Dedication

Dedication to Professor Nathaniel L. Nathanson

Dedication

A dedication to Professor Ronald Maudsley

Legal Education in Transition: Trends and Their Implications

This is a pivotal moment in legal education. Revisions in American Bar Association accreditation standards, approved in August 2014, impose new requirements, including practice-based requirements, on law schools. Other external regulators and critics are pushing for significant changes too. For example, the California bar licensing body is proposing to add a practice-based, experiential requirement to its licensing requirements, and the New York Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, is giving third-year, second semester students the opportunity to practice full-time in indigent legal services programs and projects. Unbeknown to many, there have been significant recent changes in legal education that have added practice-based courses, or practice-based components to courses, in all three years of legal education. Increasingly, law schools are reaching beyond the JD to establish projects in which graduates learn while practicing law. The innovations include first-year courses in which students engage in actual legal work to help provide legal services to clients; technology clinics in which students use or build state-of-the-art technology to help pro se litigants more effectively represent themselves; diversified experiential courses, including “practicums;” and post-JD “incubator,” “fellowship,” “residency,” “apprenticeship,” and “job corps” programs in which law graduates, and sometimes law students, practice and learn from practice. It is a dynamic period in which law schools, including through comprehensive strategic planning, should regain the leadership in facing the present and future challenges. The factors contributing to change—for example, the tough job market, reduced law school applications, interventions of regulators, U.S. News & World Report rankings and increased competition among law schools—are not likely to substantially change in the near future. Law schools are in, should be in, and will be in a period that calls for sustained innovation

Pretrial Discovery in Criminal Cases: A Necessity for Fair and Impartial Justice

I. History of Pretrial Discovery in Criminal Cases II. Policy Considerations … A. Why Is Pretrial Discovery Necessary? … (1) Confessions … (2) Items of Evidence and Scientific Reports … (3) Witness Statements … B. Arguments against Pretrial Discovery … (1) Pretrial discovery will lead to perjury and the suppression of evidence … (2) Defendants in criminal cases already have an unfair advantage, and pretrial discovery would only increase this imbalance … (3) Pretrial discovery in criminal cases will subvert the whole criminal system … (4) The crime rate has increased so rapidly that we must tighten our criminal procedures instead of liberalizing them … (5) Since the right against self-incrimination prevents the state from any discovery of an accused’s case, the state should have the same protection III. The Effect of Liberal Pretrial Discovery Methods in Military Courts and the English Criminal System … A. Military Proceedings … B. English Proceedings IV. The Present Law of Pretrial Discovery in American Jurisdictions … A. The Federal Law … B. The State Law … (1) State Statutes … (2) State Cases … [1] Confessions … [2] Items of Evidence and Scientific Reports … [3] Statements of Other Witnesses V. The Nebraska Law on Pretrial Discovery VI. Conclusio

There Is No Justice When Low and Modest-Income D.C. Residents Are Forced To Represent Themselves in Civil Cases

After spending more than twenty years as a white-collar criminal defense lawyer at DLA Piper and prior to that serving as a federal prosecutor, law professor, and law school dean, I had the opportunity to help develop and then share responsibility for directing the non-profit D.C. Affordable Law Firm (“DCALF”). 135 I learned from this experience that lawyers are rarely available for most of the low- and modest income District of Columbia (“D.C.”) residents who find themselves embroiled in civil matters in D.C. Superior Court on matters greatly impacting their lives. They become, as a result, self-represented litigants (“SRLs”) who must contend with a complicated legal system that was designed on the assumption—now proven to be unfounded—that lawyers would be representing all parties in all proceedings. I see the value, at least in principle, in having an adversary system grounded on seeking truth through expansive pretrial discovery, restrictions on hearsay, and the right to cross-examine opposing parties and their witnesses. However, it is not a sensible model when lawyers are not available to navigate that process on behalf of both parties or, even worse, only one side has representation. The system creates an anomalous situation, because lawyers have monopoly control over the representation of parties under D.C.’s rules even though they are available for so few litigants. Equally concerning, there is far too much reliance on overburdened D.C. Superior Court judges and their staffs to handle matters in traditional adversarial proceedings that can best be handled in less formal ways and in community-based settings. In this article, I will initially be examining how pervasive the lack of counsel is for low- and modest-income D.C. residents, and nationally, as well as the impact of lack of counsel on those representing themselves. Next, I will assess why it is unlikely that critically needed expanded legal support for this population will be available any time soon. In the article’s final sections, I focus on why it is essential to re-envision civil access to justice as a community responsibility; the kinds of initiatives that need to be undertaken; and the changes that need to be made within the court system when parties appear in court unrepresented. The current national debate over whether to re-allocate some of the tasks police departments have for addressing social problems is apt here

The Legal Profession: What is Wrong and How to Fix It

Sheldon Krantz begins The Legal Profession: What Is Wrong and How to Fix It by saying that the legal profession is in trouble, and should be. He then covers what is wrong by describing the current state of the legal profession, the emergence of BigLaw, the changing nature of law practice, and the access to justice crisis. This is followed up by addressing what needs to be done and setting forth a specific agenda to address its deficiencies: • Make the legal profession more responsive to client and public service needs• Resolve the access to justice crisis• Involve law schools more directly in legal profession reform; and• Create a new organization with a mandate to promote necessary changes in the legal profession on an ongoing basis He points out both promising developments as well the forces resisting change and identifies ways to overcome resistance to change and to transform the legal profession into the noble calling it should be. TMLL catalog entryhttps://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/books/1072/thumbnail.jp