In a recent article for The Recorder, Rachel Van Cleave, dean of Golden Gate University School of Law, an Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Consortium School, champions the efforts of ETL and its collaborative approach to changing legal education. Dean Van Cleave suggests that experiential learning opportunities, like clinics and simulation courses, can be expanded even further to give students a more well-rounded education that exposes them to broader skill sets that are sought by law firms.

IAALS is thrilled by the news that Judge Russell Carparelli of the Colorado Court of Appeals will take the helm at the American Judicature Society (AJS) as of January 1, 2014. IAALS has partnered with AJS on a handful of projects and we look forward to strengthening our collaborative relationship under his leadership. And Judge Carparelli is also a friend of IAALS in both the professional and personal sense, engaged actively in our Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers and Quality Judges Initiatives.

According to a new poll, nearly nine in ten voters believe that judicial campaign support—whether in the form of direct contributions or independent spending—influences judicial decisions. This figure is a sharp increase from similar polls conducted over the last decade. These heightened concerns could be a reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United or to a marked rise in judicial election spending, particularly by outside groups, in recent years.

This short update on the Colorado Civil Access Pilot Project evaluation provides information on the specifics and timing of the evaluation that IAALS is conducting in Colorado. We hope this information will provide some reassurance to the Colorado legal community on what to expect in the coming year, while also providing some insight into other evaluation processes that are going on around the country.

Florida has a commission-based judicial appointment process wherein the governor appoints all members of the nominating commissions, with some of the governor's appointees come from candidate lists submitted by the Florida Bar. According to a new report, Governor Rick Scott often rejects the bar lists and requests additional names, unlike his predecessors Charlie Crist and Jeb Bush, who always accepted the bar's recommendations. And, the pace of these rejections is expected to rise.

Professor Anthony C. Infanti, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, uses a problem-based teaching method to expose students to the complex concept of international tax law. Through this course, Professor Infanti exposes students to what practicing international tax law is really like. The full course portfolio is now available online, including teaching objectives and outcomes, application tools, videos, course materials, and student work.

According to a new analysis, justices on Wisconsin's high court tend to favor parties whose attorneys contributed to their election campaigns. With respect to campaign donations made prior to rulings, justices included in the study ruled in favor of donors 59 percent at the time. This does not establish that campaign support actually influenced decisions, but fair courts advocates worry that the public perceives this to be the case.

Many jurisdictions around the country have implemented alternative processes that are designed to provide litigants with speedy and less expensive access to civil trials. These programs generally involve a simplified pretrial process and a shortened trial on an expedited basis. This new resource offers a summary chart of the various programs nationwide and specific details for each.

Earlier this year, a local news channel praised the University of Miami's Health and Elder Law Medical Legal Partnership in a piece entitled "Joining Forces.” The clinic, run in part by JoNel Newman of the University of Miami School of Law (an ETL Consortium school), takes an innovative approach to treating the legal and medical issues patients face when seeking care by assigning both a medical student and law student to each case.

One of my primary responsibilities as Counsel to the Chief Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court is to start and maintain dialogue among Colorado's law schools, bench, and bar in an effort to find and promote commonality among their efforts to improve our state's legal profession. Naturally, then, I was interested in attending the 2013 Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers conference, which sought to connect the legal academy and members of the legal profession.

Over the summer, the Tennessee legislature declined to renew the state's judicial nominating commission, which was used to recommend well-qualified candidates for appellate judgeships to the governor. Instead, lawmakers chose to let Tennesseans weigh in on the issue in 2014. The judicial selection process appeared to be in limbo in the interim, but Republican Governor Bill Haslam has acted to fill the gap, creating a screening panel by executive order.

Much of the work on core competencies for entry-level lawyers has focused on large firms, often because it has been harder to collect this information from small firms. This is a challenge because small and medium firms continue to be major destinations for law school graduates. Today, in an open letter to law schools, longtime solo, Carolyn Elefant, demanded that law schools teach students to be employable by solos and small firms.