of the Brudney and Chirelstein casebook, brought out in 1979, has entered middle age. And with the recent publication of Professor Robert W. Hamil-

Marker Items for Appraisal of Teaching in Law School Courses

Two brief scales were proposed to assess effectiveness of teaching in legal education courses.

The “field plot”; model for instructional research in higher education1

Abstract As means of providing bridges between the learning laboratory and the classroom “field plots”; have been established in art history, second language learning, poetry, hematology, ophthamology, pediatric cardiology and law school courses. Professors from each of these disciplines are joined by research specialists from the Consulting Group on Instructional Design and the Center for Research in Human Learning at the University of Minnesota to make up the particular task‐oriented groups. To be successful the subject matter specialist must see value in the various levels of concern which the basic researcher, evaluation specialist and instructional designer have for issues of subject matter structure, comprehension, competency, sequence and mode of instruction. Similarly, the researchers and developers must see value in the association with knowledgeable specialists and an ecologically valid research environment. These cooperative ventures have produced worthwhile practical results for particular cou...

Teaching Latin American Law

Latin America, as the subject of legal area studies, presents a special problem in justification. The defense of Latin American studies cannot rest on the values, however they may be described, of comparison with the so-called non-Western areas-at least not when we are talking about legal studies. Law, as it is written and taught in Latin America, lies plainly within the traditions of Europe and North America. Indeed, so many of Latin America's institutions and so much of its legal doctrine are derived from foreign sources that it is arguable that there is little point in focusing on Latin America in a basic course in comparative law. The European countries have produced incomparably richer source materials, both primary and secondary. Some years back I tried to formulate what it is about law in Latin America that makes it a worthwhile focus for study by American lawyers. Since this is a gathering of academics, perhaps it will seem entirely normnal if I quote myself. . . .Latin America . . . has features that make the comparative study of legal institutions particularly rewarding: (a) a view of the role of law in the community that differs markedly from attitudes in the United States and Western Europe; (b) a degree of disparity between the written law and the law in action characteristic of the world's developing societies; (c) a varying social structure, ranging from the modern and highly Westernized to the semi-feudal; and (d) a rate of social change whose rapidity places serious strain on society's institutional framework. I am willing to stick with that statement. You will have noticed that there is nothing in the statement about training lawyers to handle the affairs of clients with interests in Latin America, or even training them to be able to talk to local counsel about a problem that might arise there. I do not reject those objectives as unworthy; I know of at least one course that is taught in an excellent law school by a talented professor, and which is aimed principally at those objectives. I say only that they are not my objectives. The statement quoted above emphasizes the study of Latin American legal institutions in their social contexts. Once again we should be hard put to demonstrate how such a course differs from any other law school course. Now that the realists have largely won the day,

The Need for Defense Counsel in the Juvenile Court

Some experts in the juvenile field doubt whether lawyers have much to contribute in the children's courts. Most lawyers who appear in juvenile courts do not understand the proceedings, partly because of the paucity of law school courses on juvenile court proceedings. Lawyers could contribute a great deal if they were better educated in this field. The child has a right to coun sel, court-appointed when necessary; unless he has counsel to ad vise him properly, he does not have a true hearing. No one can better prevent abuses than an attorney who is there especially to look out for the interests of the child. "In the absence of counsel there is no assurance that the child will be heard at all fully."

Some Thoughts on Law Teaching and the Social Sciences

There has been much talk in recent years, emanating largely from the law schools of Columbia and Yale Universities, about law as one of the social sciences. Yet neither of these schools, nor any other law school, has attempted to develop a program of studies in which this thought appears as a reality instead of merely an interesting or challenging suggestion. Many explanations might be offered for the continued failure of law school curricula to reflect the interrelation between law and such other studies as economics, sociology and political science; it is my belief that one of the foremost factors has been the presence, among the required first-year studies of practically all law schools, of a number of courses of synthesis such as Agency, Contracts and Torts,-courses which purport to assemble supposedly comnion legal factors from widely diverse transactional fields. The conventional procedure in such courses is to evolve or induce a general principle from a variety of specific situations which may be, and usually are, quite unrelated factually. Not infrequently the facts of these illustrative cases are connected with fairly well-defined economic or social institutions, such as banking or taxation or the family. But since neither instructor nor student can pretend to expert or detailed knowledge of all these fields, the problems are of necessity divorced from their factual background and only the abstractions of legal theory are investigated-a practice which completely ignores the conception of law as a social science. These abstract courses are objectionable not merely because they omit any intensive study of the institutional background of the specific disputes dealt with, btut also because they are unsound pedagogically: (i) they present a distorted impression as to the degree of certainty in the law; (2) they occupy the student's time and energy with the acquisition of information and technical skill which are less important than the knowledge and techniques which he might otherwise develop during the same period if a considerable nunmber of his law school courses should focus upon a human institution as a field of fact rather than upon a legal concept. The course in Agency will serve as a convenient illustration. Does the law of Agency deal with the legal problems arising out of the conduct of affairs by othiers? ' Does it relate to the legal problems involved when one