Excerpt:
What do you get when you cross a lawyer and a journalist? Most of the time, of course, you get a lawyer. You know: The kids who worked so hard on the college paper but jetted off to Boalt when the prospect of years of unpaid internships scared them off. Most journalists remember a few people like that. (I know a dozen or so.)
Sometimes, of course, you end up with a journalist ... But not every journalist who covers legal issues has the time (or the money) to get a law degree. That's where John Nockleby comes in.For the past five years, Nockleby has been trying to construct a third breed of reporter/attorney hybrid: the journalist with a crash course in the law. To bring this new beast into the world, this avuncular, bespectacled, aggressively friendly law professor is prepared
to push the limits of what you can teach someone about the American legal system in three and a half days.
...
The JLS program is centered around what are essentially miniature versions of standard first-year law classes: Constitutional law, criminal law, civil procedure, criminal procedure, torts, and so on. I had heard a lot of the basic concepts because my girlfriend (not a former journalist) is a law student. You might think a basic familiarity with the concepts would make the classes boring. But Nockleby, knowing that journalists are an "especially critical" audience, did an excellent job of assembling an engaging group of professors to teach the core classes. Even the most jaded of my fellow students seemed engaged.
Click to read the rest of "Spending the Summer in 'Journalist Law School'" (PBS).
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