About a year and a half ago, Penn State Dean Danielle Conway invited me to be a contributing author to Incorporating Antiracist Principles in Alumni Affairs and Advancement (Volume 8) of the book series created by the Antiracist Development Institute (ADI). The book series is entitled “Building an Antiracist Law School, Legal Academy, and Legal Profession,” and it will consist of eight volumes and be published by the University of California Press.

“More than 100 colleagues from the legal academy, legal profession, and adjacent organizations are contributing to the book series as chapter contributors, editors, content reviewers, and workshop facilitators, representing 55 institutions across the country.” https://dickinsonlaw.psu.edu/adi-book-series.  

I agreed to write the chapter on Antiracist Metrics for Alumni Engagement, Fundraising, and Communications. In so doing, I started by trying to make myself more knowledgeable about the existing engagement and fundraising metrics. That effort led me both to author the blog post below and the two that preceded it, which I have permission to publish here from the ADI, and to author the chapter, which is now proceeding towards a second draft.

I thank Dean Conway for the opportunity to grow my knowledge of antiracism, alumni relations, fundraising, and communications and think through the intersections among the four from a design thinking lens.

Because the possibilities are so much more extensive than I had imagined, I have a lot to share. In fact, I divided the information into three posts: (1) Introduction to Advancement Metrics and Fundraising Metrics,  (2) Alumni Engagement Metrics, and (3) Communications Metrics. This final post focuses on Communications Metrics.

I hope the three posts might be helpful to deans in goal-setting and evaluation for departments whose functions are not typically areas of expertise for law school deans.

Communications Metrics

Email Open Rate, Click-Through Rate, and Email Opt-Out Rate. As part of an overall alumni engagement measure, a counting metric is possible and easily implemented: the total number of alumni who open any alumni email in a given year.  In fact, mass email tools, such as Constant Contact and Salesforce, automatically count the number of recipients who open each email message. These totals can be compared on an email-by-email basis or year-over-year basis.

More refined is the email open rate, which is calculated by dividing the number of alumni who opened the email(s) divided by the number who received the message(s) multiplied by 100 to get to a percentage. Open rates also are compared on an annual basis to gather data about alumni engagement, and they also can be calculated for various types of alumni messages to ascertain alumni preferences. 

The click-through rate is similar to the email open rate but measures a different phenomenon. It is common in electronic alumni newsletters to include links from the email to news stories about alumni on the institution’s website and to various parts of the institution’s website that might be of interest to alumni. This metric measures the percentage of alumni who receive the email and click on one of those links; it is calculated by dividing the number of alumni who click through by the number of alumni who receive the email multiplied by 100 to get to a percentage. Click-through rates can be disaggregated for emails and even for particular links within an email, allowing, over time, for patterns to emerge that can influence future choices.

All email tools include a mechanism for recipients to communicate, electronically, a desire to discontinue receipt of emails. In addition, some alumni communicate such desires by separate emails or phone calls. The email opt-out rate is the percentage of alumni who receive the email(s) and choose to opt out. It is the number of people who choose to opt out divided by the number who receive the email multiplied by 100 to get to a percentage.

Landing Page Conversion Rate and Website Page Views. In some instances, an institution has strategic reasons for wanting to get alumni to click through from an email or from a social media post to a particular landing page on the institution’s website. Most commonly, that page would be the institution’s online giving page. In other instances, however, the institution might want alumni to read a full statement from the dean regarding an issue of institutional significance (e.g., a law school name change or a statement about a community issue). The landing page conversion rate is the same as the click-through rate discussed above regarding emails, but it also focuses on pages to which the alumni go rather than pages from which they go and includes a similar measure for social media posts. It is calculated by dividing the number of people who went to the particular page between the time of the communication and for a reasonable time thereafter divided by the number of people who received the email and/or were followers or subscribers to the social media posts that included the link multiplied by 100 to get to a percentage. Of course, while the landing page conversion rate is intended to measure the effectiveness of an email or social media posting(s), the numerator is imprecise because the number of people who visit a particular page may and often does include some who visited the page for reasons unrelated to the posting.

Website pageviews can be valuable as a point of comparison to prior years’ results. Most of the time, institutions use this measure to evaluate whether a new digital marketing campaign for prospective students is succeeding in getting them interested enough in attending the institution to visit the institution’s website. However, the effectiveness of advancement communications also can be evaluated in this way. Any page or set of pages on a website can track visits and allow for comparisons. Thus, an institution can track visits to its alumni news page or giving page and compare results across months and years.

Class Notes Submission Rate. For many years now, alumni have been submitting their accomplishments and news, and law schools have been sharing them with the alumni community, typically organized by the year they graduated. Submitting notes has become much easier as law schools have developed online notes submission tools. Consequently, it is much more possible for institutions to track and measure meaningful data; in other words, engaged alumni want to report their career and life milestones to their classmates and law school. Thus, the percentage of alumni who submit class notes is a meaningful metric, calculated by dividing the number of alumni who submit class notes by the total number of alumni and then multiplying by 100 to get to a percentage. This metric only becomes meaningful in comparison to prior years’ outcomes.  

Production Results. For each of the social media tools, an institution can report a counting metric, the production, and sharing of new social media posts, stories, and videos for each of the social media tools used by the law school. (Of course, an aggregation of all such postings is also possible.) This data can be compared month-over-month and year-over-year. In addition, production data for competitor institutions is available for Twitter (X), Facebook, and Instagram, allowing for evaluation of outcomes.   

Amplification Rate. The amplification rate is a measure of the effectiveness of social media posts, allowing an institution to assess the effectiveness of those posts by looking at the most significant way in which subscribers respond to social media posts by resharing/reposting them. Amplification refers to the idea that a social media post succeeds if it reaches the networks, family, friends, colleagues, links, etc. of the users already in the institution’s network. It is typically calculated on a per post basis to allow evaluation of and comparisons of types of posts. The formula is the number of amplifications (reshares, reposts) divided by the number of followers of that social media account multiplied by 100 to get to a percentage. An institution also can calculate an annual amplification rate across a time frame (e.g., a month or a year) and compare that rate to peer institution rates and to historical rates. The formula is similar to the post-based formula; it is calculated by dividing the number of amplifications of all posts by the number of followers on the relevant forms of social media and then, of course, multiplying by 100 to get to a percentage. 

Applause Rate. Finally, the applause rate measures the degree to which alumni respond positively to a social media post by liking it, loving it, commenting on it positively, or otherwise communicating approval. It is typically calculated on a per post basis to allow evaluation of and comparisons of types of posts. The formula is the number of applause instances (likes, loves, positive comments) divided by the number of followers of that social media account and then multiplied by 100 to get to a percentage. An institution also can calculate an annual applause rate across a time frame (e.g., a month or a year) and compare that rate to peer institution rates and to historical rates. The formula is similar to the post-based formula; it is calculated by dividing the number of applause instances of all posts by the number of followers on the relevant forms of social media and then, of course, multiplying by 100 to get to a percentage.

As was true for the production rate, communication data regarding engagement (the aggregation of amplification and applause) for competitor institutions is available for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, allowing for the evaluation of outcomes.

Alumni Engagement Metrics

About a year and a half ago, Penn State Dean Danielle Conway invited me to be a contributing author to Incorporating Antiracist Principles in Alumni Affairs and Advancement (Volume 8) of the book series created by the Antiracist Development Institute (ADI). The book series is entitled “Building an Antiracist Law School, Legal Academy, and Legal Profession,” will consist of eight volumes and will be published by the University of California Press.

“More than 100 colleagues from the legal academy, legal profession, and adjacent organizations are contributing to the book series as chapter contributors, editors, content reviewers, and workshop facilitators, representing 55 institutions across the country.” https://dickinsonlaw.psu.edu/adi-book-series.  

I agreed to write the chapter on “Antiracist Metrics for Alumni Engagement, Fundraising, and Communications.” In so doing, I started by trying to make myself more knowledgeable about the existing engagement and fundraising metrics. That effort led me both to author this series of three blog posts, which I have permission to publish here from the ADI and to author the chapter.

I thank Dean Conway for the opportunity to grow my knowledge of antiracism, alumni relations, fundraising, and communications and think through the intersections among the four from a design thinking lens.

Because the possibilities are so much more extensive than I had imagined, this posting is, by far, my longest blog post ever. In fact, I have divided the information into three posts: (1) Introduction to Advancement Metrics and Fundraising Metrics, (2) Alumni Engagement Metrics, and (3) Communications Metrics. This post focuses on Alumni Engagement Metrics. A previous post focused on Fundraising Metrics.

Alumni Engagement Metrics

Alumni engagement, in significant part, aligns with fundraising in obvious and important ways. Most alumni do not want a purely transactional relationship with their law schools whereby they give money and, perhaps, have something named for them. In most, but certainly not all instances, the pathway to a significant gift starts years before with a panel presentation, alumni board work, a hire of a recent graduate, or a student mentoring interaction. In addition, engagement is an excellent predictor of future donations and therefore influences which alumni gift officers approach, qualify, cultivate, and, ultimately, solicit. 

Moreover, changes to law school accreditation and bar admissions standards to require more practical training and professional identity development instruction have required law schools to align themselves more closely with their local and state bar associations and more intentionally involve alumni in their educational programs.

Board Service. This counting metric, obviously, is capped by the number of board seats a law school has. Many law schools operate a single alumni board, perhaps with geographic region-based sub-groups linked to the alumni board. It is also common to have a board with a membership group that includes significant donors and particularly accomplished alumni (e.e., judges). These boards, typically designated the “Dean’s Cabinet” or “Dean’s Advisory Counsel,” often receive special benefits (such as private lectures from faculty and alumni experts) and are asked for strategic advice.  Some law schools have created additional advisory boards that align with institutional priorities represented by the law schools’ centers (e.g., an advisory board for a law school’s center for advocacy).

