They're Here......

Peter H. Huang and Corie Lynn Rosen, both of the University of Colorado Law School, are publishing The Zombie Lawyer Apocalypse in the Pepperdine Law Review (forthcoming). Here is the abstract. 

This article uses a popular cultural framework to address the near-epidemic levels of depression, decision-making errors, and professional dissatisfaction that studies document are prevalent among many law students and lawyers today.
Zombies present an apt metaphor for understanding and contextualizing the ills now common in the American legal and legal education systems. To explore that metaphor and its import, this article will first establish the contours of the zombie literature and will apply that literature to the existing state of legal education and legal practice — ultimately describing a state that we believe can only be termed “the Zombie Lawyer Apocalypse”. The article will draw parallels between the zombie state of being — the state of being mindless, thoughtless, and devoid of hope — and the state of some aspects of legal culture and legal education today.
This article will then offer solutions to the problem of legal zombies. Those solutions draw on the positive psychology literature and include 1) mindfulness, 2) a shift in attribution style (the way people think about their experiences), 3) reliance on core strengths, and 4) an effort to developing meaning in work and life. Through the application of these and other interventions, we believe it may be possible to stem the tide of lawyer and law student distress and dissatisfaction and protect future students and lawyers from falling prey to the Zombie Lawyer Apocalypse.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Law-Inspired Haiku From Some Future Law and Poetry Scholars at Emory School of Law

As a followup to a post about Supreme Court Haiku and the current ABA-sponsored Supreme Court Haiku Contest for Law Students (open until November 15), I've invited Professor Julie Seaman of the Emory School of Law to present a selection of the haiku created by some of her constitutional law, evidence, and free speech students. I think they're a clever and talented group, and their poems have pith. I like pith.

A few weeks ago, and seemingly out of the blue, legal haikus were suddenly everywhere.  A former student slipped a flyer under my door announcing a Supreme Court haiku contest for law students, sponsored by the American Bar Association.  A sticky note attached to the flyer said, “I thought you’d like to share this with your classes!  Apparently the ABA shares your love of legal haiku.”  A few days later, someone on the conlawprofs listserv shared a link to the Supreme Court Haiku website (www.supremecourthaiku.com), a remarkably clever and delightful collection of which I’d thus far been unaware. 

Why did my student give me the flyer?  Because last semester, after trying my hand at legal haikus on a Facebook dare, I announced to my con law class that they could win free passes for writing haikus about the reading assignments.  Before each class, I would choose my favorite submission and post it on the powerpoint slides for the class; its author would be entitled to an extra free pass to be used as he or she wished during the semester.

The contest was a big hit with the students.  Some students were quite prolific.  Many of the haikus were funny and creative.  I continued the call for haikus this fall in evidence and free speech.  Several students have told me that boiling the cases or rules down to seventeen syllables helps them learn the material – imagine: actual pedagogical value!  But even if the exercise is pedagogically irrelevant, it sure is fun to read the submissions.  Here are some highlights: 

DeShaney v. Winnebago County Dept. of Social Services

Oh poor little Josh

State said they would care for him

No prison no help

Colin Peterson

Buck v. Bell

Can Carrie have kids?

She encumbers the state's funds!

She had due process.

Josh Karr

Troxel v. Granville

Child can’t see grandma

Mom has the right to deny

the visitation

Zoya Kovalenko

Cruzan v. Director, MO Dept of Health

Nancy is brain-dead

Her parents grieve, with no choice

But to watch her lie

Ashleigh McClure

NYC Transit Auth. v. Beazer

On that methadone

TA says I can’t work here

Upheld . . . unemployed

Stephanie Grossinger

Railway Express Agcy v. New York

It is a health risk,

To have car advertisements.

Deal with it, locals!

Rebecca Sussman

Korematsu v. United States

Refusing Orders?

Not So Fast, Korematsu.

Jail Time for You, Sir.

Caroline Geiser

Tiers of scrutiny

Judiciary

defers, but not for suspect

classifications.

Jordan Kragten

Craig v. Boren

So now my girlfriend

Can’t buy us three-two’s either?

Equality bites.

Mike McClain

United States v. Virginia

Stonewall is glaring

Shenandoah is playing

RAH Virginia Mil!

