idealawg

New Penn Law podcast series brings audiences “great minds on law and life”

News release from Penn Law:

The University of Pennsylvania Law School has launched a new podcast, Case in Point, a series that takes a dynamic new approach to podcasting in higher education and the law.

With over one billion subscriptions through iTunes alone, podcasts are quickly becoming one of the go-to sources of information and entertainment for a tech-savvy audience. A unique resource, Case in Point is produced by a one of the nation’s top law schools and convenes scholars from Penn Law with newsmakers, practitioners, and journalists from around the U.S. and the world. The series delivers smart, accessible conversations that bring experts’ knowledge to bear on major issues of law, policy, business, and culture.

“Through Case in Point, listeners will gain insights into topics where the law significantly intersects with their day-to-day lives, from their health insurance coverage, to finance, to the schools their children attend,” said Wendell Pritchett, Interim Dean of Penn Law and Presidential Professor. “This podcast is an opportunity for us to bring the engaged work of Penn Law and other leading experts directly into listeners’ earbuds, anywhere in the world.”

“Case in Point transforms the connection between the latest scholarship in the law and solutions to the key issues in our society,” said Paul G. Haaga, Jr. L’74, WG’74, a member of NPR’s board of directors who served as NPR’s interim CEO from 2013 to 2014. “Through its innovative format, the series has created a lively venue where audiences can access an array of experts addressing topics that impact all of us.”

While many academic podcasts repurpose lectures and other events for broadcast, each episode of Case in Point contains wholly original content developed expressly for the medium. The program is produced at Penn Law, with Penn scholars and a host appearing in-studio; outside experts participate in the program remotely via video link. Episodes are available in both video and audio-only formats in iTunes, SoundCloud, and via caseinpoint.org.

Read rest here.

New column will track four law students through school and beyond

From the blog of the Denver Bar Association Young Lawyers Division:

Last year, approximately 460 students in Colorado began law school. These students are facing a profession and education that some say is in the middle of a dramatic change.

In light of this, we decided to ask four 1L law students, two from each of Colorado’s law schools (Colorado Law and Denver Law), to submit articles for our new column “Law Student Chronicles” twice per year, for five years. The articles will focus on what it is like to be a law student today, with each student having unique situations and backgrounds. After graduation, we will follow them for a couple more years as they venture out into the legal field. All articles will be available on our blog, dbayounglawyers.org. The blog is open for comments, so please throw in your two cents below or by emailing me at [email protected]. Whether you are a law student or already a lawyer, we want to know your opinion.

Click to read about the four 1Ls who will be contributing.

H/T: Alli Gerkman.

 

The Zen of Law School Success

In the fall 2013 edition of Phi Alpha Delta's The Reporter, I read on page 9 a short article titled "The Art of Zen in Law School." Excerpt:

Chad Noreuil is the author of The Zen of Law School Success and the website, lawschoolzen.com. On the site, Chad has written an article about perseverance and the struggles and frustration law students encounter in their studies.

"At its most fundamental level, like always boils down to two perspectives—"Get To" and "Have To." Everything you do can be compartmentalized into these two categories. The more you choose to place your perspective in the "get to" column, the better your attitude will be ... .

He further speaks on how perspective is a key to not only surviving trying situations in law school and life, but in putting forth our best effort and using situations to better our self and the self of others.

Click to go to lawschoolzen.com, learn more about Chad Noreuil, and read the article about perseverance mentioned above.

New way to study for the bar? Or learn other material? Benefits of being spaced

If you are interested in how we take in new information and then retain it, you will want to read this new article: "Making long-term memories in minutes: a spaced learning pattern from memory research in education" (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience). The article describes a method, Spaced Learning, that may make learning relatively quick and long-lasting. The authors also describe the probable underlying neuroscience. (Basically the technique involves brief bursts of exposure to content interspersed with activity unrelated to the lesson being learned.)

In addition, lead author Dr. Paul Kelley has written a book titled Making Minds: What’s Wrong with Education - and What Should We Do About it? in which he also describes the technique.

I found the reasons cited in the article that teachers resisted the technique to be telling and somewhat disconcerting:

Teachers reacted differently to Spaced Learning though some responses were common to many teachers. Many found Spaced Learning fun, different, and felt it was a positive learning experience for both teachers and learners. Negative responses included rejecting the underlying neuroscience out of hand, a concern about greater workload, and a fear of school inspectors judging Spaced Learning sessions harshly because they did not match recommended teaching methods. 

The students often had a different response: "[They] on the other hand were very positive, asserting Spaced Learning helped them learn rapidly."

To read more from students' responses to Spaced Learning, look at the article and also read this post from Kelley's blog.

Next time I need to learn a body of information, I plan to give this method a try. If you give it a test drive, let me know how you fare, please.

Call for Proposals—Scaling New Heights: Field Placements and the Reform of Legal Education

Next February in Denver, a conference on legal externships will be taking place at U of Denver Law. Excerpt from the Call for Proposals:

Scaling New Heights: Field Placements and the Reform of Legal Education

The Organizing Committee for Externships 7 invites proposals for the seventh national and international conference on legal externships. The Conference will occur from February 27 – March 2, 2014, hosted by the University of Denver, Sturm College of Law, in Denver, Colorado.

The conference focuses on the role of field placements in reforming legal education. The momentum for reform has increased in recent years, spurred by the Carnegie and Best Practices initiatives and changes in the market for new law graduates. The call for “practice-ready” law graduates has come while schools have struggled to define that goal in an era of scarce resources.

