PATRICIA GRANDE MONTANA, St. John's University - School of Law
Email: GrandeP@stjohns.edu

There has been much discussion over the impact the Carnegie Report and Best Practices Report has had and will continue to have on legal education. This article offers a unique way that law schools can meet some of the challenges of the reports.

The reports focused, in part, on the academy's role in preparing students for practice. They concluded that law schools must devote more attention and resources to helping students develop the professional skills they will need in practice. The consensus was that the traditional case method of teaching is insufficient on its own to train students for practice. Thus, they recommended that law schools broaden the ways in which they teach their students to become lawyers by, for example, incorporating "settings and pedagogies different from those used in the teaching of legal analysis." (Carnegie Report at 14). They suggested that law schools can unite "formal knowledge" and "the experience of practice" by also offering non-traditional curricular offerings, such as clinics, externships, simulations, and other like opportunities. (Carnegie Report at 12).

The Street Law program, a course that allows students to teach a law-related education course to high school students in the community, uniquely incorporates many of the recommendations of the reports. Through their teaching, law students learn the practical applications of legal concepts and practice important lawyering skills. Using the Street Law program as an illustration, this article demonstrates how non-traditional course offerings can provide powerful professional development opportunities for students. Thus, the program serves as an excellent model for how law schools can integrate the teaching of knowledge, skills, and values into their curricula.

BEN BRATMAN, University of Pittsburgh - School of Law
Email: beb9@pitt.edu

Given the ABA's recent decision to permit law schools to offer a bar exam preparation course for credit, schools now have an enhanced opportunity to increase the percentage of their students who pass the profession's all-important licensing exam. For many law schools, an effective means of taking advantage of this opportunity could be a for-credit course focusing exclusively on the written portions of the bar exam and targeting primarily those students whose law school grades place them at the greatest risk of failing the exam. Offering a for-credit course on only the written portions of the exam, in lieu of a comprehensive bar exam preparation course, taps a strength of law schools-teaching the skills of legal reading, analysis and writing. It also leaves to the omnipresent commercial preparation courses what they best provide and what law schools are disinclined or ill equipped to provide: comprehensive outlines and rote lecturing on substantive law, and practice multiple-choice questions from the Multistate Bar Exam.

Providing a for-credit course specifically on writing for the bar exam makes particular sense at schools whose graduates take the bar exam mostly in jurisdictions that place greater scoring weight on the written portions of the exam, and at schools whose graduates tend to perform better on the multiple choice questions than on the written ones. Both of these factors hold true at the school where I teach, the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, which offers a two-credit bar writing course. Through invitation letters and a priority enrollment procedure, the law school ensures the course includes a large percentage of students whose academic performance places them at higher risk of failing the bar exam. In the course, students write answers to several practice essays and a performance test under test-taking conditions and receive extensive feedback through various means. Initial lay statistical analysis suggests the course has had a positive impact on the law school's bar passage rate.

MOLLY T. O'BRIEN, Australian National University
Email: mobrien@uakron.edu
JOHN LITTRICH, University of Wollongong
Email: littrich@uow.edu.au

A comprehensive audit of the skills curriculum offered to students in a Bachelor of Laws program yielded important insights about the collective impact of assessment tasks on the hidden and operational skills curriculum. This qualitative case study supports the views (1) that assessment tasks provide significant skills practice and performance opportunities for students; (2) that assessment provides students with important cues about what type of learning is valued; and (3) that review of assessment practices across the curriculum can provide important information for curricular reform.

FRANCIS JOSEPH MOOTZ, William S. Boyd School of Law, UNLV
Email: Jay.Mootz@unlv.edu

This paper was presented on October 14, 2008 as part of a panel addressing "The Influence of Perelman in Legal Philosophy" at a conference hosted by the Perelman Center for the Philosophy of Law, Free University of Brussels.

I argue that Perelman's philosophy is connected with legal practice, but that he never made the connections between his philosophy and legal education explicit. I refer to the work of Isocrates and Vico, and conclude that Perelman's philosophy can teach us much about contemporary legal education as we strive to address the questions raised by the Carnegie Report.