Rebecca Sussman

Skinner v. Oklahoma

Embezzlement: theft,

very similar but one

sterilizes you.

Alison Murphy

Moral turpitude

Cannot deprive criminals

Of life’s greatest gift

Meg McNulty

Watts v. US

Watts threatened the Chief,

But such clear hyperbole

Is protected speech.

Rebecca Hall

New York v. Ferber

If porn depicts kids,

value is de minimus.

The statute survives.

Joe Bearden

Trial of Sir Walter Raleigh

Raleigh’s ghost lingers . . .

“What matter how the head lie,

So the heart be right?”

Rebecca Sussman

Rule 804(a)

Forgetful? Stubborn?

Sick? Privileged? Dead? Then you are...

Unavailable.

Graham Burkhalter

Admissions Doctrine

Wait! Statements I make

are not considered hearsay?

I’m done talking now.

Josh Karr

I will sit silent

If asked if I read today

Tacit Admission

Brad Verona

Frye Test

Frye test rests on

these Elitists assumptions. 

Jurors can be smart!

Rebecca Sussman

The creativity bled over into other student communications.  One day the air conditioning was not working in the classroom.  After class, this message (from student Chris Roth) was in my inbox:

It is so damn warm

Please turn on the A/C now

Because it is hot

Another day I received this in an email before class (from student Ned Dutton):

I’m leaving early,

But please don’t be offended.

It’s an interview.

One day I canceled a reading assignment and received this (from student Rebecca Sussman, whom I must say has discovered a genuine gift for haiku):

A sigh of relief, 

Gonna ignore that reading.

Hello, sweet Netflix!

Ms. Sussman also apologized for an absence this way:

The class glared at me!

Rude, loud coughing wouldn't end!

I hate bronchitis.

Leading up to the review session, student Caroline Geiser sent this:

7 more classes

and then we have exams?!? Shit. 

Jesus take the wheel.

And finally, on the final (from student Jordan Kragten):

Constitutional

law was tough, but Professor

Seaman was great.  Thanks!

From Inside Bars To Sitting for the Bar

From The Hollywood Reporter: NBC has ordered up a script of Shon Hopwood's memoir Law Man from Carol Mendelsohn and the result may be headed for the small screen. In his colorful youth, Mr. Hopwood was a bank robber. After jail time, and redemption, he finished up law school and will be clerking for a judge on the D.C. Circuit.

Listen to an interview with Mr. Hopwood here on NPR. More here from the Huffington Post.

LCCHP Announces Student Writing Competition For 2011

The Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation (LCCHP) announces its 2011Student Writing Competition in Cultural Heritage Law. The deadline is June 10th.

LCCHP is pleased to announce its fifth annual Student Writing Competition in Cultural Heritage Law. The deadline for this year's submissions is 10 June 2011. The first place winner will receive a prize of $1000, while the second place winner will receive $500. The winning papers may also be offered publication.


Competition Details

The submitted paper must be the sole work product of a student author who is currently enrolled in or who has recently graduated from an accredited law school.

The paper must be sponsored by a faculty member at the student's law school.


It must also follow law review style and formatting.


Suitable papers may address any aspect of cultural heritage law, including art, cultural property, historic preservation, indigenous peoples, and intangible heritage (but not intellectual property, except as it relates to cultural heritage).

Only papers written after June 2010 — and not previously published — are admissible.

Only one paper may be submitted per student.

Papers must be electronically submitted directly by the student or by a faculty sponsor on the student's behalf.

The judges will focus on the student's ability to critically analyze a current issue and present a solution OR to conduct legal historical research using original sources.



Two prizes will be awarded: a first place prize of $1000 and a second place prize of $500.

The winning papers may also be offered publication in the Journal of Cultural Heritage Law.



The deadline for the 2011 Competition is 10 June 2011.



To learn more, and see past winners, visit the official website.

Law Students As Guinea Pigs

Scott DeVito, Florida Coastal School of Law, has published Experimenting on Law Students: Why Imposing no Ethical Constraints on Educational Research Using Law Students is a Bad Idea and Proposed Ethical Guidelines, at 40 Southwestern University Law Review 285 (2010). Here is the abstract.

