Chief Justice Paul De Muniz announced that he will retire from the supreme court in January 2013. De Muniz’s announcement came well in advance so that prospective candidates for his seat could prepare for the 2012 election.
Annita M. Menogan is currently responsible for oversight of all legal matters for Red Robin, including compliance and corporate governance, and is a member of the Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers Advisory Committee. She recently sat down with us to talk about the future for law students and new law graduates in the profession. In her Voices from the Field interview, Menogan raises several issues about the current state of legal education, and some possible solutions.
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich promised to “restore the proper role of the judicial branch.” Among his proposals in this regard are ignoring federal court decisions with which he disagrees and subpoenaing federal judges to seek explanations for their decisions.
In a recent presentation, Professor Daniel Martin Katz of Michigan State University College of Law promoted a new law school model that, among other things, blends practice skills with doctrine and favors students with undergraduate majors in science and engineering.
When we discuss legal education reform, some of the more jaded members of our community often ask, “Why is this time any different?” They rattle off a list of dust-covered reports about proposed reforms for legal education, often dating back several decades, and wonder how we can be optimistic about the prospects for meaningful reform now. The answer is that we are in the midst of a perfect storm; one in which several powerful forces are driving law schools toward reform.
As described in an earlier post, Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers initiated a unique, far-reaching survey of 210 U.S. and Canadian law schools. Now completed, the survey has a 58% response rate. Before presenting the findings in a series of future posts, we face a key prior task – describing the responding schools and seeing how closely they resemble all schools and the non-responding schools.
Supreme court justice Michael Eakin, who is standing for retention in November, has so far raised $427,000 to keep his seat. Even though the race is uncontested, his campaign may be preparing for a last-minute attack. (Pennsylvania judges are first chosen in partisan elections and stand for retention for subsequent terms. Judicial elections are held in off years in conjunction with municipal elections.)
A subcommittee of the judicial branch in Connecticut is reviewing whether the state's evaluation system, which includes surveys to jurors and attorneys, is achieving its goal. The subcommittee is considering ways to revise the existing questionnaire.
State legislatures are increasingly eyeing court budgets as they try to make deep cuts into their budgets, leaving state courts woefully underfunded...