Measuring Law School Clinics

Legal education reformers have long argued that law school clinics address two related needs: first, clinics teach students to be lawyers; and second, clinics serve low-income clients. In clinics, so the argument goes, law students working under the close supervision of faculty members learn the requisite skills to be good practitioners and professionals. In turn, clinical law students serve clients with civil and criminal justice needs that would otherwise go unmet. Though we have these laudable teaching and service goals – and a vast literature describing the role of clinics in both the teaching and service dimensions – we have scant empirical evidence about whether and how clinics achieve these goals. We know from studies that law students value clinics, but do clinics prepare them to be lawyers? We also know from surveys that clinics provide hundreds of thousands of hours of free legal aid in low-income communities, but how well do clinic students serve clients? These are big questions across a complex field and set of practices that cannot be answered by a single study. Nevertheless, we report here findings from a large data set of cases that shed some light on the teaching-service promise of law school clinics. Analyzing thousands of unemployment insurance cases involving different types of representation, we are able to compare clinical law students\u27 use of legal procedures and outcomes to those of experienced attorneys in cases in the same court. We find that clinical law students behave very similarly to practicing attorneys in their use of legal procedures. Their clients also experience very similar case outcomes to clients of practicing attorneys. Though further research is needed on the impact of law school clinics in the teaching and service dimensions, our findings are consistent with claims that law school clinics help prepare students to be practicing lawyers and to serve low-income clients as well as lawyers do

Deathscapes of Settler Colonialism : The necro-settlement of Stoney Creek, Ontario, Canada

This is the Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in annals of Association of American Geographers on 23 January 2018, available online https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2017.1406327. The Accepted Manuscript is under embargo until 23 January 2019.This article considers the influence of burials and memorials to colonial soldiers from an earlier era on contemporary social and cultural landscapes in Canada. Through the example of a landscape centered on Smith’s Knoll, a burial ground for war dead from the British-American War of 1812, it explores the process of necro-settlement: the strengthening of settler colonial claims to land based on the development of complex, meaningladen landscapes of dead and memory. This article consists of three parts: The first situates geographical studies of deathscapes alongside theories about settler colonialism through intersecting discourses of land use. The second includes a settler colonial microhistorical geography of Smith’s Knoll and the local deathscape that surrounds it. The third section draws on this case study to reveal new perspectives on the role of burial and memorial in settler colonial place-making and the erasure of Indigenous histories and peoples.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Educational archaeology and the practice of utopian pedagogy

This paper explores the idea, and some elements of the (potential) practice, of utopian pedagogy. It begins by outlining the general aims of ‘utopian pedagogy’ and notes the shift within contemporary writings away from the metaphor of the architect (armed with a utopian ‘blueprint’) towards that of the archaeologist. The ontological underpinnings of educational archaeology are discussed before attention turns to a critical examination of the pedagogical process of excavation. The key questions here are (to labour the metaphor) where to dig and how to identify a utopian find. The paper argues that, without a substantive normative vision to serve as a guide, utopian archaeology is conceptually flawed and practically ineffectual, romanticising an endlessly open process of exploration. The final section suggests that the fears associated with utopian architecture (authoritarian imposition, totalising closure) are misplaced and that drawing up a ‘blueprint’ should be the aim and responsibility of utopian pedagogy

A question of confidence. Is tourism as vulnerable to civil unrest as we think? A comparative analysis of the impact of Arab Spring on total reserves and tourism

This paper uses monthly data to compare how international tourism receipts and the overall economy responded to the Arab Spring Total Reserves were used as an indicator of the economy overall, because they reflect confidence in the economy through such factors as Foreign Direct Investment and the effects of capital flight. To examine the response, interrupted time series was employed, using the outbreak of Arab Spring as the key interruption. To separate the impact of Arab Spring from other events, two treated and two untreated cases were selected. The results show that tourist spending recovered faster than the overall economy

Toward a Regeneration of Revolutionary Theory

Revolutionary theorists are currently immersed in a critical debate about the future of the field. Allinson has argued that a fifth generation of revolutionary theory has passed us by without our noticing, while I have contended that it is revolutionary theory's fourth generation that is decidedly imperilled. Ritter and Beck – for their part‐ contend that we should reject the very idea of theoretical ‘generations’, and instead think of progress in revolutionary theory as a series of ongoing and settled debates about certain key topics. The pair contend that revolutionary theory has reached a consensus on two core debates: defining our object of study and determining appropriate methods. Contrary to this position, I argue that while there is much to praise about rejecting generational imagery, doing so necessarily entails that we also critique the self‐proclaimed ‘fourth generation' with which such imagery is intertwined. Furthermore, I argue that there does not yet exist consensus among revolutionary theorists about a single definition of revolution, or on the question of which methods to use. Finally, I call for a regeneration of revolutionary theory which moves genuinely beyond the generational mythologies of the past