Under current federal regulations, law school faculties are permitted to engage in human research using students as subjects with little or no ethical oversight. This freewheeling environment runs counter to well-established ethical guidelines for human research and to law professors’ heightened moral duties as members of the Bar and the legal academy. In addition, it exposes students, law faculty, and the legal academy to risks arising out of the use of unregulated human experimentation in law schools. This is inimical to morally good practice. To remedy this ethical problem, this article provides a set of guidelines for law professors who wish to ethically engage in empirical research using students as subjects.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Shakespeare's Place in the Law School Curriculum

Allen Mendenhall, Auburn University, West Virginia University, Temple University, and Furman University, has published Shakespeare's Place in Law-and-Literature in volume 3 of the Journal of Liberty and Society (2011). Here is the abstract.

Nearly every Anglo-American law school offers a course called Law-and-Literature. Nearly all of these courses assign one or more readings from Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Why study Shakespeare in law school? That is the question at the heart of these courses. Some law professors answer the question in terms of cultivating moral sensitivity, fine-tuning close-reading skills, or practicing interpretive strategies on literary rather than legal texts. Most of these professors insist on an illuminating nexus between two supposedly autonomous disciplines. The history of how Shakespeare became part of the legal canon is more complicated than these often defensive, syllabus-justifying declarations allow. This article examines the history of Shakespeare studies vis-à-vis legal education. It begins with early law-and-literature scholarship, which focused on Shakespeare’s history or biography – speculating as it did about whether Shakespeare was a lawyer or perchance received legal training – and concludes with recent law-and-literature scholarship treating Shakespeare as a source of insight for law students and lawyers alike. I submit that early law-and-literature scholarship on Shakespeare anticipated New Historicist theory and that more recent law-and-literature work, with its turn to presentism, is in lockstep with Shakespeare studies. In law-and-literature classrooms, Shakespeare is more fashionable like a hobby than scholarly like a profession; but law-and-literature scholarship on Shakespeare amounts to high-caliber work based on interdisciplinary research as well as deep engagement with legal and literary texts.



I wrap up this essay with a note about the direction of the university in general and of the law-and-literature movement in particular. I admit that my closing argument, as it were, is tendentious. It raises issues usually raised by confrontational academics and suggests remedies for what William M. Chace has called “the decline of the English Department” or what Harold Bloom has called “Groupthink” in “our obsolete academic institutions, whose long suicide since 1967 continues”. If Chace and Bloom are right about a decline in academic standards – evidence shows that they are at least right about a decline in numbers of English majors – then the fate of literary studies seems grim. Nevertheless, Chace and Bloom overlook the migration of literature professors into American law schools, a phenomenon yet to receive critical attention. Another aspect of this phenomenon is the migration of students from the humanities to professional schools. I personally have known many students who wished to go on to graduate school in the humanities but quite understandably viewed that route as impractical and went to law school instead. A positive result of this trend is that a substantial body of law students is open to the idea of law-and-literature and finds luminaries like George Anastaplo or Stanley Fish more interesting than other law professors. My final comments address the strange exodus of literary scholars into professional schools, which pay more money and arguably provide vaster audiences and readership, more generous funding opportunities, and reduced teaching loads. Perhaps more than other literary disciplines, save for cultural studies, Shakespeare studies has moved into the realm of interdisciplinarity, albeit without large contributions from scholars outside of literature departments. The law-and-literature field would have perished without the expertise of literature professors; likewise, Shakespeare studies, if it continues down the path of politics and cultural criticism, will perish without the expertise of economists, political scientists, and legal scholars, whose mostly non-Marxist perspectives, when pooled with the perspectives of literature professors, might fill out a space for interesting scholarship and redeem the interdisciplinary label. Information-sharing is especially crucial for literature scholars who, in order to examine the history of Shakespeare in American culture, have turned to practices and methods traditionally reserved for other disciplines.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

Putting Your Law School Training To Work

Along with Jim Belushi, Jerry O'Connell will star in the new legal drama, The Defenders, on CBS. Mr. O'Connell is learning whereof he speaks. In addition to having been a successful thespian for some time, he's also a law student at Southwestern Law School. Read more in this post from the ABA Journal. So, he can say, "I'm a law student, AND I play a lawyer on TV."

