At Denver Law, we have long been committed to innovation along the lines of the Carnegie Model. We opened our first legal clinic at the turn of the last century (in 1904).
But our new Strategic Plan renews that commitment with vigor. Our Modern Learning Initiative commits to produce practice-ready lawyers by emphasizing and integrating the three Carnegie apprenticeships as broadly as possible across our curriculum. To that end:
- We are adding 10 new faculty members over the next three years – a 20% increase in our faculty size. (This combines with a recent reduction in our class size by 20% to significantly alter our faculty-student ratio, significantly improving our ability to offer integrated apprenticeship courses and deepening instruction across all three Carnegie apprenticeships in all of our course offerings.)
- 5 of those new faculty members will be in our Clinical Program, allowing us to expand our clinical offerings, and deepening the level of instruction and opportunities for learning in clinical courses. (We already have 10 tenure-track clinical faculty and 3 fellows in 6 clinics, including our new, transaction-based Community Economic Development Clinic.
- We have one of the largest externship programs in the country, placing more than 400 externs last year in high-quality experiential learning opportunities. We plan to increase our externship faculty to increase the quality of our externships even further.
- We have developed a template for Carnegie Integrated Courses, which exemplify the integration of the three apprenticeships–including full-course, capstone style simulations. We are proud to feature two of those courses (Roberto Corrada’s labor law simulation and David Thomson’s Discovery Practicum) for the launch of Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyer’s website.
We look forward to working with the Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers consortium and leaders in legal education across the country to advance innovation and quality in legal education in line with the Carnegie Model.