Category: Universities

The Future of Legal Education

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| Carneige, Law, Legal Education, Universities

Carnegie Foundation on Education LawyersHot on the heels of the Legal Education Symposium blogged about yesterday comes news of an international Conference on the Future of Legal Education on 20-23 February 2008 in Georgia State University College of Law. Against the background of the Carneige Foundation‘s report on Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (which I have already discussed on this blog), this conference will ask two related questions:

First, if one were charged with starting a new law school, how would one implement the Carnegie recommendations? …

Second, how would an existing law school transform itself into the kind of law school envisioned by the Carnegie Report?

I have already blogged about the first question, and both will be discussed by a wide selection of exciting speakers, including Martin Böhmer (Founding Dean, Universidad de San Andres School of Law; CV (.doc)), Gary Davis (Flinders), Jeff Giddings (Griffith), Richard Johnstone (Griffith), Patrick Longan (Mercer), Sally Kift (QUT), Paul Maharg (Strathclyde) (author of the superb Transforming Legal Education), Lawrence C. Marshall (Stanford), David McQuoid-Mason (KwaZulu-Natal), N.R. Madhava Menon (National Law School of India), James E. Moliterno (William & Mary), M.R.K. Prasad (Salgaocar, India), Suellyn Scarnecchia (New Mexico), William Sullivan (Carnegie Foundation; lead author of Educating Lawyers) and David Weisbrot (ALRC, formerly Sydney).…

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The Future of Irish Legal Education

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| Law, Legal Education, Universities

Aula Maxima, UCC, via their siteAnd so to my Alma Mater, University College Cork (UCC), where the Faculty of Law hosted the second annual Legal Education Symposium last Friday. This year’s event, organised by Dr Fidelma White and Mr Gerard Murphy and again generously sponsored by Dillon Eustace Solicitors, had a decidedly transatlantic flavo(u)r, with of course a good deal of Cork relish as well.

The venue was UCC’s handsome 19th century Aula Maxima (pictured above left), and the delegates were welcomed in a characteristically witty and incisive speech by Dermot Gleeson, SC (former Attorney General, current Chairman of the Governing Body of UCC, and quondam lecturer in the UCC Law Faculty). He shared with us some thoughts on the various-interlinkages between the academy, practice, and the bench. He said that the best superior court judge since independence was Seamus Henchy (something I have long also believed), in part because Gleeson likes the way Henchy wrote, which Gleeson speculated may be in part because Henchy was a law professor in UCD before he went to the bench. He concluded by expressing his skepiticism about the instant transferability the science model of PhDs to Irish law, a matter to which I will return below.…

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Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom

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| Academic Freedom, Freedom of Expression, Universities

Smolla lecture poster via WLU website.A little while ago, Brian Tamanaha on Balkinization raised the question of what is the right response where professors insult in class; his post began as follows [with some added links]:

The November issue of National Jurist has an article about a recent spate of law professors getting into trouble for comments inside or outside of the classroom that apparently offended students. According to the article, a Wisconsin professor made comments about Hmong men [IHT] in the context of discussing cultural practices that might be invoked as a defense against criminal charges. A Quinnipiac professor sent an email to students on his distribution list that “derided� them “for their concepts of how poor people and ethnic minorities are represented within the American legal system� [Quinnipiac Chronicle]. A John Marshall professor was reprimanded for asking a Jewish student “whether his religious training contributed to Jews passing the bar at higher rates than African Americans� [De Paul]. The article did not mention the most recent example of such controversy, involving a professor at Connecticut who showed a film in class, pausing at a scene that offended a few of the students [Law.com].

I was reminded of this as I listened last night to Dean Rod Smolla‘s Inaugural Lecture at WLU (poster above) on

Freedom of Expression and Religion on the Modern Campus: Academic Freedom at Public and private Universities

His basic theme was that First Amendment doctrine is capable of explaining and guiding the development of the principles of academic freedom in the modern American university.…

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Law School lessons

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| Irish Law, Legal Education, Tenure, Universities

NUI Maynooth logo, via the NUIM website.A few weeks ago, noted US Constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky (wikipedia), currently Alston & Bird Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Duke, was hired as the founding Dean of Donald Bren School of Law at the University of California, Irvine; then he was “unhired” (here’s Chemerinsky’s own take on that, from the LA Times); and quite quickly re-hired.