Teaching Storytelling In Law Schools

Nancy B. Rapoport, William S. Boyd School of Law (UNLV), has published "Where Have All the (Legal) Stories Gone?" at M/E Insights 7 (Fall 2009). Here is the abstract.

This essay examines whether law schools are doing a good job of teaching the art of storytelling to law students.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Storytelling Across the Curriculum

Carolyn Grose, William Mitchell College of Law, has published "Storytelling Across the Curriculum: From Margin to Center, from Clinic to the Classroom," as NYLS Clinical Research Institute Paper No. 09/10 #3. Here is the abstract.

Narrative theory and storytelling have emerged as threads in legal scholarship steadily over the past 20 years. Beginning in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the 'Legal Storytelling' movement sought to acknowledge and include the voices of 'outsiders' in legal scholarship and dialogue. More recently, the 'Applied Legal Storytelling' movement has emerged as scholars encourage each other to use storytelling to enhance their understanding of particular skills lawyers practice, and how to improve those skills. Scholars in the 'Law and Literature' movement explore the uses of literature to help lawyers stay connected to their imaginations, to their creativity, and to their humanity. Each of these scholarly movements has led to, or grown out of, professors’ experiments with using particular kinds of narrative theory and storytelling as part of their pedagogy.

In clinical teaching and scholarship, storytelling has always assumed pride of place for all of these reasons: to help students hear and incorporate the voices of 'outsiders' as they engage in and practice various lawyering skills, and to challenge them to think creatively and compassionately about their case strategy and practice. Lucie White’s 'Sunday Shoes' piece and Binny Miller’s 'Give Them Back Their Lives' are just two examples of narrative theory and storytelling practice that many clinical teachers use either explicitly or behind the scenes in their supervision or seminar teaching.

I believe narrative theory and storytelling can be used even more fundamentally, cutting across types of courses and types of lawyering. I teach skills, doctrinal and clinical courses, and I use narrative theory and storytelling in all three, all with the same goal: to help students recognize that as lawyers, they are not only hearers and tellers of stories, but also, and perhaps most important, constructors of stories. And that, simply put, is what I mean by narrative theory. The practice of storytelling is the craft of constructing stories, based on choices made with intention and reflection by the lawyer and her client. A pedagogy that relies on this theory and practice leads students to realize that The Law itself is a set of stories that have been adopted by decisionmakers, and that those stories have been constructed by none other than lawyers, just like themselves.

My particular pedagogy relies on an exploration of both narrative theory and the practice of storytelling. Most, if not all, of my classes - regardless of their official content - involve discussions about what stories are and what makes them 'good' (persuasive, compelling), both substantively (the 'what' of the story) and technically (the 'how' of the story). That’s the narrative theory. In addition, my students spend a lot of time constructing and deconstructing stories, focusing on their elements - both the 'what' and the 'how' - and on the choices that resulted in the story’s substance and structure. That’s the storytelling practice.

In this piece, I develop the idea of using storytelling across the curriculum to teach students this kind of critical thinking and reflection about their role as lawyers. In Part One, I describe the importance of storytelling and stories in the craft of lawyering. Part Two reviews briefly how clinical and non-clinical teachers use storytelling in their teaching. The bulk of the piece - Part Three - is a description and analysis of my own teaching and how it achieves the goal of developing students’ critical thinking skills and reflective practice. I provide concrete examples of my teaching, as well as critique and analysis based on narrative and lawyering theory scholarship.

The piece concludes with the suggestion that narrative theory and storytelling as a pedagogy used systematically across individual courses and the curriculum has the potential to transform a student’s experience of law school, resulting in her development as an empowered, reflective, and socially responsible member of the legal profession, regardless of the kind of law she practices or the kinds of clients she represents.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Student Law and Film Societies in the U.S.

For a listserv (the LAWPROF list) I put together some information on Law and Film Societies (not student orgs devoted to entertainment/sports/media law and career opportunities) at U.S. law schools. I'm reproducing it here.

These societies have as their sole or added mission to show and discuss movies. I’ve also included some initiatives undertaken at some schools to increase interest in and awareness of law and film. This list doesn’t include law and film courses (too many to list), festivals, or symposia although some respondents reported on those and they are extremely interesting. A lot of those are listed here as I hear about them.

