For many law school graduates, eight weeks from tomorrow is your bar exam. Are you ready? Have you cleared your calendar and said No to everyone trying to take your time away from studying.
Remember the bar exam is a marathon, not a sprint. Get started today. And, if you need a break and some motivation, check out the audio recording of Bar Exam Success: A Comprehensive Guide on your West Academics platform or at the West Academics store, from Amazon, or from the ABA bookstore.
 Step-by-Step Guide to Contracts |
| Sara J. Berman, Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center Steven J. Bracci, Concord Law School  About the Book: The Step-by-Step Guide to Contracts is an interactive workbook designed to effectively prepare students to pass exams. The most heavily tested legal rules are presented in a format that mirrors the way they arise as issues in typical testing fact patterns. Rule statements are set out in easy-to-memorize statements, with a breakdown of the element components and logical steps to take to apply new facts to each legal element.Fluency with the legal terminology is also essential to exam success, so this Step-by-Step Guide includes fill-in-the-blank spaces to help you learn and memorize definitions of key terms as they are introduced, and a glossary of selected terms at the end for further reference. In addition to learning the law and memorizing key rules and terms, success in law school also requires the hard work of deep learning, engaging with problems to test your own knowledge, and working toward gaining a strong command of all testable topics. To that end, this Guide contains short-answer Test Yourself questions. Working through these questions and then reading the answers and explanations to determine where your understanding is clear and where you must do additional work will help you master the skill of applying the relevant rules to new and different fact patterns. In addition to the short-answer questions, this Guide also includes numerous full-length essay questions with sample answers —providing further practice to test your knowledge and deepen your learning.  C |
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Hats off to LSAC for its important webinar yesterday featuring Berkeley Law Dean, Erwin Chemerinsky. As LSAC President Kellye Testy said at the close of the session, I too felt a longing to return to the richness of law school learning while listening to Dean Chemerinsky’s review of recent Supreme Court decisions.
The session yesterday also provided a hopeful counterpart to Dean Paul Caron’s post yesterday, “Is A Law School Meltdown Coming?” (Thank you, Dean Caron for this warning that I hope we all heed, and for the rays of light in between the cautionary notes.) Dean Chemerinksy showed every prospective law student —via a distance learning delivery system I might add — why the law and legal education are critically important —indeed vital to the future of our democracy. And, to all who watched and listened or will do so when the video link is posted, yesterday’s Constitutional Law session provides irrefutable evidence that great teaching is great teaching, in any delivery mode.
Distance learning is not new. We have long been engaged in deep learning without being in the same room through books, movies, and educational television. How many Americans learned just recently about the history of the founding of our nation through singing the lyrics of Hamilton (from a distance, not “in the room where it happened”)—and how many more will learn our history when the play comes out this week on television? Thank you, Lin-Manuel Miranda, @Lin_Manuel, one of today’s greatest distance educators! How many of us know about how a bill becomes a law or proper use of conjunctions because of watching Schoolhouse Rock? And, history is replete with people who have fallen in love, sustained relationships, started revolutions, and changed the world through letter writing.
I am a legal ed distance learning pioneer. When people question me about online learning in legal education, I often point to Professor Arthur Miller, who in addition to teaching in person for more than fifty years at Harvard Law School and now at NYU, has taught more American lawyers, judges, and everyday citizens about civil procedure and the American legal system than anyone could possibly ever count, in multiple distance formats—through his treatise, casebooks, and hornbooks, his decades of bar review, the PBS Fred Friendly series for which he won an Emmy, his Good Morning American legal commentating, not to mention the incomparable civil procedures lectures he recorded for the first online law school, where I served for some fifteen years as a faculty member and assistant dean.
Quite simply, anyone who categorically dismisses “distance learning” in legal education as some sort of inferior substitute has never heard, watched, or read the teachings of Arthur Miller or Erwin Chemerinksy, or any of the thousands of other brilliant law professors across this country who are right now preparing to teach superb online courses this fall. And, this is what we should be doing —preparing for the fall. In a June 30, 2020 brilliant post, former Northwestern Dean Dan Rodriguez rightly lauds Professor Deborah Merritt as follows, “What Prof. Merritt captures well, and what I and others have tried hard to capture as we have discussed this issue privately and publicly is this: We can and should put on a full-court-press to develop and refine our remote/online teaching abilities so as to commit to giving our students an excellent educational experience — excellent in curricular content, excellent in experiential/skill-building opportunities, and excellent in the community-building that technology can assist us with, if we are diligent and strategic, energetic and empathetic.”
Coincidentally published today is the Summer 2020 issue of the AccessLex publication, Raising the Bar, which I founded and am so proud to serve as managing editor of. This issue is dedicated to distance learning in legal education, and features among other content, important wisdom from four visionary law school deans who are at the helm of hybrid JD programs that were educating for the 21st century prior to the pandemic. I hope that readers will feel inspired to continue working to develop the kind of excellent educational experience in learning that Professor Merritt and others envision.
As legal education continues in part or fully online in the new academic year and until this virus is eradicated, and perhaps beyond, let’s work together with the same fervor depicted in Alexander Hamilton’s writing “like he’s running out of time,” to see the virtual halls of our nation’s law schools filled this fall with the brightest, most engaged minds —students from all backgrounds who are ready to learn to protect the Constitution and to ensure that our nation remains a thriving democracy, governed by the rule of law.