I’ve just recently discovered that Paul Caron on Tax Law Prof used this flap “to generate and publicize the best ideas about reforming legal education from some of the leading thinkers in the law school world”. He and Bill Henderson asked various legal luminaries to give 250-word answers to this question:

What is the single best idea for reforming legal education you would offer to Erwin Chemerinsky as he builds the law school at UC-Irvine?

They got forty responses, gathered together here, and well worth a read they are too (don’t just take my word for it; the Chronicle of Higher Education thinks so too (hat tip: Tax Prof Blog)).

I wonder whether any of those ideas will surface at the forthcoming (second annual) Legal Education Symposium hosted by UCC in December (already discussed here on this blog)?…

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Reforming Irish Legal Education?

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| Competition Law, Irish Law, Legal Education, Universities

UCC Legal Education Symposium.

Change in the structure of legal education is in the air. It is one of the themes of the Second Legal Education Symposium which will be hosted by the Faculty of Law, University College Cork, on Friday 7 December 2007. As with last year’s symposium, this year’s will also be generously sponsored by Dillon Eustace, Solicitors.

This symposium will bring together various parties with an interest in legal education including students, teachers, researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and more – in the hope of enriching the debate and informing future decisions. The theme of the morning session will concern the undergraduate curriculum and will include a key-note address by Professor Joseph W. Singer (Harvard) describing recent (and much discussed and debated) curriculum reforms there. The afternoon session will focus on the implications of Fourth Level Ireland for Law Schools.

Harvard isn’t the only US law school to think about curriculum reform; there is in fact a robust discussion of these issues ongoing at present in many US law schools, including Yale, Stanford and Vanderbilt; and another exciting change has been made by up-and-coming University of Detroit Mercy School of Law in their Law Firm Program. Nor are these the only kinds of curriculum reform being contemplated.…

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Good for the University of Edinburgh

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| Universities

Robert Mugabe via BBC website.According to a short piece by Paul Kelbie in today’s Observer, Edinburgh University will tomorrow revoke an honorary degree conferred in 1984 upon Robert Mugabe (pictured left; see BBC | wikipedia), President of Zimbabwe (see BBC | Guardian | wikipedia | official site).

From the Observer’s website (15 July 2007):

Edinburgh University revokes Mugabe degree

Edinburgh University will tomorrow revoke an honorary degree awarded to Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. The degree was awarded in 1984 for Mugabe’s services to education in Africa. He has since been blamed for Zimbabwe’s failing economy and accused of running an oppressive regime.

…

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A Minister for Universities?

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| Universities

DIUS logo, via their website.If newly re-elected Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern’s post-election Cabinet reshuffle was marked by characteristic caution, then newly-installed UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s post-appointment Cabinet reshuffle was marked by uncharacteristic flexibility.

For example, Brown divided the Department for Education and Skills into two, the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS; full Ministerial team here) and the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). Then, both David Cameron, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, and Sir Menzies Campbell, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, both reshuffled their respective front benches to appoint shadows to these Departments.

However messy the split might be to implement, it is nevertheless an important one, recognising that it is inappropriate to locate policy for the very different education sectors in one department: inevitably, the focus tends to be on one strand, to the detriment of the others. Stand-alone departments, arguing their separate cases at government level, avoid this.

It is therefore disappointing, to say the least, to see that, whilst the university sector merits a full ministry in the UK, it doesn’t even merit a junior minister in Ireland. For all the Irish government’s cant about the importance of research to the national development plan, this lack of recognition is another disheartening example of how the third level sector continues to be marginalised in Irish government policy-making.…

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They are the university

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| Universities

Rabi book cover from Harvard UPJohn Naughton has published this here and here:

The physicist I.I. Rabi and General (later President) Dwight Eisenhower became friends after Eisenhower was appointed president of Columbia University soon after the end of WW2. When introduced to Rabi, Eisenhower said, “I am always very happy to see one of the employees of the university,� to which Rabi replied, “Mr. President, the faculty are not the employees of the university. They are the university.�

Quoted in J. S. Rigden, Rabi: Scientist and Citizen, Harvard University Press, 2000.

…

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