Experiential Engagement (e.g., simulation courses, field placements, and internships). The ABA’s recently enacted experiential education accreditation standard, 303(a)(3),[1]has heightened the need for alumni to be engaged in helping deliver law school curricula. These engagement opportunities include teaching simulation courses, defined as classroom courses, such as  a course in Negotiations, where students develop their skills by engaging in mock lawyering experiences. [2] Even more significant and critical are alumni who serve as field placement (A/K/A externship) supervisors; field placements are real-world lawyering experiences, such as working for a judge researching and writing memos and drafting opinions and decisions on motions, in which the student engages in meaningful lawyering activities under close supervision of a site supervisor. [3] This form of engagement allows the law school to offer its students a wide variety of experiential learning opportunities and, in many instances, to align those opportunities with students’ career goals.

Other Volunteering.  The other service metric is another counting metric that captures engagement in the form of alumni who serve as adjunct faculty [4] or competition team coaches, those who serve as mentors to current students, and those who speak on panels. It is not clear that many institutions track these data, but, as detailed below, tracking a wider variety of data is critical to an antiracist strategy of engaging a broader segment of law schools’ alumni populations. [5] 

Moreover, even among law schools that track these data, it is not clear that institutions have systematic mechanisms for capturing volunteer contributions of time to support student organizations by advising student leaders, attending events, or speaking on student organization panels.

The foregoing alumni engagement metrics can be readily combined into a single metric, Volunteering, as suggested by a 2018 information report from CASE (Council for Advancement and Support of Education). [6] CASE is generally considered to be an authoritative source. 

Philanthropic Engagement.  This metric is addressed above under fundraising and is measured by calculating the number of alumni who give and then calculating the percentage of the total alumni pool who are donors.

Alumni Events Sponsored. One of the best ways to connect with alumni is via alumni events. Many alumni are willing to host these events in their offices and cover the cost of food and beverages. This is, of course, a type of philanthropic engagement, but separating it out encourages such generosity, and it allows alumni who might not yet be willing to make a direct contribution to a law school to be engaged in a way that also benefits the alumni.

Events Attended.  CASE uses the term “Experiential” to refer to this metric, which includes alumni attendance at reunions, homecomings, speaker events (in person or online), and other events.  It can simply be a counting metric that helps institutions understand all the ways in which alumni are engaged with the law school.

It is also possible to calculate an event evaluation metric, the Percentage of Attending Alumni.  The percentage of attending alumni is calculated by diving the number of alumni attendees at an event by the number of possible alumni attendees (i.e., those in class(es) having the reunion or those in the geographic region) and then multiplying the result by 100 to get to a percentage.

All of the above combined.  With attention to avoiding double counting alumni who engage in multiple ways, this metric allows the law school to add together each of the above counting metrics and identify the total number of alumni who are engaged in any way with the law school. That total number of engaged alumni can then be divided by the total number of alumni to calculate the percentage of engaged alumni. 

The addition of email and social media as tools for connecting with alumni is forcing institutions to reconsider their definitions of alumni engagement. Is opening an email from the law school a form of engagement? Is reposting a LinkedIn posting about a law school moot court success a form of alumni engagement? Is liking such a post also engagement? How about just viewing the post?  After all, LinkedIn tracks “impressions” and the younger generation alumni are digital natives whose interactions include substantial social media communications. The metrics are segregated from the engagement in the discussion below but could be aggregated with the engagement numbers described above. In fact, the CASE information report takes the position that these metrics should be counted in engagement numbers. [7]

[1] Standard 303. CURRICULUM

(a) A law school shall offer a curriculum that requires each student to satisfactorily complete at least the following . . .

(3) one or more experiential course(s) totaling at least six credit hours. An experiential course must be a simulation course, a law clinic, or a field placement, as defined in Standard 304.

[2] ABA Standard 304(b): “A simulation course provides substantial experience not involving an actual client, that is reasonably similar to the experience of a lawyer advising or representing a client or engaging in other lawyering tasks in a set of facts and circumstances devised or adopted by a faculty member.”

[3] ABA Standard 304(d): “A field placement course provides substantial lawyering experience that (1) is reasonably similar to the experience of a lawyer advising or representing a client or engaging in other lawyering tasks in a setting outside a law clinic under the supervision of a licensed attorney . . . .”

[4] There is nuance in treating compensated adjunct faculty as engagement. On the one hand, the alumni adjunct faculty are paid so adjunct teaching is not strictly volunteering.  On the other hand, nearly all, if not all, adjunct faculty are paid much less than their regular hourly rates; in fact, the author of this chapter has seen calculations at as little as $20/hour. If income were a determining factor, adjunct teaching would not be the chosen mechanism to do so.

[5] There is an argument to be made that hiring new graduates is a form of engagement given the significance of job placement data in U.S. News rankings.

[6] CASE, Alumni Engagement Metrics 6 (2018), https://www.case.org/system/files/media/inline/CASEWhitePaper_AlumniMetrics%20AUG18.pdf.

[7] Id.

About a year and a half ago, Penn State Dean Danielle Conway invited me to be a contributing author to Incorporating Antiracist Principles in Alumni Affairs and Advancement (Volume 8) of the book series created by the Antiracist Development Institute (ADI). The book series is entitled “Building an Antiracist Law School, Legal Academy, and Legal Profession,” will consist of eight volumes, and will be published by the University of California Press.

“More than 100 colleagues from the legal academy, legal profession, and adjacent organizations are contributing to the book series as chapter contributors, editors, content reviewers, and workshop facilitators, representing 55 institutions across the country.” https://dickinsonlaw.psu.edu/adi-book-series.  

I agreed to write the chapter on Antiracist Metrics for Alumni Engagement, Fundraising, and Communications. In so doing, I started by trying to make myself more knowledgeable about the existing engagement and fundraising metrics. That effort led me both to author the blog post below and the two that will follow over the next few weeks, which I have permission to publish here from the ADI, and to author the chapter, which is now proceeding towards a second draft.

I thank Dean Conway for the opportunity to grow my knowledge of antiracism, alumni relations, fundraising, and communications and think through the intersections among the four from a design thinking lens.

Because the possibilities are so much more extensive than I had imagined, this posting is, by far, my longest blog post ever. In fact, I have divided the information into three posts: (1) Introduction to Advancement Metrics and Fundraising Metrics, (2) Alumni Engagement Metrics, and (3) Communications Metrics. This post provides an Introduction to Advancement Metrics and then identifies the full range of Fundraising Metrics.

Introduction to Advancement Metrics

Few deans come to the job with extensive expertise regarding advancement, and almost none know more than the most rudimentary metrics, e.g., dollars raised, proposals made, and percentage of alumni donors. Candidly, when I started as a dean, those were the three metrics I knew, and I could not even explain the intended meanings of common terms in the field, such as advancement, development, engagement, and fundraising.  This blog post and the two that will follow are intended to serve as a resource for law school deans and their advancement offices.


Advancement office metrics align with the three categories common to law school advancement office work: fundraising, alumni relations, and communications. The inclusion of these three topics in this blog post is not meant to suggest that all law schools house all three functions in a single advancement department.[1] 

Fundraising metrics

Fundraising metrics are, to a degree, in a state of flux. Higher education advancement offices are moving from focusing exclusively on what might be called counting metrics, e.g., dollars raised, percentage of alumni who give, prospective donor visits, etc., to more nuanced measures such as return on investment, percentage of prospects contacted, number of active prospects in portfolio, and percentage of what are called “unique visits.[2]” There is no standardization in metrics used in higher education so the metrics identified and explained below are intended to be illustrative and neither exhaustive nor prescriptive.

Metrics for law schools typically are set by a university advancement vice president or president and may be set at a unit level (e.g., a university goal and a law school goal) or at a gift officer level or both.

Commitment Goals. This metric measures the sum of immediate gifts, pledges via pledge agreements, and bequests, i.e., the institution being named in a will or trust as a recipient of either a percentage of the estate or trust or a specified amount. The specific target factors in needs of the institution, capacity of the donor pool, recent results, and pool development, i.e., where in the fundraising process prospects are.

Cash Received Goals. This metric captures both immediate gifts, transfers of funds by a donor made at the time of committing to the gift, and performance of pledges, transfers of funds by a donor in performance of a previously-made pledge. Targets are set using the same factors as commitments, except that, as one might expect, pledges that are still being performed are a critical factor in setting these goals.

Major Gift Goals.  Major gifts are the largest donations an institution receives and are set at a specific giving level by the institutions. Higher education institutions vary greatly in how they define major gifts, but, for many law schools, that number is either $25,000 or $50,000 but may be as high as $100,000 or more.  Major gifts are so important because 80%-90% of funds donated come from 10-15% of the donors; consequently, major gift goals are set in relation to the institution’s overall commitment goal and, of course, donor pool.

Annual Giving Goals.  Annual giving refers to the results of organized efforts (often letters or emails) designed to secure gifts on a yearly basis to support, at least in part, the general operations of an institution. Annual giving also captures gifts made in response to a “Day of Giving” or the like. Annual giving is the other side of the coin from major gifts and refers to the gifts made by the donors who make smaller donations either to specific existing funds (e.g., a scholarship) or to an undesignated fund. Goals typically assume at least a small increase from the prior year’s results.

