Teaching & Learning Resources: Integrating Skills in the Classroom

After decades of taking a back seat to doctrine, lawyering skills have lately become the star of the legal education reform movement. Few law schools continue to question whether essential lawyering skills such as legal writing, research, and advocacy deserve a prominent place in the curriculum. In this book, which includes an introduction by Sophie Sparrow, more than twenty law professors who have figured out how to bridge the gap show why integrating skills into traditional doctrinal courses is crucial to student learning and offer proven strategies for how to do it.

As one of the 'learned' professions requiring advanced learning and high principles, law enjoys a special standing in society. In return for its status and rank, the legal profession is expected to exhibit the highest levels of honesty, trust and morality, the very values which underpin the legal system itself. This book calls for a realignment of the legal curriculum and pedagogies so as to emphasize the development of culture over industry; character over eloquence; and calling over skill. Chapters are grouped around the core content and key themes of Curiosity, Calling, Character and Conscientiousness, Contract, and Culture.

This title looks at the signature pedagogy set out in the Boulder Statements on Legal Research Pedagogy and Legal Research Education, and places it within the framework of the rich literature on information literacy, adult learning and experiential learning. Chapters include assessment; integrating legal research into the curriculum; teaching the values and limits of intermediation and disintermediation; social networking for workplace and school; metacognition; relationship of legal tools and the legal structure; and critical information studies.

The mandate for more experiential education raises a fundamental question for law teachers: How do we design and provide these learning opportunities for our students? This book offers answers to that question. Organized into four sections, it discusses specific techniques for incorporating various forms of experiential education into the law school curriculum, ranging from discrete modules of experiential instruction to complete curriculum reform.

Calls to reform legal education argue for increasing skills courses and for adding skills components to existing doctrinal courses. What if skills teaching is actually an inherent part of deep doctrinal learning? This book dismantles the theoretical legitimacy of the doctrine-skills divide, identifies its unnecessary negative entailments, and suggests better alternatives.

Historically law schools have not included leadership studies in the curriculum. This book is one of the first to examine whether and how to integrate the theory and practice of leadership studies into legal education and the legal profession. Interdisciplinary in its scope, with contributions from legal educators and practitioners, the book defines leadership in the context of the legal profession and explores its challenges in legal academia, private practice, and government. It also investigates whether law students need to study leadership and, if they should, why it should be offered as part of the curriculum. Finally, it considers how leadership should be taught and how it should be integrated into classes.

Success in every law school course, regardless of doctrine, requires that students acquire and become expert at applying a set of skills that can be taught explicitly throughout the course. This book highlights ways that various academic skills (such as case briefing, close case reading, note taking, outlining, and exam preparation), legal reasoning skills (such as fact identification and analysis, issue spotting, and working with rules), and theoretical perspectives (such as socioeconomics, legal realism, and critical legal theory) can be incorporated directly into the syllabi of first-year courses in general, and contracts courses in particular.