Category Archives: Law School

Another Law School Moves Into the Neighborhood

FIU Law started up just a few years ago (2002), and now Ave Maria School of Law Announces Relocation to Southwest Florida. It's planning to move in 2009 from Ann Arbor, MI to the startup town of Ave Maria, Florida, a site located about 30 miles east of Naples, Florida. (Local news coverage.) Naples is about two and a half hours from Miami — unless you get caught behind a slow car on Coral Way, aka US 41 (or there is an accident on Alligator Alley, aka I-75) in which case it's more like four hours.

Is there any other region in the country that has seen such explosive growth in law schools recently?

Of course, Ave Maria is not your average law school…and it's bankrolled by an unusual donor.

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What Makes a Good 1L Law Exam Answer

Orin Kerr has done 1Ls around the country a great service by writing a very clear guide to distinguishing between Bad Answers, Good Answers, and Terrific Answers to 1L exams.

While the principles also have considerable applicability to more advanced courses, I think that we professors legitimately expect all this and more from 2Ls and 3Ls, including more complex issue-spotting, coping with more complex and contradictory rules, and taking account of various sorts of policy considerations (when relevant), to name just three. Actually, might we hope for some of those in the terrific 1L answers too? I should admit here that it's been far too long since I actually taught first years, and for some to-me-incomprehensible reason the day students (but, it must be said, not the students in our since-dismantled night program) said I was too scary….

Update: on the subject of exams, Paul Ohm has a thoughtful post about achieving fair grading in a common grading situation. (Personally, I grade each question separately and average them, but that's not without issues.)

Posted in Law School | 3 Comments

Tell the Prof to Talk Faster

Prof. Ann Bartow seeks advice for some students who have what I hope is an unusual problem.

I once asked one of my students if lots of people used their laptops to goof off. No, he said, you talk so fast there's no time for that.

Posted in Law School | 16 Comments

Statement by Law Deans on Stimson Remarks

The following statement, dated January 14, 2007, has been signed by more than 57 U.S. law deans, with more joining by the hour:

We, the law deans undersigned below are appalled by the January 11, 2007 statement of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles “Cully” Stimson, criticizing law firms for their pro bono representation of suspected terrorist detainees and encouraging corporate executives to force these law firms to choose between their pro bono and paying clients.

As law deans and professors, we find Secretary Stimson’s statement to be contrary to basic tenets of American law. We teach our students that lawyers have a professional obligation to ensure that even the most despised and unpopular individuals and groups receive zealous and effective legal representation. Our American legal tradition has honored lawyers who, despite their personal beliefs, have zealously represented mass murderers, suspected terrorists, and Nazi marchers. At this moment in time, when our courts have endorsed the right of the Guantanamo detainees to be heard in courts of law, it is critical that qualified lawyers provide effective representation to these individuals. By doing so, these lawyers protect not only the rights of the detainees, but also our shared constitutional principles. In a free and democratic society, government officials should not encourage intimidation of or retaliation against lawyers who are fulfilling their pro bono obligations.

We urge the Administration promptly and unequivocally to repudiate Secretary Stimson’s remarks.

Sincerely,

[first 57 signatories below]

Continue reading

Posted in Law School | 5 Comments

Dealing With E-Mailed Research Queries from Strangers

Almost every day I get an email from a student somewhere that reads something vaguely like this one I received today:

Dear Mr. Froomkin.

As a graduate student in The [Redacted] Institute for the History and Philosophy of Sciences and Ideas at [Redacted] university, [OECD country] I am doing a reaearch on building an identity and self representation in the blogs. I read some of your papers refering to Habermas, which might be of use to me. Would you be able to send me some more papers [or adresses of these] talking about Habermas attitude towards the discourse used by individuals while trying to represent themselves, wheather in a true or false way, using blogs or psychological forums on the internet.

Any other citations dealing with Habermas, Discourse and the cyber would be of help.

Thanks

Perhaps because I’m an intellectual dilettante, the subject matter of the queries vary widely. Other variations on the theme involve questions from students in far less developed countries (who may not have access to as many materials), and questions from high school students — or even grade school — students doing a class project who want to know my views on some loaded question, like whether all speech or only harmful speech should be regulated online. And then (especially in December, January, April and May) there are the US college and UK law students who have an urgent question about some point of cyberlaw which they really need answered before 3pm today — presumably because it’s a question on their open book exam.

I try to respond to the grade school and high school queries whenever I can. And I try to be helpful with the third-world correspondents because I want to be sensitive to the possibility that they don’t have a good library to hand, and that their internet access may be slow or limited. And if I happen to have written a paper on the subject of the query, I send the URL — although I wonder why anyone who could find my email address couldn’t also find my papers. And if the student has an interesting topic, once in a while I offer to read the paper when it is in draft.

But for the bulk of the more advanced students in the developed world who ought to be doing their own research — well, there the struggle is to be polite. Or at least not too rude.

Today was not a good day: I’m afraid I responded as follows,

I haven’t written other papers in this area.

You may find the following links helpful:

http://www.google.com

http://scholar.google.com/

But I’m torn: on the one hand, scholarly inquiry is a good thing. And I might have known the answer off the top of my head, in which case I would have given it. And just because today’s questioner comes after dozens, maybe hundreds, of others, doesn’t mean he really deserves my bad temper. On the other hand, I’m not his research assistant, and life is short.

But of course, I already feel guilty: Was I too curt? I’d be very curious to hear from other people on both sides of these sorts of exchanges what the right way to deal with them is.

Posted in Law School | 7 Comments

Grading Season Again

It’s the dreaded grading season again. Grading being one of the two horrible parts of this job (the other is administration).

Dan Solove explains how it is done in his neck of the woods. Tempting, tempting.

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