First Year Practicum Course

My colleague Jenny Moore permitted me to post this course description for Practicum.  She, Alfred Mathewson and  Sergio Pareja are each teaching one section of First Year Contracts.    The Practicum is a one credit course connected to  Contracts.  Here is her description: 

University of New Mexico School of Law Practicum course (Fall 2008)   
 
OVERVIEW:  The goal of the first year [...]

Best Practices and Math for Lawyers

 I have been getting some feedback from members of the bar that recent graduates are not as savvy about math and accounting as they have been in the past.  I was assured it was not just UNM graduates, but it made me think about the recommendation in Best Practices to prepare students for the practice [...]

Bar Passage and Best Practices for Legal Education

My colleague Alfred Mathewson always makes me think.  He came back from the American Bar Association  Bar Exam Passage conference last week.  He had attended the Crossroads conference at the University of Washington too.  He had some interesting observations.  He said there were several schools that were creating “tracks” for students in the lower end [...]

Almost No Correlation between Scholarship Production and Teaching Effectiveness

I hesitated to post this now because I really want to see some creative feedback on the previous post from Carolyn Grose! Please DO RESPOND to Carolyn’s excellent post.   
However, this was simply TOO good to wait to share - here’s some news from the TAXLAW BLOG that confirms what Best Practices has been “preaching”! (more…)

Queries from the Best Practices Implementation Committee

We had a fantastic time in Seattle a few weeks ago, and I for one felt reinvigorated and excited about this great project we’re all involved in — you know, the one about totally reforming legal education? What we didn’t get either from the Best Practices Meets Reality workshop (see my earlier post on September [...]

Passion, Context, Redux (Part 1)

A fun aspect of getting a few gray hairs: we’re around long enough to see our ideas come to fruition.   Some years ago I wrote about the important role of experiential learning in providing context for law students.  (more…)

More Conversations on Professional Identity

For a number of years I’ve taught a course on Access to Justice that satisfied the externship classroom component requirement. Because we are restructuring our externship program, when I taught the class spring quarter the students who were taking the class only to satisfy the requirement were moved to our new externship course.
Not [...]

Law Professors and Context-Based Education: The Clinic and the Classroom

New Mexico’s clinical model is quite unusual as far as clinic models go.  All of us who teach in the clinic also teach in the classroom and many faculty members rotate through the clinic.  While the model has its challenges, we think the benefits far outweigh those challenges.  One huge benefit is that faculty members are [...]

Liveblogging the SEALS Conference 2008: Revamping the Law School Curriculum

Check it out at:
http://lsi.typepad.com/lsi/2008/07/liveblogging-th.html

Two American Keynotes at International Clinical Conference in Cork, Ireland

Jay Pottenger from Yale and Beryl Blaustone from CUNY gave two of the keynote presentations at the recent International Clinical Conference in Ireland.   The theme of the conference was ”Lighting the Fire:  The Many Roles of Clinical Legal Education”. (Wonderful conference by the way, kudos to the organizers!).  
An exciting thing about the American presentations was the leadership,,, from MacCrate, to Best [...]

Peer Assessment

I hate to be one of the first to mention it, but it feels like summer is waning. As much as I love what I do during the academic year, summer break never seems long enough to catch up on what gets back-burnered by the demands of teaching – in my case, teaching students within [...]

A Conversation Circle with Students on Professional Identity

On returning from a women’s retreat in April where we spent some time trying to identify what we long for, I happened to open Parker Palmer’s book, A Hidden Wholeness, looking for a wonderful quote analogizing the soul to a wild animal.  (”If we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last [...]

Register for the UW’s Legal Education at the Crossroads Conference

Sorry it’s taken me longer to post this than expected:  The good news:  it was my left shoulder and I’m a right-ie.  The bad news: I’m clumsy, it was a cement floor and my shoulder’s broken.  And all because my internet connection wouldn’t work and I was trying to figure out what was wrong.
You can [...]

Using Laptops in the Classroom as a Teaching Tool

Since I shared the first couple of emails in the current debate at UNM about laptops, I asked Alfred Mathewson if I could share his response.  He is working on using the lap tops as a teaching tool! 
“I am probably moving in the opposite direction of most of my colleagues here and in most law [...]

More on Laptops in the Classroom

My colleague Rob Schwartz is addressing the laptop issue in New Mexico this summer while teaching in the Pre Law Summer Program for Indian Students (PLSI) run by the Indian Law Center.  Here is his response  to Sergio Pareja’s email (described in my last  post).  (more…)