Curricular Innovation
IAALS’ work in legal education began with a commitment to supporting curricular innovation and collaboration among legal educators.
Objectives:
- Support legal educators and law schools that are taking risks and innovating to improve legal education for the profession, for legal consumers, and for society.
- Collect and develop better tools for assessing programs of legal education.
Through online resources, annual conferences, and the first major evaluation of a non-traditional model of legal education, we developed a broad network of legal education innovators and an expansive collection of resources for educators.
IAALS formerly housed this work under its Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers initiative until 2018.
IAALS conducted an evaluation of the Daniel Webster Scholar Honors Program at the University of New Hampshire School of Law to analyze the program's outcomes. The program is a collaboration between...
During the ABA’s 2013 mid-year meeting, the Task Force on the Future of Legal Education heard testimony from individuals about opportunities to improve legal education. Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers...
Our 7th Annual Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers Conference was held November 1-2, 2018, in Denver, Colorado. Our topic this year will cover Phase II of our Foundations for Practice project.
As the institutions entrusted with educating lawyers, law schools are uniquely positioned to ensure that new lawyers are not only prepared to enter the profession, but also to serve clients. The 2017...
Law schools across the country are talking about learning outcomes—what should they be, how do you develop them, and how do you measure them? Our 5th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference...
At the 4th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference, we debuted survey results from our Foundations for Practice project, following a survey of attorneys nationwide to identify the foundations...
Traditional notions of assessment in legal education have limited our capacity to truly measure whether law students are receiving the education and training they need to enter the profession. This...
Our 2nd Annual Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers Conference took a closer look at these 3 questions: What core competencies do entry level lawyers need? What structural and curricular changes ensure law...
Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers hosted its first annual conference, The Development of Professional Identity in Legal Education: Rethinking Learning and Assessment , at the University of Denver Sturm...
It has become an Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers Conference tradition to kick off the first day with a series of Ignite presentations. Presenters have 6 minutes, 20 slides, and 18 seconds per slide to share their projects, successes, and innovative ideas with a room full of legal educators and employers. Below is a list of past presentations.
2017:
- Charles H. Rose III: Simulated Client Experiences in Advocacy Competitions
- Kate Kruse, Ana Pottratz Acosta & Leanne Fuith: Client Contact from Day One
- Michael J. Madison: Teaching Leadership from the Bottom Up
- Stephanie Wilson: Law Librarians Embedding in Clinical Courses
- Christine E. Cerniglia: Serving the Community and Students through Courthouse Self-Help Desks
- Robert D. Dinerstein: Structuring Student Self-Assessment to Prepare Entry-Level Lawyers
- Leah Witcher Jackson Teague: Lawyers Are Leaders: Shouldn't Law Schools Better Prepare Students for this Role, Especially Now?
- Megan Riesmeyer, Lucy Johnston-Walsh: Advanced Clinic, Advanced Preparation
- Rona Sisson: Find Yourself, Find Your Clients - An Introduction to the Study of Legal Taxonomy
- Edward Hart: Alternative Legal Research - Going Beyond Wexis!
- Karen Lockwood: Tomorrow's Clients, Tomorrow's Lawyers, Tomorrow's Justice and Democracy
- John Mayer: Can Experiential Learning Solve the Access to Justice Problem?
- Stephanie Ledesma: Cultural Compassion - A New Model of Legal Representation
- Elizabeth Fraley: Helping Recent Grads Improve Access to Justice
- Robert Furnier: Learning to Serve Tomorrow's Clients by Building Technology
2016:
- Nancy Maurer, Christine Chung, Mary Lynch: Alumni Focus Groups and Pathway Competencies: capturing community expertise to inform student learning
- Charlene James: Talking Growth: Thurgood Marshall School of Law’s Faculty Resource Site
- Randy Wagner: Assessing Professional Identity Formation at Denver Law
- Josie Gough: Building a Community of Legal Professionals- A Collaborative Effort
- Rebecca Trammell: Are We Assessing the Right Things? Are We Teaching the Right Things?