Percentage of Alumni Giving Goals.  The alumni giving percentage is calculated by dividing the number of alumni who give by the total number of living alumni. This metric often has prominence in advancement office reporting, in large part because U.S. News rankings of colleges and universities include this metric as a factor in those rankings.[3] (The U.S. News ranking of law schools does not include this metric as a factor.[4])

According to U.S. News, for colleges and universities, “[T]he average alumni giving rate during the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 academic years was 8%,” but the 10 colleges with the highest rates saw “alumni giving rates of 44% and higher.”[5] Because U.S. News does not weigh alumni giving in law school rankings, comparative data is not readily available. What is clear is the percentage of alumni giving continues to be a fairly universal metric for evaluating fundraising departments, and goals are typically set to increase or at least maintain the previous year’s percentage.

Goals for Visits, Donors Qualified, Yield Rate, Conversion Rate, and Unique Visits.  In most institutions, gift officers are assigned a portfolio of prospects that includes alumni who may have a wide range of giving histories, including some who have never given to the law school and some who are regular donors. It is generally understood that donors typically do not make gifts they regard as financially significant absent some personal interaction, a visit, with a gift officer and/or the dean. Consequently, visits to a significant number of donors in the gift officer’s portfolio are an important predeterminate of successful fundraising, and many institutions have made visits a metric.  If, during a visit, a gift officer determines that an inactive donor has the capacity and propensity to give such that further efforts by the institution are warranted, the officer qualifies the donor. 

Some institutions have moved away from visit goals because of the risk of an unintended consequence—a gift officer could make a large number of visits that are speedy and mostly meaningless to manipulate the officer’s results. If an institution does set visitation goals, those goals tend to be between 121 and 150 visits per year. 

Qualification goals are set based on historical institutional data as a percentage of expected visits.  Ideally, according to studies of successful fundraisers, only about 15% of a gift officer’s portfolio should include potential donors who need to be qualified.[6]

Yield rate is a measure of the success of donor interactions, i.e., the percentage of money asked for that is realized in gift commitments.  In other words, if a gift officer were to make asks totaling $10,00,000 over the course of a year, and the gift officer were to secure $5,000,000 in commitments, the officer’s yield rate would be 50%. Depending on the quality of information available and of prior qualification work, a yield rate of 50-75% is considered good.

The closely rated conversion rate measures success in terms of the percentage of solicited donors who give, in other words, the number of solicited donors who give divided by the number of solicited donors. This metric carries with it a significant risk of manipulation; a gift officer could successfully convince a higher percentage of donors to give by asking for only small gifts. Nevertheless, some institutions set conversion rate goals, figuring that working with gift officers to set the amount of asks can minimize the risk of manipulation.

Unique visits are calculated by dividing the number of prospects visited by the number of visits made. Implicit here is that, in any given year, some donors will be visited multiple times, especially as the law school gets close to closing a gift. The ideal and therefore the typical target goal, based on studies of what works to grow fundraising success, seems to be about 50% unique visits.[7]

Major Gift Solicitations Made.  This metric reflects the essential role major donors play in commitment outcomes and seeks to increase the likelihood that a gift officer focuses on securing major gifts. The university sets a target number of major gift asks. While there is some possibility that a gift officer might try to manipulate the data by making major gift asks of a large number of donors, if the university also uses yield rate, the risk is minimal. Targets depend on the number of potential major gift donors in the gift officer’s portfolio and those potential donors’ readiness for a major gift ask.

All Gift Solicitations Made.  This simple counting metric measures the total number of solicitations made by a gift officer. Goals are set based on standards at the institution and the size and nature of the officer’s portfolio. Solicitation goals between 25-30 per year are consistent with the number of annual solicitations of the most successful fundraisers.[8]

New Donors and Donor Retention Rate.  These two metrics focus on numbers of donors rather than quality of donations. New donors measures first-time donors, and donor retention rate measures the percentage of the donor pool that continues to give gifts or continues to perform pre-existing pledges. Together, new donors and retained donors equal total donors. As gift officer performance metrics, these metrics conflict with a general trend in philanthropy— total giving has increased on a per donor basis and overall, but the total number of donors has decreased.  Thus, setting goals that contemplate increases in these metrics may not be rational.

Event Conversion Rate. Institutions often seek to assess the degree to which events are an effective way to inspire alumni giving. This metric allows the institution to quantify that assessment. It is the percentage of alumni who attend an event (a reunion or a regional alumni event) who later chose to donate and therefore is calculated as the number of attendees who donated after attending the event divided by the total number of attendees and then multiplying by 100 to get a percentage.

Return on Investment and Cost Per Dollars Raised.  As you will see, these two metrics examine the success of a fundraising enterprise from opposite lenses. Return on investment is calculated by dividing revenue by expenses resulting in a measure of the fundraising benefits of each dollar spent. If the result is greater than 1, it means the fundraising enterprise made a profit; if the result is less than 1, the enterprise lost money.  Cost per dollars raised is calculated by reversing the numerator and denominator, i.e., dividing expenses by the revenue. If expenses exceed the revenue produced, the result will be a number greater than 1, indicating that the enterprise spent more money than it brought in. If the result is less than 1, the enterprise earned more revenue than it spent and therefore was profitable.  It would be unusual (and redundant) for an enterprise to use both metrics.

Campaign Metrics. The term “campaign” refers to fundraising that occurs over specified time frame and focuses on a specific, predetermined goal. Such goals may be a dollar target not tied to a particular project or initiative, e.g., in five years, raise $10,000,000 for the law school, or a dollar target tied to a specific strategic initiative, i.e., in five years, raise $40,000,000 to build a new building for the law school.

Obviously, the measure of success of all campaigns is the achievement of the dollar target.  However, nearly all of the other metrics explained above can be tied to a campaign, e.g., Return on Investment with respect to the Campaign, Campaign Gift and Major Gift Solicitations Made, Percentage of Alumni Giving to the Campaign, etc.

[1] In fact, law schools vary greatly in terms of where these functions are housed. In some law schools, communications operates as an independent department because law schools’ marketing and communications needs also include student recruitment and yield and current student communications. In other law schools, a university marketing and communications department handles all communications, alumni and otherwise.  For other law schools, a university advancement office handles all these functions with dotted-line reporting to the law school’s dean. Finally, for other law schools, alumni relations is housed exclusively in a university advancement office.

[2] Unique visits are calculated by dividing the number of prospects visited by the number of visits made.  Eduventures, Gift Officer Productivity: Defining New Metrics (Summary Overview for CASE) (2013).

[3] Robert Morse and Erin Brooks, A More Detailed Look at the Ranking Factors: Find out which data is used in our undergraduate rankings and what has changed, https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/ranking-criteria-and-weights, (September 11, 2020).

[4] Robert Morse, Kenneth Hines, Eric Brooks, and Daniel Lara-Agudelo, Methodology: 2023 Best Law Schools Rankings: Find out how U.S. News ranks law schools, https://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/articles/law-schools-methodology (March 28, 2022).

[5] Josh Moody, 10 Colleges Where the Most Alumni Donate, https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-list-college/articles/universities-where-the-most-alumni-donate (U.S. News).

[6] See Eduventures, Gift Officer Productivity, note 2 above, p. 13.

[7] See Eduventures, Gift Officer Productivity, note 2 above, p. 8-9.

[8] See Eduventures, Gift Officer Productivity, note 2 above, p. 13.

As law schools increasingly recognize the need to incorporate issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion into their educational programs, we asked rising 3L McGeorge student Lovia Ofori-Ampofo to explore and provide a student’s perspective on what some law schools are offering in terms of DEI curricula. Her review is by no means exhaustive, but the list and Ms. Ofori-Ampofo’s reflections certainly can serve as food for thought as faculty strive to meet the moment.

~ Dean Michael Hunter Schwartz

 

Lovia Ofori-Ampofo is a rising 3L at McGeorge School of Law. Photo by Ashley Golledge.

By Lovia Ofori-Ampofo

After the national racial reckoning that occurred in 2020 in response to several police killings of unarmed African Americans, many law schools across the nation committed to enhance their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts. Some law schools are creating required or elective courses on legal inequalities based on race, while others are incorporating more DEI issues in their existing courses. Some law schools are doing both. This short essay focuses on efforts I believe are notable.

As an example, the faculty at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles voted for the following learning outcome on systemic inequality last academic year:

Upon completion of the JD program, students will understand the law’s relationship to systemic inequality based on race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, disability, immigration status and/or socioeconomic status.[1]

Loyola made DEI learning outcomes mandatory throughout all required law school courses, which includes all first-year courses and three upper-division courses.

The University of California, Irvine School of Law (UCI) announced that they would require first-year law students to take a DEI course.[2] The course will focus on “critical concepts rooted in a range of equity categories, including race and indigeneity, disability, gender and sexuality, socioeconomic background, survivors of family and domestic violence, [penal] system involvement, and veteran status.”[3] UCI became the second school in the country—and the first in the University of California system—to make such a course mandatory for first-year students.[4] Last semester, Professor Kaaryn Gustafson taught a 1L elective called Race and Lawyering in California.[5] UCI requires that law students take a course on race and indigeneity before they graduate. UCI currently offers courses on race and indigeneity such as US Law, Policy, and Native Nations; Race, Law & Capitalism; Critical Race Theory; Critical Identity Theory; Centering California in the History of Race and the Law; and several other courses with a DEI focus.[6]

Also in Los Angeles, the University of Southern California School of Law (USC) became the first top-25 law school to require first-year students to take a similar course, called Race and the Law.[7] The curriculum for this course was created by Franita Tolson, Vice Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs and Professor of Law.[8] Dean Tolson and USC Professor Ariela Gross were co-chairs of the Academic Affairs subcommittee charged with developing the course.

