Journal of Legal Education (Association of American Law Schools)

Minow, Martha

Barton Tobin, Susannah

English

Archetypal Legal Scholarship: A Field Guide, 2d. Edition

Dinerstein, Robert

Paul, Jeremy R.

Rolland, Sonia E.

Rosser, Ezra

385Journal of Legal Education, Volume 71, Number 3 (Spring 2022) From the EditorsThis issue features a wide-ranging collection of articles and book reviews addressing timely and timeless issues in legal education. From pedagogy to artificial intelligence, from podcasts to genres of legal scholarship, our authors cover a broad spectrum of topics central to the legal academy. We trust there will be something in these pages to interest almost everyone. The issue opens with a test of whether AI-generated exam responses can pass law school finals. The answer, according to four University of Minnesota Law School professors, Jonathan H. Choi, Kristin E. Hickman, Amy B. Monahan, and Daniel Schwarcz, is a qualified “yes.” The AI-generated exam answers generally scored on the low end of the curve, but were still in the passing range. The article highlights both the level of AI-generated responses and the importance of well-drafted prompts when requesting quality AI-generated answers. Next, Bridgette Carr, Vivek Sankaran, and Taylor J. Wilson present a novel curricular response to the mental health crisis in the legal profession. They describe the structure and content of the University of Michigan’s “Designing a Fulfilling Life in the Law” course. The class requires students to engage in a deliberative process of charting a fulfilling professional and personal path and to develop an array of skills critical to well-being. The next three articles focus on pedagogy. Marni Goldstein Caputo and Kathleen Luz celebrate the power of podcasts to connect law students with the lawyer experience. As they show, alternative media, including podcasts, can help students relate to the material in a way that emphasizes the human element in lawyering. In their appropriately titled article, The Case Against Commercial Casebooks, W. David Ball and Michelle Oberman argue that professors should abandon commercial casebooks in favor of open-access alternatives. Highlighting the need to lower student costs, the authors explain how even seasoned professors can make the transition to open-source material. Paul Figueroa directs our attention to the importance of schema in the formation of long-term memories. His article uses an illustrated lesson on the parol evidence rule to show how analogies and visuals can help students understand complex topics. Archetypal Legal Scholarship: A Field Guide, 2nd ed., updates a classic work. Martha Minow and Susannah Barton Tobin sort legal scholarship into nine categories and provide citations to representative works in each category. The article ends with advice for those just getting started writing legal scholarship. The penultimate article, by April Land and Aliza Organick, focuses on how law schools can better prepare students for (clinical) practice. The article ties the educational concepts of backward design, transfer of learning, and 386 Journal of Legal Educationcurricular mapping to efforts made at the University of New Mexico School of Law to better integrate non-clinical teaching with clinical practice. Finally, the contribution by John Kirlin, Jeffrey Michael, and Francis J. Mootz III looks in detail at the process and challenges involved in the launch of two master’s degree programs by University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law. At a time when many law schools are either starting or contemplating such non-J.D. programs for both pedagogical and financial reasons, lessons from this article extend well beyond the McGeorge experience. Following our usual practice, we close with three book reviews. Marsha Griggs and Andrea A. Curcio review Joan Howarth’s book, Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing, delving into issues of fairness, bias, and competency concerns related to how lawyers are admitted to the bar. Law professors curious about law school discipline norms and historical practices will learn a great deal from the detailed review by Robert E. Rains of Robert M. Jarvis’s book, The Expelled Law Student—A Case Law Survey. Rounding out this issue of the Journal is Lawrence Krieger’s extensive review and essay inspired by Shailini Jandial George’s book, The Law Student’s Guide to Doing Well and Being Well. This issue contains a bit of the old and a bit of the new. Some issues in legal academia are always with us: what is good scholarship and how can we better reach our students. Other topics—such as the possibility that students could use AI to pass their exams—feel almost futuristic. Yet we hope you will agree that, collectively, this collection of articles and book reviews contributes to our understanding of legal education. We welcome your continued engagement. Robert Dinerstein Ezra Rosser Jeremy Paul Sonia E. Rolland

From the Editors

Griggs, Marsha

Curcio, Andrea A.

Book Review of Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing

Khalik, Faith

Lincoln, Alisa

Salus Populi: Educating Judges on the Social Determinants of Health

Ginsburg, Tom

Academic Freedom and Democratic Backsliding

Corrada, Roberto L.

Teaching a Hybrid Administrative Law Simulation Class Using Jurassic Park

Bix, Brian H.

Book Review of Advanced Introduction to Legal Reasoning

Land, April

Organick, Aliza

Moving Law Schools Forward by Design: Designing Law School Curricula to Transfer Learning from Classroom Theory to Clinical Practice and Beyond

Figueroa, Paul

If You Draw It, Students Learn It: An Approach to Teaching Contracts and Other Doctrinal Courses

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Archetypal Legal Scholarship: A Field Guide, 2d. Edition

From the Editors

Book Review of Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing

Salus Populi: Educating Judges on the Social Determinants of Health

Academic Freedom and Democratic Backsliding

Teaching a Hybrid Administrative Law Simulation Class Using Jurassic Park

Book Review of Advanced Introduction to Legal Reasoning

Moving Law Schools Forward by Design: Designing Law School Curricula to Transfer Learning from Classroom Theory to Clinical Practice and Beyond

From the Editors

If You Draw It, Students Learn It: An Approach to Teaching Contracts and Other Doctrinal Courses

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