The City University of New York Law School: An Insider\u27s Report

The Law School of the City University of New York ( CUNY ) is an experiment in whether it is possible for lawyers to integrate their lives. It is not, primarily, an institution with a somewhat novel, somewhat derivative, approach to legal education (although it is that). It is a place where lawyers try to bridge the gap between love and work, those so often dichotomized constituents of life. At CUNY we are trying simultaneously to equip students for survival in the current legal system and to burden them with a critical perspective on that system; to do and think, to practice and teach, to function and feel

Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It . . . : Taking Law School Mission Statements Seriously

Learning about the process and the results of mission definition in law schools has made palpable the tension between clarity and inflexibility, candor and marketing concerns, and the specificity that fosters accountability as opposed to the generality that embraces a vague multitude of approaches to the law school endeavor. Building on the strong endorsement of the use of mission statements in the original Best Practices for Legal Education, we present some “Best Practices” for both the development and the content of law school mission statements. We hope that this piece hastens further conversation and commentary that will foster a richer and more mindful perspective on this necessary--and potentially transformative--task of legal educators

How Derrick Bell Helped Me Decide to Become an Educator, Not Just a Faculty Member

Way ahead of the current chorus of critique of American legal education, Derrick Bell was a fierce, but lucid and incisive, critic of every aspect of American legal education, from law professors’ inadequacies, to the repetitive passivity of the law school classroom, to the financial exploitation of students, to the negative consequences of the tenure system. Dean Bell did not merely voice these concerns, he creatively structured his own courses to make them more relevant, effective, and student-centered. The author’s chance encounter with Dean Bell’s 1982 article, The Law Student as Slave, which presaged later calls for wholesale reform of legal education like the Carnegie Report, was transformative

The Utility of International Law for Protecting Women\u27s Health Rights

There is one area, however, where international law seems to hold promise; certain cultural practices that pose special, direct threats to the lives and health of women (although male infants and children often share women\u27s vulnerability in this regard). I have in mind sexual slavery, coercive prostitution and pornographic exploitation, rape, compulsory marriage, coerced impregnation and its converse, coerced abortion and sterilization; spousal abuse, dowry deaths and coerced suicide, female infanticide and sex-specific abortion. All of these practices are the product not of microbes, poor hygiene, or a lack of health care, but of deliberate human behavior. All these practices have a double identity; you can call them health problems, epidemics, pandemics, and you can also see them as forms of violence against women--techniques of social control. This dual identity may converge under the rubric of human rights to the extent that the right to health is a component of basic human rights. But whether these practices are considered symptomatic of pathology or the product of power structures, or both, the question remains; does international law have a role to play in response to such phenomena and, if so, what is it

The Work of a CUNY Law Student: Simulation and the Experiential Learning Process

The work you do as part of a simulation is selectively, but not exactly, the same as what you would do as a lawyer confronted with a comparable problem. By drastically shortening the time frame of the actual process, the simulation allows you to experience the consequences of your choices relatively quickly. In a simulation, you are asked to assume certain roles, and to engage in a variety of tasks, some in-role and some out-of-role (except for the ubiquitous role of law student )

The Exclusion of Pregnant, Pregnable, and Once-Pregnable People (a.k.a. Women) from Biomedical Research

The barriers to women\u27s participation as subjects in biomedical research are currently being challenged as a matter of legislative policy, medicine, and law. This Article catalogs the ways in which women have been disadvantaged by their exclusion and recent developments to redress them, and goes on to dissect the underlying rationales for excluding women from clinical trials. The author reveals the \u27fundamental misconception\u27 behind exclusionary rationales, and argues that research sponsors in fact have more to fear in the way of potential liability from the exclusion of women, even pregnant women and women of child-bearing capacity, than from their inclusion. Finally, the Article suggests strategies for achieving reform of these exclusionary practices

Parallels in Predicting Dangerousness--What Price Security?

One question is: why should an employer have any duty to intervene, respond, or warn when an employee is deemed “dangerous”? What expertise in making these predictions can your average business manager bring to the table? As lawyers we tend never to look at law that is more than a week old. Similarly, scientists prefer not to rely on science that is more than a few months old. Yet, here is an article written almost 20 years ago when I was a young Associate for Law at the Hastings Center for a symposium honoring the great forensic psychiatrist Dr. Jonas Robitscher, whom I had the pleasure of working with there

Table of Accrediting Organizations

This chart represents research for “ Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It . . . : Taking Law School Mission Statements Seriously by Irene Scharf and Vanessa Merton. We gathered information about accrediting bodies to determine the role of mission statements in accreditation standards. For each agency we answered the following questions: Must accreditation seekers have mission statements? Must these statements must be in writing? Is it required for the mission statement to include goals? For some accreditors this information was clearly stated, while the answers were more ambiguous for others. The website for each accreditor is included in this chart as a permanent link

Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It: Taking Law School Mission Statements Seriously

A law school can best achieve excellence and have the most effective academic program when it possesses a clear mission, a plan to achieve that mission, and the capacity and willingness to measure its success or failure. Absent a defined mission and the identification of attendant student and institutional outcomes, a law school lacks focus and its curriculum becomes a collection of discrete activities without coherence