In fall 2021, the course was an optional one-unit credit/no credit course with four modules per semester.[9] Starting in fall 2022, the Race, Racism and the Law course is required for all students. The course examines the role of law and lawyers in the creation of race and racism as ideologies, structures, and practices, and the role of race and racism in shaping legal institutions, processes, and outcomes.[10] The course touches on the role of law and lawyers in antiracist movements, from abolitionism through Black Lives Matter.[11] The course also focuses on topics such as: The Taking of Native American Lands, Racial Equality and Education, Race and Voting Rights, Latinos(as)(x) Civil Rights Struggles.[12]

Rutgers School of Law, located in Newark, New Jersey, has created a Law and Inequality course that consists of several units of instruction.[13] This is an optional pass/fail course.[14] Each week, a different professor teaches a different topic.[15] The fall 2021 course consisted of units such as: Race, Bias, and Professional Identity; Incarceration, and Inequality with an Emphasis on Racial Disparity; Reproductive Justice; Contracts, Torts, and Property; From Tulsa to Wakanda: Utilizing the Law to Repair Centuries of Systemic Black Land Dispossession.[16] The last section, taught by Professor Norrinda Hayat, focuses on the race-based roots of international law, with a focus on “imagin[ing] an America where the law recognizes Black people as legitimate landholders and reverse engineer policy prescriptions from that place.[17]” Rutgers has taken an innovative and seemingly unique perspective on history and case law. This course made me wonder how the justice system would have been affected if the Warren Court — one of the most liberal courts in U.S. history — had lasted throughout the 1970s.

In Bristol, Rhode Island, Roger Williams School of Law’s Race and the Foundation of America course also uses a mix of videos and readings to further the class aims.[18] The course was developed and co-taught by Nicole Dyszlewski, Diana Hassel, and Nadiyah J. Humber.[19] The course became mandatory in fall 2021.[20] It uses many of the same readings as the courses at UC Irvine, USC, and Rutgers. The grading consists of a final paper, which is worth 60%, weekly reflections worth 10%, and professional engagement, which is worth 30%.[21] The course is divided into three sections: Historical Origins of White Supremacy; Systems of Racism; and Going Forward.[22] The course starts powerfully by diving into the important topic of defining race and intersectionality as rigorous terms within the legal system.[23] An important topic that this course covers is System of Racism: Mass Incarceration/Abolition.[24] Students read chapter five of Dean Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.[25] I believe that this course is unique because the other law school courses I have seen thus far do not include a unit on Public Education, Legal Education, and Racism. The fact that this course seeks to shed light on an often-overlooked topic that currently causes harm to the Black community is commendable. After each reading assignment, students must write a reflection paper.[26] I believe that this is an imperative part of the course because reading students’ reflections allows the professor to assess the students’ individual understanding of each issue in the course. If there is a weakness to this course, it is the focus on slavery and the Reconstruction Era. Instead, this course could give more attention to modern events that occur at the intersection of law and race.

In 2020, Northern Illinois University College of Law (NIU) offered a remote mini-seminar, Race and the Law, that uses Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and the documentary 13th. The course uses other materials such as Juan F. Perea’s “Buscando América: Why Integration and Equal Protection Fail to Protect Latinos,” and The New York Times 1619 Project (2019–present) [a multimedia presentation]. The syllabus lists Lopez, a case studied in constitutional law, as a case involving social construction of race. This pass/fail seminar allowed students to view law school cases from a racial perspective. NIU is not offering the mini-seminar currently and has not decided whether to offer it again in the future. Nonetheless, I found NIU’s 2020 seminar innovative because it started with current racial issues and touched on matters relating to the Latinx experience. Professors gave adequate attention to current problems plaguing the underrepresented communities within the field of law. This mini-seminar also focused more on books and studies, rather than law-related textbooks. Moreover, the mini-seminar required only a limited amount of reading and did not include any tests or quizzes, so that students can digest the material without feeling overwhelmed with the traditional law school grading method.

As reflected here, there are a broad variety of classes on race and law that law schools are implementing, and there is not one perfect course to use as a model. I commend law schools for attempting to educate future lawyers on issues underrepresented people face every day. Legal education needs to educate future lawyers to be ready to help any client, no matter their race. As law schools embark on the important work of incorporating DEI courses into their current curricula, it is vital that the curriculum accomplishes its intended purpose by thoughtfully discussing relevant topics. The avoidance of relevant topics can be traumatizing to students of color and unhelpful to other students. The unrepresented communities they seek to educate must not be re-traumatized. Professors should keep in mind that they are educating students about what People of Color deal with every day, and as a Person of Color, I am entrusting professors to educate my colleagues about my race. Even a well-intentioned idea can miss the mark. I implore faculty and administrators to constantly self-reflect while creating and teaching DEI courses to make sure that the goal is being met.

Footnotes

[1]Loyola Law School First to Mandate Critical Legal Education, Curricular Innovation: Learning Outcomes, lls.edu, (Oct. 12, 2021), https://www.lls.edu/thellsdifference/facesoflls/curricularinnovationlearningoutcomes/.

[2]Michelle Weyenberg, UCI Law Adopts New Race Course Requirement, the journalist, (Apr. 14, 2021), https://www.nationaljurist.com/prelaw/uci-law-adopts-new-race-course-requirement.

[3]Staci Zaretsky, Top Law School Will Make Race-Related Coursework Mandatory for Graduation, above the law, (Apr. 9, 2021), https://abovethelaw.com/2021/04/top-law-school-will-make-race-related-coursework-mandatory-for-graduation/?rf=1.

[4]Id.

[5] LAW 5777 SEC 1 – Race & Lawyering in CA, UCI Law Course Catalog, law.uci.edu., (2022), https://apps.law.uci.edu/CourseCatalog/cap_details.aspx?id=4154.

[6] Spring 2022, UCI Law Course Catalog, law.uci.edu., (2022), https://apps.law.uci.edu/CourseCatalog/cap_results.aspx.

[7]Leslie Ridgeway, USC Gould To Offer Unique Required Course Focusing on Race in Legal System, gould.u.s.c.edu, (Feb. 4, 2021), https://gould.usc.edu/about/news/?id=4814.

[8]Paul Caron, USC Is First Top 25 Law School To Offer Required Course On Race, Racism, And The Law, taxprof.com, (Feb. 9, 2021), https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2021/02/usc-is-first-top-25-law-school-to-offer-required-course-on-race-racism-and-the-law.html.

[9]USC GOULD 1L Courses, gould.u.s.c.edu, (2021), https://gould.usc.edu/resources/downloads/academics/courses/1L-JD-CourseList.pdf.

[10]Id.

[11]Id.

[12]Id.

[13]Law and Inequality Course, law.rutgers.edu, (2021), https://law.rutgers.edu/law-and-inequality-course.

[14] Id.

[15]Law and Inequality Pilot Course & Section Descriptions, law.rutgers.edu, (2021), https://law.rutgers.edu/sites/law/files/attachments/Law%20and%20Inequality%20Course%20Description%20and%20Sections%20July%202021.pdf.

[16]Id.

[17]Id.

[18]RWU Law Introduces Required Course on Race and the Law, rwu.edu, (June 29, 2021),

https://www.rwu.edu/news/news-archive/rwu-law-introduces-required-course-race-and-law.

[19] Id.

[20]Meera Gajjar, De novo review: Professors Diana Hassel and Nicole Dyszlewski on teaching ‘Race & the Foundations of American Law‘, westlaw today Civ. rights, (Dec. 3, 2021), https://today.westlaw.com/Document/I44c520ec547c11ec9f24ec7b211d8087/View/FullText.html?transitionType=CategoryPageItem&contextData=(sc.Default)&firstPage=true.

[21] Race and the Foundation of American Law Model Syllabus and Learning Outcomes, rwu.edu, (2022), https://law.rwu.edu/sites/law/files/downloads/diversity/Race_Model_Syllabus_.pdf.

[22]Id.

[23]Id.

[24]Id.

[25]Id.

[26]Id.

This week, I am returning to my series on innovative courses.  This posting will feature courses that focus on law and technology.

The list below reflects courses from nine different law schools and includes twelve law and technology courses that I divided into four categories: (1) Courses that focus on creating and using technology in the legal space, (2) courses that focus on digital currency and business, (3) courses that focus on law practice technologies, and (4) courses that focus on cyber-torts, cyber-crimes, and digital privacy and security.

However, I will start with a quick overview of Penn State Law’s Law, Science, and Technology Concentration.

A Quick Aside on Penn State’s Law, Science, and Technology Concentration

The concentration requires JD students to complete 12 credit hours. Particularly exciting courses (to me) include:

  • AI’s Past, Present, and Future
  • COVID-19: Law and Tech Policy
  • Cybercrime
  • Emerging Technology & Legal Practice
  • Information Privacy Law
  • Information Security Law
  • Internet Law
  • Virtual Lab (detailed below)

For more details on the concentration, see this link.

Courses that Focus on Creating and Using Technology in the Legal Space

Southern University Law Center offers an intriguing course called “Intro to Intelligent Legal Systems.”  In this course,

Students will learn the entrepreneurial experience firsthand to better serve tomorrow’s clients by experiencing tech entrepreneurship themselves, learning about business by running a business that involves the creation and launch of legal apps. Students will design technology that helps solve criminal and social justice problems facing many urban areas today. Through this exercise, students will hone their abilities to educate themselves about an area of the law and use that knowledge to imagine tech solutions, solutions with commercial potential. The goal of the course is to inspire students to launch their legal apps in real-world situations to real-world clients.

The University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law offers a similar course.  “Selected Projects in Law, Technology & Public Policy” is a 2 or 3 credit, project-based course that is:

[T]aught collaboratively with law faculty, business faculty, and an engineering faculty member. Law students are taught about community engagement, project planning, design thinking, change management, interviewing, surveying, and focus groups. Students work on technology-related, civic and social entrepreneurship projects for Kansas City or other municipalities with technology support from the Code for America Brigade.

