Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World

Abstract

As of 2015, legal education has experienced five successive years of intense challenges: enrollments reduced by half of their highest level, pressure to prepare students for a legal services market undergoing major restructuring, significant new bar admission and accreditation requirements. Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World (Lexis 2015) provides a wealth of guidance for institutions and individual teachers facing these challenges. Organized into eight chapters divided into 33 sections, the book draws on the wisdom of 57 authors, including three deans or former deans. The volume suggests best practices, or emerging best practices, for many aspects of legal education. Law school faculty and administrators can find thoughtful advice, whether they are working on school-wide curricular reform or teaching methods within one class. The book provides suggestions for different types of courses, classes and teaching methods, including the Socratic method, teaching technologies, and experiential courses, especially those involving real legal work. The book also addresses newly essential areas of knowledge, skills and values, including professional identity formation, intercultural effectiveness, and business and financial literacy.

The document here includes the table of contents and Introduction. Individual chapters and sub-chapters are posted separately on SSRN. Search by author or title to find them.

The content of this SSRN posting is material that was published in the book Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World, Maranville, et al., Lexis Nexis 2015. The content has been posted on SSRN with the express permission of Lexis Nexis and of Carolina Academic Press, publisher of the book as of January 1, 2016.

Note: The downloadable document provides the book’s Table of Contents and Introduction. To access individual sections of the book, please check the SSRN pages of individual authors or members of author teams.

Keywords: legal education, law schools, pedagogy, teaching, law students, curriculum, curricular reform, innovation