Professor Catherine Carpenter is again chairing the survey committee.

In addition, the book contains what we’ve called “Reading the Law Critically” questions placed just before the relevant case, Restatement, or statutory material, highlighting for students the sorts of issues and concerns they should be thinking about as they read. Sometimes these questions address a cluster of related cases, to encourage students to view the cases as a unit and to synthesize them. We’ve found that students are better prepared for class because they have some guidance to help them read more effectively and analyze what they read. (This comports with “critical reading” theory and practice.) In effect, the book gives them a chance to think before class about the kinds of questions that their teachers have been thinking about for years. That makes class discussion better and helps students learn more effectively.

We’ve also included lots of problems (some multiple choice, some essay, some drafting) to help students review concepts and engage in active learning. We selected cases we think teach well, often with particularly evocative facts and/or thorough and helpful legal analyses.

In addition to the printed textbook, students will be able to use the textbook online, where they can follow live links to all of the cited cases, codified provisions, noted websites, and other linked material. We’re not sure yet how much students will make use of these live links, but we’ve found them very useful ourselves in preparation, making it easier to check on related cases and other materials. We’ll be able to add additional links and commentary to the online version (e.g., adding connections to new cases or interesting “contracts in the news” items) to keep the text dynamic. (For teachers only, there will also be an online teachers manual.) We hope others will find this new textbook to be as good for teaching as we have!

One goal is to define in some meaningful way what “legal education” means. That is, the ABA is trying to describe the core edcuational objectives that every law school should achieve for every student. This is not an easy task, and there is room for legitimate disagreement about how to do this.

The second goal is to require each law school to articulate the educational objectives of its curriculum and each course in it. The fact that very few law schools can do that today would come as a shock to most members of the public.

I hope the ABA is able to achieve both goals. I cannot think of any harm that might come from forcing law teachers to think carefully about their collective and personal roles in preparing students for the legal profession. It is long overdue.

For the upper division curriculum, two efforts are particularly noteworthy. First, UWLS is in the early stages of using on-line portfolios in an innovative effort to combine student development of individual career plans through our career planning office with educational efforts by faculty around developing a professional identity.

Second, we are continuing our efforts to expand our already extensive experiential opportunities by partnering with the Washington Access to Justice and the Law Schools Committee. The Laurel Rubin Rural Externship Advocacy Project (REAP), the first collaborative effort between the committee, three civil legal services providers, and the three Washington Law Schools was by all accounts a roaring success. A new project involving Heritage University, a school serving Native American and Hispanic students in central Washington is underway, and other projects are in the discussion stage.