University of Connecticut School of Law offers a 3-credit seminar on “Technology and Law Practice,” which is described as:

In this course, students are expected to work in small teams with a legal service organization to develop a platform, application, or automated system that increases access to justice and/or improves the effectiveness of legal representation. For the final project, each team will have developed and/or built a functional app or automated system that is adopted by the legal service organization and put into use for the organization or its clients. Students are not required to have coding or programming experience and will not be expected to write software.

Boston University School of Law and UC Berkeley collaborate on a course offering called “Law for Algorithms” taught by Andrew Sellars. The course description explains:

Algorithms – those information-processing machines designed by humans – reach ever more deeply into our lives, creating alternate and sometimes enhanced manifestations of social and biological processes. In doing so, algorithms yield powerful levers for good and ill amidst a sea of unforeseen consequences. This cross-cutting and interdisciplinary course investigates several aspects of algorithms and their impact on society and law. Specifically, the course connects concepts of proof, verifiability, privacy, security, trust, and randomness in computer science with legal concepts of autonomy, consent, governance, and liability, and examines interests at the evolving intersection of technology and the law. Grades will be based on a combination of short weekly reflection papers and a final project, to be completed collaboratively in mixed teams of law and computer science students. This seminar will include attendees from the computer science faculty, students and scholars based at Boston University and UC Berkeley.

Finally, Loyola Law School’s “Artificial Intelligence and Access to Justice Practicum” 3-credit course gives students the opportunity to:

work in small teams with a legal service organization to develop a platform, application, or automated system that increases access to justice and/or improves the effectiveness of legal representation. For the final project, each team will have developed and/or built a functional app or automated system that is adopted by the legal service organization and put into use for the organization or its clients. Students are not required to have coding or programming experience and will not be expected to write software.

Penn State’s Virtual Lab offers a distinctive variant. According to the linked story, the Virtual Lab:

The Legal-Tech Virtual Lab reinvents the idea of a computer lab, piloting the lab of the future as a virtual space, built around a set of technologies and opportunities to learn about them rather than simply a physical room. Partnering with leading legal technology companies and interdisciplinary partners across Penn State, the lab will (1) train Penn State Law students in the ways these groundbreaking technologies are being implemented in today’s legal practice; (2) enable law and other Penn State students to explore the legal issues surrounding emerging technology; and (3) develop innovative educational content using those technologies.

Courses that Focus on Digital Currency, Law, and Business

The Northern Kentucky University Chase College of Law’s “Digital Commerce and the Law” 3-credit elective course addresses e-commerce law and digital currency.

The course description explains:

As commerce shifts to the Internet and mobile technologies, the law has been forced to adapt to the realities of the e-commerce marketplace. Consumers and businesses buy and sell goods or services through virtual storefronts using digital contracts, paying with digital currency, and, in some cases, resolving disputes online. Meanwhile, blockchain technology has offered new ways to document and to pay for e-commerce transactions through smart contracts and cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin. This course will address e-commerce common and regulatory law, with a special emphasis upon blockchain technology.

In “Smart Contracts and Financial Technology,” a course developed by Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, CA, students explore blockchain technology and its legal effects. The course description explains that the course is:

A workshop exploring the legal implications of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, with a focus on cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin), smart contracts and other financial use cases. The class will feature a close exploration of the network and cryptographic features of Bitcoin, the first and most utilized cryptocurrency built on the blockchain. The class will then review blockchain technology more broadly in order to appreciation its suitability (advantages and limitations) for a variety of ‘smart contract’ use cases, including payments, swaps and other derivatives, and land transfer. A number of biomedical blockchain use cases will also be examined.

Courses that Focus on Law Practice Technologies

The third course in this category is “Law Practice Business and Technology” taught at NSU Florida’s Shepard Broad College of Law.” The course description for “Law Practice Business and Technology” explains:

This course examines the operations of successful private practice require an understanding of the primary tools used to efficiently deliver legal services and meet the ethical and professional obligations to provide competent representation. Lawyers need to understand the law firm business, operations, and relevant technology if they are to succeed in the profession. This workshop provides hands on experience for students on a number of key operational aspects of the practice of law, including the business foundation of a successful law firm management; privacy and data security in a law office environment, including but not limited to security and confidentiality of client information; marketing, public relations, advertising and social media; duties of technological competence under ABA “Ethics 20/20” amendments to the Model Rules of Professional Responsibility; predictive coding and other eDiscovery issues; client intake and case management; and issues related to the scope and composition of representation including the unauthorized practice of law and unbundled legal services.

The University of South Carolina School of Law offers a course called “Technology Law: Law of the Newly Possible” taught by Associate Professor Bryant Walker Smith. This course:

[E]xplores the relationship between law and technology through unique, immersive, and collaborative case studies that emphasize impact. The class has partnered with Virgin Hyperloop One on state regulatory strategies for ultra-fast tube transport and with UberElevate on policy considerations for flying taxis. Most recently, students consulted numerous stakeholders to develop public recommendations for the local regulation of e-scooters. In each case, students work closely with each other and with experts in academia, government, industry, and civil society to understand not only law but also technology, policy, and business.

Courses that Focus on Cyber-Torts, Cyber-Crimes, and Digital Privacy and Security

The last category is a bit of a catch-all and includes three courses from Northern Kentucky University Chase College of Law.

  1. “Digital Crimes and Torts” is described as:

This is the age of the invisible criminal and tortfeasor, harming individuals, businesses, and governments under a cloak of anonymity and through the boundless reach of the Internet. Many crimes and torts were rare or nonexistent until this century—like cyber-attacks, cyberbullying, cyberextortion, cyberstalking, cyberterrorism, and cybertheft. This course will examine New Age crimes and torts and the legal challenges in imposing criminal and civil liability upon those who commit them.

  1. “Legal Boundaries in the Digital Age” is described as:

Technology extends the reach of individuals, organizations, and governments beyond borders, posing one of the greatest legal challenges in the Digital Age. A single action on the Internet can have consequences far beyond where the actor resides—stealing an identity, subverting an election, threatening a public utility—raising questions about what laws, and what governing bodies, will protect victims and punish those that harm them through technology. This course will examine the obstacles to enacting and enforcing laws to govern cyberspace and the real world when developing technologies create challenges to the lawful authority of governments to regulate technology.

  1. “Digital Privacy and Security” is described as:

The exponential and infinite proliferation of big data raises both privacy and security issues, as the sensitive information of individuals, organizations, and governments are collected and stored online where it can be hacked or misused without authorization. This course will explore the developing, complex web of laws, national and international, that govern data privacy and cybersecurity. More specifically, it will examine the limitations of the existing legal framework and consider the policy implications of greater regulation of data collection over the Internet and the evolving Internet of Things.

McGeorge’s parent university, University of the Pacific, is ramping up its planning for the spring semester. These efforts made me curious about the national landscape: How are law schools responding to the pandemic in terms of conducting classes in person or online and what has worked to promote student, faculty, and staff safety? I sent an email survey to my colleagues asking three questions: (1) If you are holding in person class this fall (Hyflex or otherwise), what has been the key to you doing so successfully? (2) If you are online this fall, are you planning to be in person (Hyflex or otherwise) or online (in the spring)? (3) If you have not decided whether to be in person or online, when do you anticipate making a decision?

Seventy-nine of my 204 dean colleagues responded, which, in my experience, is a very high response rate, and their responses were interesting enough that I decided to share them via this posting. I have organized my report in three subtopics. In the first section, I will share a summary of the health and safety and other strategies my dean colleagues thought were most effective. In the second section, I will share the results regarding spring 2021 plans. A final section wraps up this post with final thoughts.

The Health and Safety Strategies that Seem to Have Worked

At least among the deans who chose to respond to my survey, law schools seem to have been able to avoid the major outbreaks seen at a number of undergraduate institutions. My hypothesis it that this result is a function of the age and maturity of law students and, perhaps, the fact that they are entering a field that, in effect, celebrates rules.

At most of the law schools, in-person classes were taught in some variation of the Hyflex model in which some students are in person and others are simultaneously participating online. However, at least two law school chose to have classes be either entirely in person or entirely online. At both, faculty took on temporarily-increased teaching loads so that social distancing protocols could be followed.

Nearly all law schools deferred to individual faculty preferences as to whether their classes would be in person and Hyflex or online. Law schools also were fairly uniform in allowing students to choose classes based in part on whether their classes would be at least partially in person or would be entirely online.

Overwhelmingly, my dean colleagues reported that having unambiguous rules and defined enforcement systems regarding face coverings, social distancing, daily self-screening, testing and tracing all played a significant role. They also cited training of both faculty and students as critical. Most of my colleagues emphasized the critical importance of testing classroom sound systems and having student tech and Zoom assistants in managing the challenge of simultaneously teaching students in person and online. At most of the responding law schools, class schedules were more staggered than normal to reduce student hallway interactions.

Less uniform but quite credible to me were recommendations of see-through masks for the professors and lavalier microphones.

Plans for the Spring

With only two exceptions, all of the responding law schools are following the same plans for the fall as they followed for the spring. In addition, all but one responding law school has already announced its plans for the spring semester. However, most of the responding deans noted that their announced plans were subject to the dictates of local health authorities and developments in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths as a result of the pandemic.

The final tallies: 54 of the 79 (68%) responding deans report that their classes will be partially in person, and the other 25 (32%) will be online. No law school will be entirely in person; in fact, most will have between 1/3 and 2/3 of classes online. Even among those law schools that will be otherwise entirely online, most have adopted a partial exception for legal clinics and externship sites that need to be in person to serve their clients. Interestingly, California law schools are over-represented among the law schools that will be entirely online.