- Mike Madison: Tracking Achievements and Competencies: A Digital Badging Strategy
- Orit Shalomson: Structured Simulations for a Large Number of Students in a Short Time
- Benjamin Madison: Remembering Carnegie's Third Apprenticeship: A Learning Outcome and Course Designed to Advance Professional/Ethical Formation and Decision-Making
- Courtney Brooks: Exposing student foundations: professional portfolios in externships
- Timothy Kaye: Feedback: Fixing Problems You Didn't Know You Had
- Elena Baylis: Equipping Law Students with Policy Skills
- David Thomson, Steve Daniels: What Students Say about Experiential Learning: Preliminary Results from a Three-year study at Denver Law
- Leanne Fuith: Integrating Career Development Across the Curriculum
- Jeff Pokorak: Lawyer Professionalism and Law Professorism – We Need a Universal Translator!
2015:
- Erika Pagano: Building the Future of Law Today
- Natt Gantt: Leadership Development for Law Students
- Randy Wagner: Assessing Learning Outcomes Piece by Piece
- Mary Lynch, Rosemary Queenan: Inclusive Strategic Planning and Adoption of Learning Outcomes
- Laurel Terry, Camille Marion: Dickinson Law’s New Curriculum and its Focus on Student Outcomes
- JoNel Newman: Students' Self Assessments of Competency
- Ann Southworth: Teaching Ethics and Professional Identity in the First Year
- Fernando Colon-Navarro: Technology and Assessment in the Legal Classroom
- Mary Bowman: Collaborating for Transfer
- Jerry Slater: Preliminary Outcomes of an Innovation Curriculum
- Andrew Crouse: Mitchell's Hybrid JD Program
- Dan Jackson, Hemanth Gundavaram: Northeastern Law’s Curriculum Transformation Project
- Rodger Citron: The Portals to Practice – Experiential Education at Touro
- Christine Cerniglia Brown: Learning Outcomes and Implementing New ABA Standards
- Docia Rudley, Cassandra Hill: Developing Meaningful Program Assessment
2014:
- David Thomson: The Experiential Advantage Program at the University of Denver
- Jeremy Paul: Law School Assessment, the Positives and the Negatives
- Andrew Schepard: Interdisciplinary Learning Through the RCSDF at the University of Denver
- Michael Madison: The Innovation Practice Institute
- Jay Finkelstein: Collaboration to Produce the Practice Aware Lawyer
- Ilene Seidman: Accelerator to Practice
- Natt Gantt, Ben Madison: Cultivating Professional Identity in Law School
- David Herring: Course Level Assessment to Institutional Level Assessment
- Jennifer Gundlach: Improving Learning Outcomes
- Kate Kruse: Hamline Lawyering Skills Lab
These course portfolios are shared here by professors who have distinguished themselves as leaders in legal education; who have incorporated into their own teaching a commitment to producing more practice-ready and professional graduates; and who demonstrate a willingness to share their expertise and experiences with others who want to develop these courses at their own institutions.
Portfolios include background material, video tutorials, teaching methods, recommendations and strategies for adaptation, and outcomes.
Administrative Law is a required course at our law school. I have taught the course in this simulation four times over ten years. The course teaches all three Carnegie categories: legal analytics,...
This course is one of several advanced Lawyering Process (research, analysis & writing) courses students at UNLV can take to satisfy the third semester Lawyering Process requirement. I teach the...
Upper Level / Carnegie Integrated Course / Required / Legal Writing 50 students per semester First use of this course: Spring Quarter 2009 Last use of this course: Spring Quarter 2011 State Procedure...
80 students per semester First use of this course: Autumn Semester 2002 Last use of this course: Autumn Semester 2011 Contracts is a required first-year, two-course sequence. I began changing the...
This innovation takes the basic first year Contracts class and reorients it to focus on teaching students how to “do” contracts in a team-based case-based setting. I have taught the course five times...
