News & Updates

In a recent blog post, Richard Zorza shares some thoughts on improving services for self-represented litigants in the United States. He believes that the legal system needs an aspirational goal to address access to justice, which can ultimately move the system in the direction of meaningful change.

Mark your calendars! The 4th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference will take place October 1-3, 2015, in Denver, Colorado, and will center on our Foundations for Practice project. We will debut the results of our national study to participants and look to them to help us shape the lessons, recommendations, and next steps that will turn the results into action.

The Colorado Supreme Court has requested comments on proposed amendments to the Colorado Rules of Civil Procedure. The changes are focused on improving access to the civil justice system by making pretrial case management more efficient, thereby decreasing cost and delay, without sacrificing justice. The proposals seek to take the best of Colorado’s Civil Access Pilot Project (CAPP) and implement them broadly for all civil cases across the state.

The ABA Section of Dispute Resolution has awarded IAALS and the Resource Center for Separating and Divorcing Families the 2015 Lawyer as Problem Solver Award. This honor is bestowed upon individuals and organizations that employ their problem-solving skills to forge creative solutions.

Jeffrey Thaler, Visiting Professor and University Counsel at the University of Maine, recently published a paper on Meeting Law Students' Experiential Needs in the Classroom: Building an Administrative Law Practicum Implementing the Revised ABA Standards. Thaler hopes others can use this approach to help students be ready to practice beyond the world of judges and juries.

In a recent article, Professor Clare Huntington argues for family law reforms that address the “seismic shift” occurring in American families. Today, more and more children are born to unmarried parents. To date, the legal system has not been responsive in adapting to this shift and fostering more beneficial co-parenting partnerships.

Whether law students are practice-ready after graduation depends greatly upon whom you ask. In BARBRI's first “State of the Legal Field Survey,” 70% of third-year law students thought they possessed “sufficient practice skills” and 76% believed they were ready to practice law “right now.” However, practitioners thought quite differently on the matter. Alli Gerkman weighs in on the discrepancies.

In a recent Politico piece, the former chief justice of Alabama's supreme court offered a firsthand perspective on the relationship between electing judges and maintaining impartial courts and judges, and other judges have shared similar sentiments. In 2012, Chief Justice Cobb participated in an IAALS roundtable, which reached consensus on several "cornerstones" for contested judicial elections.

Minnesota legislators are proposing an alternative to traditional divorce proceedings—the Cooperative Private Divorce. The bill aims to allow couples to form divorce agreements without filing with the court or needing a judge's sign-off. The reform will not replace the current, court-administered divorce system, but adds another option for families to consider.

On March 12, retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was inducted in the Arizona Women's Hall of Fame as a Living Legacy. Justice O'Connor was raised on a ranch near Duncan, Arizona, and was selected for her “decades of work as a judge and her legacy as the first woman appointed to the nation's highest court."

In December, we began contacting state bar leaders across the country, asking them to send a survey to every lawyer in their state in an effort to get to the bottom of a seemingly simple inquiry: what are the foundations that entry-level lawyers need to practice law? With at least 31 states on board with the survey, we're getting data that identifies the foundations—skills, competencies, characteristics, traits—the profession thinks are needed. This is big—and not just for law schools.

The Quality Judges Initiative believes that court systems should reflect the social makeup of their communities, and therefore should be diverse among many demographics. As March is Women's History Month, we recognize the many great women who have laid a foundation for inclusion in the federal judiciary. The U.S. Courts have recognized several women this month, to which we add one more.

New York has set its sights on access to justice and alleviating some of the issues that low-income litigants face needing help from justice system. In his annual State of the Judiciary address on February 17, New York Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman put forth a number of innovative methods for making the state's judiciary more equitable and accessible.

Divorce can put families through a long and difficult process of litigation—but does it have to? At its core, the collaborative divorce process occurs outside of court and seeks to resolve issues in a more respectful and dignified setting. According to a recent article, an increasing number of divorcing spouses are turning to this option, and the ABA Journal recently profiled IAALS' out-of-court approach.

If you’re like most prospective students, there’s a good chance the U.S. News & World Report Law School Rankings will play some kind of role in your decision about where to go to law school. We can all debate the merits of the rankings as a method for choosing a law school, but we can’t stop the world from clamoring for them. So until they’re announced, here are some things to keep you occupied.

As has become standard operating procedure in the last several sessions, the Kansas legislature is once again considering proposals to alter the process for selecting the state's appellate judges. Chief Justice Lawton Nuss has spoken out against efforts to end Kansas' merit selection process for appellate judges and has found an ally in O'Connor Advisory Committee member and former Chief Justice of Texas Wallace Jefferson.

Pennsylvania is one of two states that is electing supreme court justices in 2015. To provide the public with information about judges on the ballot, the Pennsylvania Bar Association offers ratings of appellate judicial candidates provided by the Bar's Judicial Evaluation Commission (JEC). But, a sitting commonwealth court judge and supreme court candidate has called that evaluation process into question.

Last year, the ABA’s Student Lawyer featured Alli Gerkman and her advice for current law students. Gerkman discussed the value of building a personal network and the importance of making and fostering professional connections right from the get-go. "Your success and your ability to make an impact are limited only by the breadth and quality of your personal connections," she said.

Social and mainstream media is abuzz with coverage of a recent segment on HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, in which Oliver skewers judicial elections. With clips of campaign ads that range from the absurd to the appalling, and extreme examples of the tactics some judicial candidates have used to garner campaign contributions, Oliver shines a hilarious but no less accurate light on the "horrifying spectacle" of judicial elections.

A recent survey commissioned by the NCSC explored public opinions of the court system. Compared to a similar survey conducted in April 2012, assessments of state court systems on such measures as integrity, customer service, and stewardship of taxpayer dollars have improved. However, the public still has concerns about the influence of partisanship and political dealmaking, as well as the potential for waste and inefficiency, in the justice system.