Final Thoughts

There is a risk that my sample was non-representative. Perhaps the deans who did not respond did not enjoy as much success as those who did. It is also possible that the deans who did respond framed their responses to put their law schools in the best possible light. I certainly did not check any publicly reported health outcomes data for any of the law schools or their parent universities. Thus, it would be fair to read this post with a degree of skepticism.

I do wish to share one, final thought. It might be surprising to some non-deans that my colleagues were so responsive and so helpful in sharing their experiences. I believe the dean readers of this blog, however, are not at all surprised. I suspect that, if tested, we would be characterized as a fairly competitive group of people, but we nevertheless are also quite supportive of each other. We appreciate the challenges of each others’ jobs and help where we can. My final thought, therefore, is an expression of gratitude for my dean colleagues.

On July 23, 2019, I emailed the Associate Deans’ and Deans’ ABA listservs asking for information about innovative courses. I received 54 responses describing more than 60 courses. This is my third post describing what I have learned.

I organized the courses into four categories: Required, Electives, Skills and Clinics, and Law and Technology, and I am planning six blog posts, including my first post on innovative required courses, a second post on innovative electives that focus on cutting edge topics and cutting-edge practice areas, this third post addressing the other electives sent to me, two postings that will focus on Skills Courses and Clinics, and one posting that will focus on Law and Technology Courses.

Each posting describes the courses, identifies the law school that offers the course, and, if I have the information, provides the name of a professor at the law school who teaches the course. I will include at least some commentary about most of the courses. The quoted language comes from the email I received from the law school or from the law school’s website.

I divided the nominated electives into four categories: (1) electives that focus on cutting-edge legal topics, (2) electives that focus on specific, interesting practice areas, (3) electives that focus on lawyer well-being, (4) and a catch-all category intro which I tossed the other eight interesting electives. This post will focus on the electives in the second two categories.

Electives that Focus on Lawyer Well-Being

The University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law’s “Mindful Lawyering” course, which Professor Clifford Rosky teaches as a two credit-hour, pass fail course, is an effort to communicate the law practice implications of a mindful practice.

Mindfulness refers to the practice of trying to pay attention to whatever is happening in the present moment, from one moment to the next, without criticism or judgment. Practicing mindfulness can help us develop greater awareness, concentration, and acceptance–allowing us to reduce our susceptibility to distractions, and respond creatively and constructively to pressures and demands, rather than reacting blindly out of habit.

The course description explains:

[I]n this course, students will practice mindfulness on a daily basis, both inside and outside of class. The course is divided into three units, in which we apply mindfulness to the personal, interpersonal, and institutional aspects of one’s professional identity as a lawyer. First, we will cover “personal” topics such as the relationship between the body and the mind in stress and relaxation responses; using mindfulness to examine one’s strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots; reflecting on what it means to be a “mindful” lawyer; and developing a mindful approach to thriving in law school and the practice of law. Second, we will cover “interpersonal” topics, including the “soft skills” of lawyering such as various styles of listening; vicarious trauma and empathy fatigue; basic principles of conflict management; the role of the lawyer in lawyer-client relations; and the recognition and reduction of implicit bias. Last, we will cover “institutional” topics such as fostering wellbeing in legal education and the practice of law, and new developments in the profession such as holistic and collaborative lawyering, restorative justice, and therapeutic jurisprudence.

Students in the class are “expected to maintain a daily practice of mindfulness.”

In a course called “The Happy Lawyer: Finding Your Path” developed by University of Richmond School of Law Dean Wendy Perdue and Professor Christopher Corts, Richmond students take a slightly different approach to developing habits that will ensure their long-term well-being. The course description explains that the course:

[E]xplores the role that workplace attributes and personal characteristics play in the lives of lawyers. Class meetings will be held on Sunday evenings over dinner at the home of Dean Perdue. During each class session, students will discuss prepared readings relevant to the course topic, and interact with guest speakers who will share a real-world perspective on lawyering, career development, self-care practices, and the particular ways they have pursued happiness, purpose, and meaning in their work.

Perhaps most interestingly, the class, which is capped at 10 students, meets each week at Dean Perdue’s home over Sunday night dinner. Here is an article that both provides additional information about this class and important background on the challenges that this course and the other courses described here are trying to address.

A third variation on this theme, the University of Tennessee College of Law’s “Thriving as a Lawyer (A Scientific Approach),” was developed by Professor Doug Blaze and Adjunct Professor Candice Reed (UT Law ’00), who earned her Masters in Applied Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. The course was

Designed to introduce law students to the scientific principles of positive psychology, while incorporating “hands-on learning” through empirically validated positive interventions, which require cognitive reasoning and physical effort, encourage habitualizing behavior, involve goal-setting, and allow for self-efficacy or autonomy.

Other Innovative Electives

The breadth of courses in this last category reflects the breadth of interests of our faculty colleagues around the country. Two of the courses seem to be grounded in their law school’s context. Wayne State University Law School’s “Race, the Law, and Social Change in Southeast Michigan” focuses on social justice issues from the lens of the law school’s home city, Detroit. The course description explains:

Detroit is the most segregated metropolitan area in the country. This course examines the role and limits of law in addressing issues of race, discrimination and equality in Southeast Michigan. From a legal and anthropological perspective, students will study the efforts that attorneys have made over the past century to create a region more consistent with American values of inclusiveness. The course will examine individual and class action lawsuits and other forms of policy advocacy, all addressing legal problems in Southeast Michigan, examining litigation tactics and the role of expert testimony. The history and social problems of the region are examined from the perspective of the courtroom.

Lincoln University Duncan School of Law’s “Lincoln’s Constitution” course draws on the work of its namesake for the focus of a course. The course description explains:

This course provides an in-depth analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s constitutional perspectives, interpretations and actions. After a brief review of Lincoln’s biography and times, the course will examine his attitude and actions regarding slavery, secession, war powers, habeas corpus, emancipation, free speech and other individual rights, and reconstruction. The course also will evaluate the profound effects of Lincoln’s actions on modern American constitutional law.

The remaining courses are all over the map and are presented in the order I received them.

While many law schools offer a “Spanish for Lawyers” course, American University Washington College of Law’s Professor Jayesh Rathod has developed a more in-depth course, “Bilingual Lawyering.” The course description explains:

This one-credit course is designed to prepare students to be effective bilingual (Spanish-English) practitioners of U.S. immigration law. Students who enroll must have conversational Spanish language ability, as the course is taught primarily in Spanish. The immigration law survey course (LAW 655-001) is a co-requisite or prerequisite. . . . The content of the course will include the following: (1) discussion of, and practice in articulating substantive immigration law, and relevant legal procedures, to Spanish-speaking clients; (2) discussion of, and practice in counseling Spanish-speaking clients with immigration-related legal concerns; (3) ongoing discussion, in Spanish, of issues and questions raised by the assigned course readings; and (4) review of Spanish language vocabulary needed to communicate with clients about immigration law. More broadly, during the course we will consider challenges inherent in bilingual lawyering, along with different approaches to bilingual lawyering scenarios. In short, this is not simply a “Spanish for immigration lawyers” course, but rather a more rigorous effort to prepare you for the practice of immigration law in both English and Spanish

In this essay, Professor Rathod provides additional information about the course and explains the pedagogical context for the course.

[The essay] . . . outlines a unique, bilingual instructional model that involves adding an optional credit hour – taught in Spanish or another language – to existing doctrinal courses. Drawing from the literature on language pedagogy and classroom experiences over several years, the essay describes the basic architecture for these courses, specific instructional techniques, as well as some challenges and limitations of this model.

One of my favorite innovative electives is Northeastern University School of Law’s new “Laboratory Seminar in Applied Design and Legal Empowerment.” The course is a true interdisciplinary effort, bringing together law students and art students to solve important legal services problems. As the law school explained:

The NuLawLab’s engagement with students at the School of Law typically begins with their enrollment in the Laboratory Seminar in Applied Design and Legal Empowerment. This limited-enrollment intensive seminar explores the use of design principles in the development of new models for delivering legal information and services. Law and art students explore problem-solving methodologies derived from the fields of product and systems design as they apply them to a specific legal design problem. By the end of the experience, students have worked together as a team to take an idea from brainstorm to tested prototype.

The University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law has implemented a unique approach to offering field experience courses. The courses are offered during intersessions and are attached to one of the law school’s doctrinal courses. As the law school explained:

Preservation law is connected to a one-week trip on the Buffalo National River, International Criminal Law is connected to a one-week trip to international organizations in the Hague, Missouri Civil Procedure is connected to a trip to the Missouri Supreme Court, and Family Violence is connected to a trip to the Yucatan to learn about how family violence is addressed in Mexico. Students reflect on their experiences and how the doctrines from class translate into practice in the field.

The University of Richmond School of Law offers a second course of interest to this post. The law school’s innovative “Vices – Prohibition, Regulation, and Social Impact” course

[E]xamines the historical treatment of and trends in public policy regarding gambling, pornography, prostitution, alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and other drugs . . . [and] the effectiveness of these policies on human behavior and related industry, including the impact of legal and illicit markets on society, race and gender.”

The University of Arkansas Little Rock, William H. Bowen School of Law offers an interesting post-Business Organizations course called “Corporate Justice.” The course extends the concepts students learned in Business Organizations to social justice issues. Subjects include “Corporate Board Diversity, the Private for-profit Prison industry, the Financial Market Crisis of 2008, and the pursuit of social justice in the corporate context.” The course, designed by Bowen Professor andré douglas pond cummings, seeks to equip students “with a renewed knowledge of basic Corporate Law concepts, like the Business Judgment Rule and Board of Director fiduciary duties,” and “the skills necessary to engage in shareholder activism, [address] board of director diversity, and [understand] causes for capital market traumas.”

