Law School 2.0

Lexis Publications Board meeting in San Antonio

I just returned from San Antonio where I participated in the Lexis Publications Advisory Board meeting. I have come to enjoy these meetings; my fellow members of the Board are an impressive group, and fun to be around.  I always learn a lot from them too.  We also had several folks from Lexis, some of whom I had not met before, so it was good to meet them.  San Antonio is a beautiful city, especially down by the Riverwalk. Unfortunately, the weather was incredibly hot (not surprisingly) and so we did not get out much.

On the second day of the meeting, I offered a view of the future of law school text publishing. As part of my talk, I discussed the potential impact of the Kindle, and explained how I think electronic publishing is finally maturing, and what I think it will take before it makes significant inroads into law school publishing.  I also explained how electronic publishing and the Skills & Values Series could fit with ePublishing. I am, with Scott Burnham (a professor at Montana Law School) editor of the Series. The S&V books are designed to provide a more active form of learning in all law school courses. Four of these books have been published, and six more are under development (including one I am writing - on Discovery law).  The S&V Series of supplemental texts also each have an online component offering interactive exercises designed to bring to life concepts students are learning in class.  

Of course, the holy grail would be an eReader that had swift web access (faster than the Kindle) and was available in color.  That way, the S&V Series could truly combine the textual material and the interactive online components into an eBook of tremendous value.

ALWD Conference 2009 - Kansas City

The biennial conference of the Association of Legal Writing Directors is taking place today and tomorrow at the University of Missouri - Kansas City.  The planned sessions cover the waterfront, from development of programs, to the evolving roles of program directors, all the way to a technology track. Not surprisingly, my presentation on Saturday will be in the technology track - I will present on the subject of Law School 2.0 and share some of the work I have done with wikis in teaching.

I have been struck during the conference (so far) by how much we focus during these meetings on explaining to our students and colleagues what it is we do. I often find myself rather sick of these discussions, but today I am - reluctantly - appreciating the need for it. In some senses, explaining what we do should be simple. We help students to write legal documents. But for a number of reasons, it seems to me, it is actually not a simple thing to explain. 

Some of our colleagues, unfortunately, still think we teach grammar and punctuation. That is, they think we are technicians, rather than rhetoricians. Of course we do teach a certain kind of writing, but so much more of what we do is teach thinking - or more precisely, legal thinking and legal expression.  Some have called this applied analysis.  Indeed, there is such a need for us to focus on applied analysis, there is very little time to teach grammar and legal citation. 

In addition, over the last 15 years, a rich and diverse body of scholarship about the substance and pedagogy of applied analysis has enriched our field immeasurably, and it is an impressive body of work. Scholarship, of course, is very important to our colleagues. Helping them to understand the richness of our scholarship is something we need to do better.

But this is also a good time for those of us who teach applied analysis.  The various criticisms of legal education all generally agree that our students need more "doctrine in context" - or, put another way, applied learning. In the context of the legal problems we teach with - yes, we teach doctrinal law too - and in the simulated environment in which most of us teach, we are (and have been for many years) doing what the criticisms say we need more of in legal education.  

And so we still have an educational mission with our colleagues in the academy. It is easy to forget this when we are busy with our students. But we can't forget it.  

Law School Assessment Conference

The third Legal Education at the Crossroads Conference will focus on Law School Assessment. It will take place on Friday evening, September 11 and go through mid-Day on Sunday, September 13, and will be hosted at the University of Denver's Sturm College of Law.  Mike Schwartz and I are the co-chairs of the conference committee, and with us are the well-known leaders in this field Andi Curcio, Greg Munro, and Judith Wegner. Because assessment in legal education is a very hot topic these days, the conference has already engendered a lot of interest. 

We sent out a request for proposals in May, and the deadline was July 1st.  We received 50 proposals for the conference, and were somewhat overwhelmed by that.  We have spent quite a bit of time over the last week reviewing those proposals (all of which are interesting and well done), and making adjustments to the draft conference schedule.  We hope to finalize the schedule in the next week or so, and notify those who submitted proposals. In the meantime, you may visit the website for the conference here.  Watch that site for updates to the conference schedule, registration information, and logistics (such as hotel and transportation information).

If you would like to receive conference updates on Twitter, follow @LEC3A (which is an abbreviation of "Legal Education at the Crossroads v. 3 - Assessment").