AALS 2016, after CALI’s early morning breakfast meeting, I found myself in the elevator with Deb Quentel. CALI’s newly released set of skills lessons trace back to that elevator! Deb and I talked then and then at length when I returned to South Florida. I shared how excited I was about the lessons, tracking and assessment opportunities. I incorporated CALI lessons right away into 2L and 3L courses in the ASP department I directed at NSU, and I spoke with Deb about ideas to create skills lessons –for all law students including 1Ls. I did not have the bandwidth then to develop them, but I held on tightly to the ideas.
Fast forward to the CALI annual conference in 2018. I sat with John Mayer and we talked at length. I suggested CALI consider developing law school ASP skills lessons, and encouraged CALI to apply for an AccessLex Grant to fund the effort. The rest, as they say, is history. The Law School Academic and Skills Lessons are live! Thank you, CALI. And, thank you, AccessLex!
These lessons will allow ASPers nationwide to expand their reach and their offerings to students. As all of us who are or have been in the ASP trenches know just how important it is to have quality resources for our students. These are also all online so perfectly adaptable to the shift to online learning that the pandemic forced on us and that you all have embraced heroically. And, as if all of that were not enough, what I am most proud of is that these are not only the highest quality (and editable by faculty who use them), they are free to law students in CALI member schools. This project thus serves the invaluable purpose of democratizing reliable supplements. Already stretched financially to intolerable levels, with the negative economic ripple of this pandemic, the importance of free quality study and skills resources simply cannot be overstated.
So again, thank you John, Deb, Sara, and everyone at CALI. Thank you Allie, Laura, Nicole, Courtney, Renee, Melissa, and Steven — the faculty authors. Thank you to all the peer reviewers. And, thank you AccessLex for supporting this project.
And, thanks to legal educators across the country. Our collective support of law students is vital, now more than ever, to maintain our nation as one governed by the rule of law.
All posts on this blog are my own; they do not represent any institution.
Compiling list below with resources for online teaching and learning, from messages exchanged by faculty as the nation’s law schools have gone online, overnight. Recalling a 2008 interview in the California Bar Journal, December 2008: “The curriculum includes live classes, assigned reading, video lectures, essays and tests in 11-day modules. “Other than eye contact and body language, the discussion is, in many ways, quite similar to that of a traditional law school classroom,” said Concord professor Sara Berman. And Berman, a UCLA School of Law graduate herself, sees advantages to a virtual classroom: The interaction is based solely on the discussion’s content, not on the student’s gender, race or looks, for example. Students don’t have to commute. They can review archived classes. And they gain extra experience in written communication.”
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Miscellaneous Resources on Online Teaching and Learning*
*Not endorsing any of the resources below; just listing them.
https://www.cali.org/books/distance-learning-legal-education-design-delivery-and-recommended-practices (published guide.)
https://www.law.du.edu/online-learning-conference/conference-schedule (Videos embedded in conference schedule)
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2020/03/assessment-in-online-law-school-classes.html
Thoughts for Law Professors Contemplating Moving to Virtual Classes, By Allie Robbins, March 10, 2020, https://passingthebar.blog/author/smashthebar/
- A virtual classroom tour of one of our online courses: https://jdinteractive.syr.edu/classroom-tour/
- Q&A with Law.com on nuts & bolts of pivoting to online education amid this crisis: https://www.law.com/2020/03/10/law-schools-shift-classes-online-amid-covid-19-but-can-they-do-it-right/
- An article for the NY Bar Journal that outlines online program at Syracuse University, and its goals for expanding access to education and justice: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3276305
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/advice-online-teaching
Will update list, and again, not endorsing any of the above resources.
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All posts on this blog are my own; they do not represent any institution.
All posts on this blog are my own; they do not represent any institution.
The present state of the world, in pandemic, reminds us that we are all connected, and we are all in this together. For that reason, my current playlist includes a set of recordings by many different artists the world over called, “Playing for Change” –songs around the world. Here are just some of many Playing for Change songs:
For more info, from Wikipedia: “Playing For Change was founded in 2002 by Mark Johnson and Whitney Kroenke.[1][2] Producers Johnson and Enzo Buono traveled around the world to places including New Orleans, Barcelona, South Africa, India, Nepal, the Middle East and Ireland. Using mobile recording equipment, the duo recorded local musicians performing the same song, interpreted in their own style. Among the artists participating or openly involved in the project are Vusi Mahlasela, Louis Mhlanga,Clarence Bekker, David Guido Pietroni, Tal Ben Ari (Tula), Bono, Keb’ Mo’, David Broza, Manu Chao, Grandpa Elliott, Keith Richards, Toots Hibbert from Toots & the Maytals, Taj Mahal and Stephen Marley.[3][4][5] This resulted in the documentary A Cinematic Discovery of Street Musicians that won the Audience Award at theWoodstock Film Festival in September 2008.[6][7]Mark Johnson was walking in Santa Monica, California, when he heard the voice of Roger Ridley (deceased in 2005)[8]singing “Stand By Me“; it was this experience that sent Playing For Change on its mission to connect the world through music.[9] The founders of Playing For Change created the Playing For Change Foundation, a separate 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.”
All posts on this blog are my own; they do not represent any institution.
A group of us who have been involved in lawyer licensing and legal education for many years lay out options for bar admission in the current context at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3559060.
All posts on this blog are my own; they do not represent any institution.
In tough times, people sometimes show the brightest colors. It has been great connecting with all sorts of people who are struggling, and fearful –many of whom are entirely alone. A while back, I shared a gratitude pact with a new friend, texting at least three things each day that unexpected made us smile. Here are some things I am grateful for today:
Law School & Bar Exam Success 