The final course in this category is the University of Mississippi School of Law‘s “Law and Science Fiction” course. The law school describes its specialized law and literature course in this way:

Many of the great works of science fiction deal with law in its various guises, some directly, others indirectly. In particular, science fiction offers a unique perspective to address issues relating to contemporary problems in law and society. This mini-seminar will explore some of the major themes of science fiction as they relate to law and society, focusing on questions of diversity and autonomy. Course materials will include short stories, graphic novels, novels, episodes from science fiction TV shows, and movies.

On July 23, 2019, I emailed the Associate Deans’ and Deans’ ABA listservs asking for information about innovative courses. I received 54 responses describing more than 60 courses. This is my second post describing what I have learned. (Note 1: I adjusted my label from “unique courses” to “innovative courses” so I can duck the question of whether any particular course meets the high standard of distinctiveness required by the word “unique.”)

I organized the courses into four categories: Required , Electives, Skills and Clinics, and Law and Technology, and I am planning six blog posts, including my first post (which addressed Required Courses), two postings on Electives (for which I received the largest number of nominated courses) and of which this posting is the first, two on Skills Courses and Clinics (for which I received the second largest number of nominated courses), and one on Law and Technology Courses.

Each posting describes the courses, identifies the law school that offers the course, and, if I have the information, provides the name of a professor at the law school who teaches the course. I will include at least some commentary about most of the courses. The quoted language comes from the email I received from the law school or from the law school’s website.

In this posting, as my title for this posting suggests, I am focusing on innovative electives. I divided the nominated electives into four categories: (1) electives that focus on cutting-edge legal topics, (2) electives that focus on specific, interesting practice areas, (3) electives that focus on lawyer well-being, (4) and a catch-all category intro which I tossed the other eight interesting electives. This post will focus on the electives in the first two categories; my next post will focus on electives in the second and third categories.

Electives that Focus on Cutting-Edge Legal Topics

The breadth of courses I shoe-horned into this category is significant. The category includes a course framed around the criminal procedure issues in the Netflix television series Making a Murderer, a course that focus on governmental oversight and accountability, which has been in the news a bit lately, and a course entitled “Hip-Hop and the American Constitution.”

In the University of Utah School of Law’s three credit-hour “Making a Murder” course, created and taught by Professor Shima Baradaran Baughman, students analyze criminal procedure issues not covered in typical Criminal Procedure courses, such as:

[S]cience in the court room, venue motions, prosecutorial ethics, police evidentiary issues, jury behavior, etc. In each class session, the students watch an episode or two of the series. The class then discusses the particular issues highlighted in that episode. The students also read over 2,000 pages of trial transcripts and motions from the Avery/Dassey cases so they can judge for themselves whether police/lawyers/judges acted properly.

This article includes an interview with Professor Baughman, who provides further details about this wildly popular course.

American University Washington College of Law is offering a particularly timely seminar called “Advanced Topics in Oversight and Accountability” created and taught by Professor Fernando Laguarda. According to Professor Laguarda’s syllabus, this two-credit course explores and analyzes “the work of the Inspectors General, Office of Government Ethics, Office of Special Counsel, Government Accountability Office, and the Office of Management and Budget, among other constituent elements of the ‘oversight and accountability community.’”

Students in the course help develop and implement an “Oversight and Accountability Blog.” The goal for students working on the Oversight and Accountability Blog is “to publish updates on newsworthy developments from the oversight and accountability community as well as more extensive analytical essays about their work from students and, eventually, from practitioners and representatives of those agencies.”

In a somewhat related subject area, Professor Greg Crespi of the SMU Dedman School of Law is offering a course entitled “Presidential Impeachment and Related Topics.” The course:

[I]nvestigates the legal and political issues relating to Presidential impeachment and removal from office, focusing primarily but not exclusively on the current President. During the first ten weeks of the semester the class meets twice each week in a seminar-style format to discuss several assigned books and other current topical materials relating to various legal or political impeachment issues, including related criminal indictment and 25th Amendment issues. By the end of the tenth week, students are asked to choose an impeachment-related topic of appropriate scope, and research and write a 25-30 page law journal-style paper. During the last four weeks of the semester students are asked to briefly present their paper ideas and outlines or preliminary paper drafts for general class discussion and suggestions. The course satisfies the School of Law general writing requirement.

Here is an SSRN link to Professor Crespi’s essay describing the course and its development.

In Professor andre douglass pond cummings’ two credit course, “Hip-Hop and the American Constitution,” University of Arkansas at Little Rock, William H. Bowen School of Law students have the opportunity to explore “social justice theory and training” and develop their “interest in representing indigent and underrepresented clients.”

[T]his course includes the study of Fourth Amendment search and seizure law, First Amendment free speech law, Constitutional Intellectual Property protections, as well as Mass Incarceration, Policing, Family law and Corporate law all through the prism of hip hop music and culture . . . In each of these areas, hip hop artists have openly critiqued the top-down development of the law, and this class gives students the opportunity to explore the law from the bottom up, imagining what form the law might take if hip hop artist’s critiques and contributions were taken seriously and adopted.

The final course in this category, Florida A & M College of Law’s “Cannabis Law Social Justice Workshop” is a seminar that focuses on “key legal and policy issues related to racial disparities within every part of the cannabis industry, including the local, state and federal differences in the criminal justice system, economic and business disparities, and social justice implications.” The course also explores “the legislative and technology landscape in this dynamic area and . . . provide(s) opportunities to discuss cutting-edge issues at the intersection of law, cannabis, and social justice.”

Electives that Focus on Specific, Interesting Practice Areas

The six courses in this category explore a wide variety of practice areas of interest to students, including space law, legal operations, patent practice, privacy, and environmental law.

The first of the two space-related courses, the University of Nebraska College of Law’s “Space and Satellite Business Law,” explains the business context in this way:

[U].S. Space policy has favored increasing commercialization for three decades. Over 200 commercial space launches have occurred since the first one in 1989. New commercial activities, including ferrying cargo to and from the International Space Station and performing research and experiments for the private sector on the ISS, are becoming routine. Soon human transportation and asteroid mining will be part of the commercial space landscape.

The course reviews and examines “the history of Presidential space policies regarding space commercialization” and the work of “all key federal agencies charged with licensing and regulating the commercial space transportation and satellite industries.” The course also addresses “the statutes that give these agencies this authority and the rules that the agencies administer and enforce” and “The role of NASA.” The largest portion of the course focuses,

. . . on agreements that form relationships in the commercial space industry. These include Launch Service Agreements, Satellite Purchase Agreements, Transponder Sale/Lease Agreements, Non-Disclosure Agreements, Satellite Launch and In-Orbit Insurance contracts, and Hosted Payload Agreements. The course concludes with students engaging in a simulation of a condensed commercial space business transaction – from business plan to launch.

The second, space-related course, the University of Mississippi School of Law’s “International Space Law,” “explores the international laws applicable to outer space.” The course analyzes the “nature and scope of international law . . . vis-à-vis space-related activities.” Specific topics addressed in the course include:

[T]he nature and sources of international space law; binding and non-binding international space law instruments; the progressive development of space law in the United Nations and other international forums; and subjects of current debate, including commercialization of government exploration, space debris remediation, remote proximity operations, space resource ownership and utilization, environmental protection, international security, military uses of outer space, and the long-term sustainability of outer space activities.

Nova Southeastern University Shepard-Broad College of Law has developed a course focusing on an area of practice expected to grow significantly in the next few years, Legal Operations. In an ABA Journal article authored by University of Indiana Maurer School of Law’s Professor William Henderson, a leading law practice futurist, the author explains, “the milewide gulf between the legal profession’s infinitesimal knowledge of the burgeoning field of legal operations and how that field is going to reshape the entire industry.”

Nova’s course explores the many areas of legal practice in which “one or more of the parties to a transaction or dispute are business enterprises operating using a common set of disciplines and tools to share information, evaluate risk, and make financially-based decisions.” The course:

[P]rovides law students an introduction to these primary tools of quantitative analysis and research, to better understand the needs of their clients, provide additional strategies for structuring transactions and resolving disputes, and adding discipline to the operations of the lawyers’ own law firms. Through simulations, exercises and discussions, students . . . explore how best to apply these tools to the practice of law.

The Southern University Law Center is offering a course focusing on a specific aspect of patent law practice. The law school explains the course, “PTAB Practice and Procedure,” in this way:

[T]he American Invents Act took effect in 2012 creating the Patent Trial and Appeals Board (PTAB) to, in part, review the patentability of any patent through post-grant review (PGR), inter partes review (IPR) and covered business method (CBM) process. The PTO, as an executive agency, has created a myriad of procedures, rules and regulations to further define the PTAB and its operation. In this course, students . . . learn the statutory, administrative rules and practice of the PTAB process. Students . . . also gain practical tips from expert PTAB practitioners from across the country about patent litigation and its interaction with the new PTAB process.

Professor Victoria Schwartz (no relation) of Pepperdine University School of Law (who also serves as the law school’s Associate Dean for Academic Affairs) has developed a privacy law course that focus on the practical applications of privacy law for students interested in careers as business lawyers. She reports that the course explores “issues of workplace privacy from the practical perspective of an attorney advising a business.” Because the area of law is still developing, she reports that course topics “may include electronic surveillance, drug, genetic and, psychological testing, polygraphs, social media issues, and employer control of off-duty activities.” Finally, she explains that, “While familiarizing themselves with the various legal frameworks applicable to workplace privacy, students . . . also develop skills in offering legal advice in areas that are not yet clear under existing law.”

