Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers Fellow, Professor Michael Madison, has written a blog post examining the state of legal education and emphasizing the need for change. Professor Madison suggests that law schools need to integrate the client relationship throughout their curriculum to prevent the turmoil in the profession from escalating.

In August, the American Bar Association formed the Task Force on the Future of Legal Education to analyze the challenges facing law schools. The Task Force is now seeking comments about the goals law schools should adopt; student demographics; how schools should be financed and accredited; and the ways in which law school costs affect students and the legal profession.

Speaking at the Colorado Judicial Institute’s Tenth Annual Judicial Excellence for Colorado dinner, former Iowa justices Marsha Ternus, David Baker, and Michael Streit stressed the importance to the business and legal communities of maintaining an independent judiciary. According to Justice Ternus, this is a critical factor for businesses in deciding where to locate, as they “want predictability and to know that the courts follow the facts of law, not the whims of special interest groups.”

People for the American Way lauded the work of a federal judicial screening committee established by Senators Udall and Bennet to assist them in recommending to the White House a replacement for a retiring U.S. District Court judge. Upon learning of Chief Judge Wiley Daniel’s plans to take senior status, the senators reactivated the 11-member bipartisan panel they have used for two previous vacancies.

Professor Rebecca Aviel, member of the Steering Committee to the Honoring Families Initiative, has won the third annual Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship in Professional Responsibility for her article, “The Boundary Claim’s Caveat: Lawyers and Confidentiality Exceptionalism,” which was published in the Tulane Law Review.

Congratulations to Professor Howard Markman, member of the Honoring Families Initiative Advisory Committee, for receiving the University of Denver's John Evans Professorship Award.

Proponents of replacing Minnesota’s nonpartisan judicial elections with commission-based gubernatorial appointment, retention elections, and performance evaluation were pleased to see Democrats regain a majority in the legislature for 2013, believing that the reform movement lost momentum when Republicans took over in 2010.

The Texas Supreme Court has issued its long-awaited rules for expedited actions this week, making the process mandatory in cases of $100,000 or less. The rules are being adopted as a result of Texas legislation that called upon the Court to promulgate "rules to promote the prompt, efficient, and cost-effective resolution of civil actions."

In an interview with Parade Magazine, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Honorary Chair of the Advisory Committee to the Quality Judges Initiative, discusses why approval ratings for the U.S. Supreme Court justices have fallen, stressing that the public's broken confidence in the courts is due to misconceptions that the Court should base their decisions on political and personal beliefs rather than on the law.

Rebecca Love Kourlis, Executive Director of IAALS, will speak about the organization’s work to improve the use of financial experts in litigation on December 5. She will discuss how civil pretrial processes involving financial experts might be streamlined to increase the experts’ effectiveness and reduce client costs, which is the focus of a recently published report, Another Voice: Financial Experts on Reducing Client Costs in Litigation.

The defeat of two incumbent supreme court justices has led some to consider making changes to the judicial election process. Neither justices’ qualifications were called into question, and both received higher ratings from the state bar association than did their challengers—one of whom was “not recommended.”

Senate Republicans are split on whether to consider confirmation of judicial nominees, many of which have been pending for several months, during the lame-duck session or wait until the next Congress.