Institutional Failure, Campus Sexual Assault and Danger in the Dorms: Regulatory Limits and the Promise of Tort Law

Schools are in a position to help reduce the risk of campus sexual assault through risk education. Litigation and publicity against educational institutions could help to shine a light on the problem

A Simple Low-Cost Institutional Learning-Outcomes Assessment Process

Law school institutional learning outcomes require measuring nuanced skills that develop over time. Rather than look at achievement just in our own courses, institutional outcome-measures assessment requires collective faculty engagement and critical thinking about our students’ overall acquisition of the skills, knowledge, and qualities that ensure they graduate with the competencies necessary to begin life as professionals. Even for those who believe outcomes assessment is a positive move in legal education, in an era of limited budgets and already over-burdened faculty, the new mandated outcomes assessment process raises cost and workload concerns. This essay addresses those concerns. It describes a relatively simple, low-cost model to measure institutional law school learning outcomes that does not require any initial changes in individual faculty members’ pedagogical approach or assessment methods. It explains how a rubric method, used by the Association of American Colleges and Universities [AAC&U] and medical educators to assess a wide range of nuanced skills such as critical thinking and analysis, written and oral communication, problem-solving, intercultural competence, teamwork, and self-reflection, could be adapted by law schools. The essay explains a five-step institutional outcomes assessment process: 1. Develop rubrics for institutional learning outcomes that can be assessed in law school courses; 2. Identify courses that will use the rubrics; 3. Ask faculty in designated courses to assess and grade as they usually do, adding only one more step – completion of a short rubric for each student; 4. Enter the rubric data; and 5. Analyze and use the data to improve student learning. The essay appendix provides sample rubrics for a wide range of law school institutional learning outcomes. This outcomes assessment method provides an option for collecting data on institutional learning outcomes assessment in a cost-effective manner, allowing faculties to gather data that provides an overview of student learning across a wide range of learning outcomes. How faculties use that data depends upon the results as well as individual schools’ commitment to using the outcomes assessment process to help ensure their graduates have the knowledge, skills and values necessary to practice law

Addressing Barriers to Cultural Sensibility Learning: Lessons from Social Cognition Theory

Understanding subconscious biases, their pervasiveness, and their impact on perceptions, interactions, and analyses, helps prepare lawyers to represent people from cultural and racial backgrounds different from their own, and to address both individual and institutional injustice. Two law student surveys suggest many students believe lawyers are less susceptible than clients to having, or acting upon, stereotypes or biases. The survey results also indicate that many students suffer from bias blind spot – i.e. they believe that while others cannot recognize when they are acting based upon stereotypical beliefs and biases, the students know when they are doing so. The survey results suggest some law students: 1. do not understand the pervasiveness of bias, even in well-meaning people; 2. do not recognize that legal analytical training is unlikely to trump a lifetime of subconscious cognitive processes; and 3. may resist education aimed at helping them recognize how their own biases affect their interactions, in part because they believe that they already understand and can recognize their biases. This article argues that the survey results demonstrate a need to address students’ misconceptions about lawyers’, and students’ own, susceptibility to subconscious biases. It discusses how exposure to social cognition literature on topics such as aversive racism, implicit bias, confirmation bias and bias blind spot may deepen students’ understanding of subconscious biases, their pervasiveness, and their impact on all people’s perceptions, interactions and analyses. That literature may also help students understand their potential resistance to learning about their own biases and help educators understand how best to overcome student resistance to learning about how cultural biases and stereotypes impact individual and institutional decision-making. In light of the survey results, the article urges schools to consider using social cognition theory as the cornerstone of a program of legal education that recognizes the need to infuse the curriculum with an awareness of the role culture plays in the lawyering process. Finally, it provides some concrete examples of how educators can integrate discussions of cultural biases and perspectives into a wide range of law school courses