ILTL Summer Conference

The Institute for Law Teaching and Learning's Summer Conference is taking place at Gonzaga Law School in Spokane Washington today and tomorrow. 

This morning, I attended a terrific session on Rubrics and their development and use, by Sandra Simpson (Gonzaga).  After that, there was a session by Karen Sneddon (Mercer) about integrating writing into "casebook" courses.  She had some terrific examples of how to do this, and would be pleased to send them to anyone who sent her an E-mail request.

This session was followed by three professors from the University of Montana (including a journalism professor), who had students in a class blog and twitter from the W.R. Grace trial that was being conducted in court during the class.  (This project has received a lot of attention on the 'net, and details can easily be found by searching for "Grace case.")  In that session, the presenters asked us to tweet and post to their blog about the session, and in particular about an excerpt from the movie "Anatomy of a Murder," so that we could see what it was like for the students when they did this from the Grace trial.  I used twitter, so you can find those posts with the hashtag #ILTL09.  Finally, today there is a session entitled "Life after Langdell" in which the presenters are describing an "uncasebook" that they have developed for teachers to get away from the reading of appellate cases for an Evidence class.  Their focus is on spending class time in a more interactive manner (using simulation and role playing), rather than just reviewing and discussing the case law - the "Langdell" method - in Evidence.

Comments

[Nadia]

Hey David,

Glad you're blogging on the conference. Thanks for the shout out about the Grace case and for keeping the Tweets flowing during our presentation. It was fun.

See you tomorrow.

-- Nadia