Parsing the Visual Rhetoric of Office Dress Codes: A Two-Step Process to Increase Inclusivity and Professionalism in Legal-Workplace Fashion

Legal employers expect attorneys in their offices to use the ethos of personal appearance to project an image of competence to clients. This expectation is largely unspoken, however, and polling and anecdotal evidence alike show that in today’s workplace, employers are frustrated with the level of professionalism demonstrated by new employees. The goal of this article is to encourage open conversations about workplace fashion as it relates to an attorney’s professional identity. It is in both the employer’s and employee’s interests to clarify employer expectations and empower new members of the legal profession to adopt a personal sense of style that projects competence, leadership, and professionalism, without subtracting out the self. Professional style and ethos, not conformity, should be the goal of office dress codes. This article is written from the perspective of a legal writing professor and advocates an approach to building a positive office culture by training new lawyers to parse the message of unwritten dress codes and participate in drafting inclusive office policies that accommodate disparate cultural, racial, and gender experiences. By making the unconscious conscious through open communication about employer goals and employees’ professional identities, biases can be overcome and new attorneys prepared for a profession where choice of dress projects an instantaneous message about an individual’s business judgment

Fika—Mindfulness for the LRW Professor

Too often, LRW professors sacrifice their love of writing to their devotion to teaching. This can have an adverse impact on career advancement. This Article shares the story of two LRW faculty members who used a cultural tradition to achieve balance, strengthen a collegial bond, and increase their scholarly productivity.This article originally appeared in Perspectives: Teaching Legal Research and Writing, published by Thomson Reuters. For more information please visit http://info.legalsolutions.thomsonreuters.com/signup/newsletters/perspectives/

It\u27s Not Purely Academic: Using Practitioners to Increase the Rigor and Practical Learning in Scholarly Writing

Law schools that are building new courses and adding to their existing curriculum in an effort to offer more practical legal training may be overlooking the practical skills that can be developed through an existing graduation requirement - upper level writing. At The George Washington University Law School a practitioner-taught Scholarly Writing course focuses on the practical application of academic writing and prepares 2L students for the demanding expectations of the 2L summer associateship/internship. This Article describes the ABA standard for upper level writing, explains how the adjunct-taught program at GW Law provides skills training and professional development, and addresses the challenges of managing adjunct faculty

Using the Student-Edited Law Review to Teach Critical Professional Skills

At a time when law schools are being urged to add experiential learning opportunities to their curricula, law reviews may have been overlooked because the need is so obvious. Producing a journal is a professional endeavor requiring leadership by student editors who are in the process of forging their professional identity. Law schools have a responsibility to teach critical professional skills as part of the pedagogy to shape future lawyers. This article summarizes the need for law schools to provide experiential learning opportunities, unpacks the criticism faculty authors have heaped on student-led law reviews, and the describes a symposium-style training session for student editors to identify and build the leadership skills that foster the values the legal profession strives to uphold

Fine-Tuning Acquisition Reform\u27s Favorite Procurement Vehicle, the Indefinite Delivery Contract

This article provides an assessment of the effectiveness of the efforts to improve efficiency and commercialize government procurement, seven years after the passage of the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act. The reforms that abolished inflexible rules and empowered a reduced acquisition workforce have been criticized as allowing agencies to obscure the transparency of traditionally rule-bound federal procurement, using sole source methods and bundling to limit competition. This Article asserts the problems associated with indefinite delivery contracting can be alleviated if more attention is devoted to accountability and enhancing contracting officer participation on the acquisition team

Patient and public attitudes to and awareness of clinical practice guidelines : a systematic review with thematic and narrative syntheses

Article Accepted Date: 15 July 2014 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Acknowledgements The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 258583 (DECIDE project). The Health Services Research Unit, Aberdeen University, is funded by the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health Directorates. The authors accept full responsibility for this paper and the views expressed in it are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Chief Scientist Office. NS receives funding through a Knowledge Translation Fellowship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. No funding bodies had a role in the manuscript. We would like to thank Healthcare Improvement Scotland and the University of Dundee for support, including access to literature. We would also like to thank Lorna Thompson (Healthcare Improvement Scotland), for her help with the protocol for this review.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Graduate Level Distance Learning: Enhanced Student Experience, Significant Scalability Challenges: A Multiyear Case Study

This article describes our experiences and lessons learned providing degree-based distance (online) education to graduate students (studying business, law, and policy related to government contracts or public procurement). Temporal note: our pilot, and the five years of experience described in this case study, predate the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic emergency distance teaching transition. Among other things, we discuss our experiences with regard to fundamentally rethinking our pedagogical approach, flipping the classroom, chunking, and scaffolded learning. We extol the benefits of working with, and being open to, advice from experienced instructional designers. We conclude that embracing distance education, at least in a hybrid form, offers exciting opportunities for more effective teaching and student learning. If thoughtfully and responsibly managed, the student learning experience in distance education not only compares favorably with, but may surpass, that found in the classic, amphitheater, quasi-Socratic or lecture-centric law course. Conversely, preparing to deliver and delivering quality distance education is time consuming, labor intensive, and, potentially, expensive and difficult. To reap the benefits and achieve the promise of distance education, law schools must embrace paradigm-shifting cultural change, a significant barrier for many faculty and institutions

Employment status, residential and workplace food environments: associations with women\u27s eating behaviours

There remains a lack of consistent evidence linking food environments with eating behaviours. Studies to date have largely ignored the way different individuals interact with their local food environment and have primarily focussed on exposures within the residential neighbourhood without consideration of exposures around the workplace, for example. In this study we firstly examine whether associations between the residential food environment and eating behaviours differ by employment status and, secondly, whether food environments near employed women\u27s workplaces are more strongly associated with dietary behaviours than food environments near home. Employment status did not modify the associations between residential food environments and eating behaviours, however results showed that having access to healthy foods near the workplace was associated with healthier food consumption. Policies focused on supportive environments should consider commercial areas as well as residential neighbourhoods