32 students per semester First time administration of the course: Spring 1997 Most recent administration of the course: Fall 2009 This course has been taught eight times. This is an upper level...
Copyright Law is an upper-level elective focusing on the American copyright system. I have taught the course since 2001. Beginning in the Spring of 2005, I have based student assessment on a series...
20 students per semester First time administration of the course: Fall, 1993 Most recent administration of the course: Spring, 2011 This is a whole course simulation. This course is an upper level...
The four-credit Evidence Law course is a core upper-level course and a component of the required curriculum. It is considered a "code" course, focusing on the Federal Rules of Evidence and...
40 students per semester First use of this course: Autumn Semester 2008 Last use of this course: Spring Semester 2011 Family Law with Skills covers the same core legal doctrine material as the...
This is a course on Louisiana family law, with comparisons made to laws from other jurisdictions when appropriate. The course is taught through fourteen Problem Sets, which present hypothetical...
Since 2005, the Health Rights Clinic (formerly Health and Elder Law Clinic) as been an in-house live client clinical course at the University of Miami Law School, offered to second and third year law...
For the past 10 years, we have been teaching a unique class at American University Washington College of Law based on experiential learning structured around an extended simulated negotiation of a...
International Tax is an advanced tax course taken by upper-level students. The course is designed to transmit substantive knowledge about U.S. international tax rules to students and to prepare them...
10-45 students per semester Regularly taught since 1995 My course in Labor Relations Law is an upper level, elective course. I have taught the course as a whole course simulation more than ten times...
Every year, more than 45,000 law students in the United States take a mandatory course in professional responsibility. Despite its prevalence, the course is often viewed as dreary and uninteresting,...
There are two immersion courses in our new 3L experiential curriculum, which is required of all students. The fall two-week immersion is litigation oriented while the spring two-week immersion is...
This is an elective course that students take in their second or third year. It builds on a required first-year course at Missouri, Lawyering: Problem-Solving and Dispute Resolution , which provides...
Professional Responsibility (often called Legal Ethics) is a notoriously difficult subject to teach, in part because it is typically the only course students are required to take after their first...
At our law school, in response to the Carnegie Report, we sought to introduce 1L students to substantively engaging areas of practice while infusing practical “lawyering skills” and core values. We...
Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers Consortium (2011-2017)
IAALS' Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers initiative partnered with law schools that are committed to our mission of aligning legal education with the needs of an evolving profession. IAALS works with a wide range of law schools across the country and we are especially grateful to the schools below, which joined our Consortium during our formative years. We no longer have a formal Consortium, but we continue to benefit from our partnership with these and many other schools, as well as educators, lawyers, employers, and others who are making a difference in the way we educate tomorrow’s lawyers.
Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers Fellows
The Fellows of Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers are individuals who have distinguished themselves as leaders in legal education; who have incorporated into their own teaching a commitment to producing more practice-ready and professional graduates; and who demonstrate a willingness to share their expertise and experiences with others. ETL honors the Fellows for their achievements.
Chair in Modern Learning and Professor of Law, University of Denver Sturm College of Law
Professor of Law and Economics, University of Southern California Gould School of Law
Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh School of Law
Co-Director, Center for Ethical Formation & Legal Education Reform, Regent University School of Law
Faculty Director, Innovation Practice Institute, University of Pittsburgh School of Law
Associate Dean for Clinical Education and Director of the Mills Legal Clinic, Stanford Law School
Director of Clinic for Asylum, Refugee and Emigrant Services and Professor of Law, Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law
Associate Professor of Law and Director of Litigation Center, Golden Gate University School of Law
Sidney and Walter Siben Distinguished Professor of Law, Maurice A. Deane School of Law, Hofstra University
Associate Director and Clinical Instructor, Health Rights Clinic, University of Miami School of Law
Assistant Professor in Residence, University of Nevada Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law
Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers Advisory Committee (2011-2014)
Professor of Law and Economics, University of Southern California Gould School of Law
Associate Dean for Clinical Education and Director of the Mills Legal Clinic, Stanford Law School
Former Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers Inc.