The Columbia Law School Film Society. This club has a website at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/newmedia/film/film.htm but does not seem to have been updated in years, which suggests it is defunct. If someone at Columbia (or elsewhere) can verify that it is funct, please let me know. However, at least one other group has shown a movie (A Class Apart) recently: The American Constitution Society (http://www.acslaw.org/node/8445).

Harvard has a law and film series associated with the Program on Negotiation (see http://www.pon.harvard.edu/category/events/pon-film-series/?cid=72). Jennifer Schulz, now at the University of Manitoba, led the discussion on the film Chocolat (refreshments included chocolate).

Seton Hall University School of Law’s Marc Poirier reports that there was a school-wide group, active for years, that seems to have ceased this year, possibly because of overscheduling; students have such a wide variety of activities to choose from now. In addition the Lambda Legal Alliance (for which he is faculty advisor) decided this year to do a film series, with three each semester, accompanied by introductory talks and/or discussion, but he is unsure at this point whether it will take off. He also reports that some student groups are trying to organize film series.

John Radsan at the William Mitchell Law School also ran a “spy/crime” film series showing such films as “Goodfellas,” “In the Name of the Father,” and “Syriana.” Professor Radsan also moderated an event called A Strange Bond: The CIA and the Cinema which appeared on public television in Minnesota. Included on the panel were Mark Bowden (author of Black Hawk Down) and John Rizzo (the then Acting General Counsel of the CIA). To welcome new students to Wisconsin Law this summer, the school also sent them all a copy of the novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and later held an event in the auditorium to discuss the book and to play the movie on the school’s big screen.

Villanova Law School is starting up a student law and film organization this fall. Currently it is co-partnering with the Tax Law Society, which will provide refreshments for both groups. It will show its first film on September 29th.

The University of Chicago Law School Film Fest at http://www.law.uchicago.edu/studentorgs/filmfest. Law School Film Fest is listed as a student organization. The festival is currently held annually. According to an email from a former head of the organization:

We hold several movie screenings throughout the year. Each screening is hosted by a professor, and we usually allow him or her to pick the film. The movies are sometimes law-related and sometimes just movies the professor enjoys. We order food for the students and the professor gives a brief introduction to the film followed by a discussion of the film afterward. We typically schedule events for the late afternoon, around 4 o'clock.

Last year, we experimented with holding an actual "film festival" in addition to the periodic film screenings, and it was a great success. We lined up four professors to have screenings for four consecutive days and we planned to have a movie-themed wine mess (a weekly get-together for students and professors at our school) at the end of the week, although that fell through. We usually either rent the movies or check them out from the law school library.

I think there are probably more law and film clubs/groups/societies out there. If so, and I hear of them, I will send out an updated list later on, and post an updated list here.

Textbook Cover Images and Law

Sarah Beresford, University of Lancaster, has published Judging a Book by its Cover The Deployment (and) Unsettling of Familial Images on Family Law Textbook Covers , forthcoming in the Griffith Law Review. Here is the abstract.

An individual's legal identity can be constituted by a multitude of often-complex notions, and is not necessarily of their own construction. Legal discourse has a significant role to play in the construction of an individual's legal identity and can apply to gender identity as much as any other. This construction can occur not just through what is written or said, but also by and through the image(s) of law. The image presented to the viewer is prescriptive in both its nature and operation. This paper deliberately chooses a medium which is often omitted from analysis - the front cover of an undergraduate textbook - and offers a 'reading' of some of the images that are selected to adorn certain text family law textbooks. It argues that the cover can be read as visual rhetoric as powerful and as constitutive of legal identity as the written words within the book. If left unchallenged, law's cultural prejudices are often shielded from critical examination, leaving the operation of 'power' and 'truth' within discourse to continue uncritiqued and unquestioned.

Download the article from SSRN here.

The Art of Pun-ditry

Too good to overlook, and because I disagree with those who think puns are a lower form of intellectual life; I think good puns require esprit. Check out Joseph Tartakovsky's Pun For the Ages, in the New York Times (March 28, 2009). Mr. Tartakovsky is a law student. Of course.