The final course on this list explores a traditional area of law, environmental law, in a new way. Pace University Elizabeth Haub School of Law’s four credit “Environmental Skills and Practice/Clean Water Act” adopts an intriguing approach:

[U]sing a single statute, the Clean Water Act, as a model, this course introduces the student to interpreting and working with complex statutes and regulations. Through a series of exercises and simulations, it explores basic administrative and regulatory processes, such as rule making, permit issuance, and enforcement. It explores how the three branches of the federal government, together with federal and state governments and advocates for industries and nongovernmental organizations, interact to develop environmental laws and policy and the role of lawyers in that process.

Final Comments for This Blog Post

As these courses reflect, in an effort to produce excellent lawyers who deeply understand the law, law professors continue to create courses that explore cutting-edge legal topics and fields.

My own reaction to the list of courses above is a desire to travel around the country taking all these courses. I do not believe my boss would approve.

On July 23, 2019, I emailed the Associate Deans’ and Deans’ ABA listservs asking for information about innovative courses. I received 54 responses describing more than 60 courses. I felt so fortunate to get to learn about all the interesting and innovative classes law schools have created, and I hope this post, which will be the first in a series of posts describing what I learned, proves to be of value to you. (Note 1: I have decided to adjust my label from “unique courses” to “innovative courses” so I can duck the question of whether any particular course meets the high standard of distinctiveness suggested by the word “unique.”

I decided to organize the courses into four categories: Required Courses, Electives, Skills Courses and Clinics, and Law and Technology Courses, and I am planning six blog posts, including this one on Required Courses, two on Electives (for which I received the largest number of nominated courses), two on Skills Courses and Clinics (for which I received the second largest number of nominated courses), and one on Law and Technology Courses. (Note 2: I acknowledge that these categories are arbitrary and simplistic. Skills courses and clinics are always taught against doctrinal backgrounds, and required and elective doctrinal courses typically teach analytical skills, and, in some cases, drafting and other practice skills.) My goal is to complete this series of six posts over the next 12 weeks.

Each posting will describe the courses, identify the law school that offers the course, and, if I have the information, provide the name of a professor at the law school who teaches the course. I will include at least some commentary about most of the courses. The quoted language comes from the email I received from the law school or from the law school’s website.

In this posting, as my title for this posting promises, I am focusing on innovative required courses. The seven required courses in this category fit into three sub-categories: (1) law practice skills courses, (2) professionalism and professional identity, and (3) foundational knowledge. Six of the seven courses are first-year courses.

Law Practice Skills

Professor Laura Thomas at the University of Minnesota School of Law has co-led the law school’s first year Law in Practice course for years. The course

[S]eeks to transform law students’ emerging knowledge of legal doctrine and reasoning into an introductory understanding of the practice of law.   LiP combines classroom teaching with small group simulation experiences to provide the conceptual knowledge and professional skills needed to master the iterative process of discovering new facts, refining legal research objectives and managing the relationship with the client. Law School faculty members teach a weekly class exploring doctrinal and strategic issues in the simulated cases. Students perform simulations in ‘Practice Groups’ of eight students led by practicing attorneys. Groups of two students engage in client or witness interviews, client counseling, and negotiation and dispute resolution simulations. Each student individually takes a deposition.

Here is a link to additional information about the course, and here is a link to an article about the course from Minnesota’s alumni magazine.

While many law schools have second-year simulation courses that are similar in content, what distinguishes this course is the choice to move it forward to the first year, a choice that I would hope would increase the likelihood that students retain the excitement about becoming lawyers that led them to go to law school in the first place.

Professionalism and Professional Identity

Three of the seven nominated required courses fit into this category, and I believe 25-30 law schools, including my current law school and my prior law school, require similar courses, all in the first year. Particular kudos are due in this category for Mercer Law School, which was one of the first law schools, if not the first, to create such a course and St. Thomas University School of Law, which has taken a leadership role in this field.

The courses in this category about which I was emailed were:

Mercer’s first The Legal Profession course, created by Professor Patrick Longen. This three-credit hour course is described as

[A]n exploration of lawyer professionalism. Students learn about what ‘professionalism’ means for lawyers and why it matters. They see what pressures the practice of law places on professionalism in different settings. The students explore the many ways in which the legal profession seeks, imperfectly, to create and perpetuate the conditions that promote professionalism. This course also examines the extraordinary challenges and opportunities that come with a life in the law, and the students study ways in which professionalism contributes to the satisfaction that lawyers find in their calling. In addition, to class readings, discussions, guest speakers, and an exam, the students write two papers reflecting on their career goals. They also visit in small groups with experienced lawyers to discuss life in the legal profession, and they read a biography of a famous lawyer or judge and discuss it in a small group setting.

Here is a link describing the course’s evolution.

The University of North Dakota School of Law’s Professional Foundations course is a team taught, two-credit hour course that was created and coordinated by Professor Emeritus Patti Alleva (who retired this year) and the law school’s new Dean, Michael McGinniss. The class

[I]ntroduces students to concepts of professional role, identity, and practice for lawyers. A key objective of the course is to assist students in beginning to cultivate a reflective mindset about professional life in the law and to develop the habits needed to exercise sound professional judgment as lawyers. Students will develop the skill of practiced self-reflection in legal settings and, in exploring the kind of lawyers they want to become, deepen their ability to apply their professional values in the practice of law.

Texas A & M School of Law’s Professional Identity course. In Professional Identity students are asked to engage in reflection about themselves, their goals, and how to best go about achieving them. PI is a chance for students to focus on their own professional development.

Foundational Knowledge

Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law has created two business-focused, required courses aimed at providing students with foundational business knowledge. The first, a required first-year, one credit course, called Business & Financial Literacy Module, is taught as a one-week intersession in January of students’ first year. It was described to me in this way: The course

[I]ntroduces all 1L students to critical business and finance concepts and their application in practice. This required course begins with an overview of basic financial literacy concepts, including instruction on how to read a financial statement and how to value a business. The course moves beyond these basics to show how these concepts are used in a practical setting. Students work in small groups to solve an ongoing problem involving the valuation and sale of a business. Their work is overseen by practicing attorneys who help students put the concepts they have learned into practice as they work through this real-life legal scenario. The week culminates with teams of students negotiating a deal and creating a term sheet for their clients, all with the guidance and supervision of experienced practitioners.

The second course, The Business Aspects of Law Module, was designed as a follow-up to the 1L course. The course was described to me in this way:

This one-week course was designed in consultation with law firm and in-house leaders. Practitioners from various settings – from global firms to small boutiques, from giant corporations to family businesses, from non-profits to government – show the students how different legal organizations run their business. Putting this knowledge into practice, students are broken into small teams and tasked with a simulation that requires them to run the general counsel’s office at a multinational corporation.

Together, these courses address an issue that I have heard about from practitioners all over the country: most new lawyers do not understand essential business concepts that can be significant both to their own practices and to their work for clients.

University of North Texas College of Law has created a one credit hour, first-year course it calls Lawyering Fundamentals. The course is aimed at providing UNT students with somewhat of a hybrid of the Legal Process courses from prior eras of legal education and the professionalism and professional identity courses described above. The course, per the description I received,

[I]ntroduces students to the UNT Dallas College of Law and its curriculum, and introduces concepts and skills that will be important throughout the study of law, including introduction to law as a profession, introduction to the court systems in Dallas, anatomy of a trial and anatomy of a deal, methods of effective studying and learning in law school, and interactions and interviews with lawyers relating to legal education and the practice of law.

Final Thoughts

Innovative courses in the first year are rare. Constrained by bar exam pass rate concerns, marketing concerns that lead law schools not to require more credit hours than their peer law schools, and the pervasive influence of the Langdellian legal education curriculum and the law school quasi-Socratic teaching method, law schools have only tinkered around the edges of the required curriculum. As you will see in future posts, the same cannot be said for upper-level skills courses, electives, and law and technology courses.

Giving law students the opportunity to advocate for clients is an essential part of the law school experience. When those clients are some of their state’s most vulnerable residents, the experience can be even more rewarding.

Third-year law students at the University of Nebraska College of Law have the opportunity to serve as guardians ad litem (GAL) for children in Nebraska’s child welfare system. The Children’s Justice Clinic (CJC) is a partnership between the College of Law and Nebraska’s Center on Children, Families, and the Law.

Since the year-long clinic began in September 2017, students have been appointed on 41 cases, representing 88 Nebraska children.

“Advocating for very young children presents a unique challenge that requires a special skill set,” said Judge Roger Heideman, presiding juvenile court judge for the Separate Juvenile Court of Lancaster County, Nebraska.

The CJC is a unique opportunity for law students which includes:

  • Guardian ad litem foundations – an intensive classroom component that students take prior to representing clients. Students learn the foundations of child representation, including courtrooms skills, federal and state child welfare laws, the child welfare process, child development, and trauma in young children.
  • Weekly seminars – each seminar is developed to enhance and complement the knowledge and skills that students learned in the foundations course. Topics include such areas as drug and substance abuse, domestic violence, and human trafficking.
  • Case consultations – the clinic director and the multidisciplinary team of psychologists, social workers, and child welfare practitioners from the Center on Children, Families, and the Law meet weekly with students to advise on cases.
  • Reflective consultation – a licensed mental health practitioner and the clinic director help equip students for handling the emotional challenges of their cases.

“Being part of the CJC has expanded my law school education in a way I could have never imagined,” said Rachel Kunz, a third-year law student and current CJC student attorney. “I feel confident going into the courtroom or family team meetings to advocate for my clients and make their voices heard throughout the process. Being a part of this clinic makes me excited for my future as a lawyer.”