At the same time, the number and diversity of field placement programs has expanded rapidly. Externship programs work at the cutting edge of the reform of legal education, offering programmatic and pedagogical pathways to alter how law schools pursue their mission. The Organizing Committee seeks proposals that explore how field placement programs might advance the cause of reform, through distinctive pedagogies, thoughtful design, creative integration into the curriculum and productive relationships with the practicing bar.

We seek proposals from externship clinicians, other clinicians, non-clinical legal educators and administrators, career services professionals, field supervisors, and others with an interest in how field placement clinics might advance legal education reform. We also seek participation from the international community, where field placement programs have played a distinct role in developing clinical education.

Click to read the rest.

BARBRI offering a class on mindfulness

Announcing email from Berkeley Initiative for Mindfulness in Law:

We wanted to share some exciting news from one of our colleagues at BARBRI who has recently created a 4-week mindfulness based bar prep program, set to launch tomorrow - June 25, 2013. We encourage those of you in the law school world, or who know students preparing for the bar exam, to share this widely so that students can access this excellent resource; from previewing the content, we believe it will be of great benefit, and it is available to anyone -- not just those enrolled in Barbri.
 
The audio programs have been developed in partnership with the internationally respected University of California- San Diego Center for Mindfulness, and are aimed specifically at teaching students how to control stress and focus on bar exam preparation.  By listening to an online 30-minute audio session once per week and practicing just 15 minutes 4 times per week, students will develop skills to apply immediately to current studies and in preparing for and taking the bar exam itself.

Further information from Barbri:
In addition to learning these helpful techniques and strategies, we invite students to participate in our ongoing efforts to improve our learning technologies and methods.  In this effort, we have partnered with the University of Missouri Schools of Law, Psychology and Anthropology to help us gather data on the effectiveness of this program.  We will send follow-up surveys, after the bar exam to learn about students’ experience with this resource.  This information will help us further expand and refine our products and will support the expansion of mindfulness as a wellness and productivity tool in the legal profession.
 
To gain access to these programs, students must OPT-IN by clicking here, and this will also serve as a registration to our bi-weekly wellness tip email.
 
Current BARBRI students will be able to access this program through the Enrolled Student Center once they have opted in.
Non-BARBRI students will be able to access the same programs on the external website here once they have opted in.
 
Please feel free to forward this information to all students, faculty and administration whom you believe will be interested in providing this ground-breaking resource to their students. 
 
Best wishes,
The Mindfulness Initiative team

Notion of two-year law school still floating around

From "The two-year itch" (The Economist):

Law students have been saying for years that America’s legal education is broken. Graduates from even the best law schools are failing to find jobs. And those that do often find themselves stuck. The average student takes out more than $100,000 for law school, which is why many feel they cannot afford to leave the profession; governments and NGOs cannot pay them enough.

Members of a group that benefits from the current system—the professors—have started to speak up. Paul Campos of the University of Colorado writes a blog called “Inside the Law School Scam”. Brian Tamanaha of Washington University has published a book called “Failing Law Schools”. And on January 18th the law school of New York University (NYU) held a discussion on a reform that would jolt the system: cutting legal education by a year.

Click to read the rest. Sorry the quote is not indented but TypePad is again being squirrely this morning.

Up, around, and in between: Some dispositions helpful to resolving conflict

I find simple ways of describing things helpful and memorable. Therefore, I was drawn to a quick list in a a book I have been reading called Intellectual Character: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get It. The items on the list are thinking habits or dispositions, and are discussed in the context of intellectual character, but are also thought habits that promote balance, inventiveness, and nimbleness in conflict resolution. The list:

Creative thinking: looking out, up, around, and about

Open-minded

Curious

Reflective thinking: looking within

Metacognitive

Critical thinking: looking at, through, and in between 

Seeking truth and understanding

Strategic

Skeptical

Like this list?

Lawyer and mindfulness expert Scott Rogers receives award

News release from University of Miami School of Law:

"Mindfulness Expert Scott Rogers Receives DBR's Sookie Williams Award"

Miami Law's Scott L. Rogers, a Lecturer in Law who has made a name for himself by urging law students to be cognizant of stress and how to deal with it, has received the Daily Business Review's Sookie Williams Award, given for outstanding service to the legal community. Rogers was given the award on Sept. 21 at the Dade County Bar Association's Installation Luncheon.

"What's especially nice is that it is because of the work being done with mindfulness and the law," Rogers said. He attributed the honor to his founding and directing of the country's first Mindfulness in Law program at any law school, in 2011, and to his teaching the first for-credit mindfulness class for law students, which he began doing the previous year.

This year, Rogers founded the Dade-County Bar Association and Federal Bar Association's Mindfulness in Law Task Force, the first in the country, a body of which he is co-chair. In 2007, he offered the first Mindfulness and Law CLE program in Florida. As far back as 1998, Rogers assembled one of the first mindfulness presentations for lawyers in the country.

Rogers and Jan L. Jacobowitz — a Lecturer in Law and Director of the Professional Responsibility and Ethics Program at Miami Law — are the authors of the book Mindfulness and Professional Responsibility, published by Mindful Living Press.

In an article published earlier this month in the National Law Journal, titled "How to learn the law

"How to learn the law without losing your mind"

Several law schools are providing programs for students which include meditation and other activities leading to mindfulness. You may read about these programs in a new article in National Law Journal. From "How to learn the law without losing your mind":

Law school has long had a reputation as a grueling experience, leading not only to high levels of stress and anxiety but also elevated rates of depression and substance abuse. Legal educators and students alike report that the dismal job market and growing debt loads have heaped even more pressure onto already taxed students. Some schools are responding with programs designed to help students navigate the emotional and psychological minefield that is law school.

Click to read the rest. For more programs, go to contemplativelawstudents.com.