Learning to be Lawyers: Professional Identity and the Law School Curriculum

The Carnegie Report faults American legal education for focusing exclusively on doctrine and analytical skills and neglecting the formation of professional identity. According to the Report, law schools can fix this problem by enabling students to encounter appealing representations of professional ideals, connect in a powerful way with engaging models of ethical commitment within in the profession, and reflect on their [own] emerging professional identity in relation to those ideals and models. The Report identifies pro bono work, clinics, and externships as sites for this sort of learning, where students can interact with members of the profession and reflect on the models of professionalism that they encounter. Taking the Carnegie Report’s charge as a starting point, this article proposes an additional model for integrating a focus on professional identity into the law school curriculum. It profiles an experimental law school course that combined field work observations of practicing attorneys with in-class simulations of the work of a small law firm. The course was quite successful in prompting students to engage in an inquiry into what it is to be a lawyer and what kinds of lawyers they wanted to be. One student commented in a course evaluation, for example, that the course allowed him to see a new vision for what being a practicing lawyer can be. That this sort of exposure to professional exemplars and reflection on professional identity was possible in a non-clinic course was an exciting discovery, suggesting new directions for curricular design as law schools continue to meet the challenges of the Carnegie Report

Misclassification and Antidiscrimination: An Empirical Analysis

This article investigates misclassification and antidiscrimination. Misclassification is employers\u27 practice of classifying workers as independent contractors whom the law would categorize as employees. Misclassified workers are exempt from most federal antidiscrimination statutes, unless they file a discrimination lawsuit and seek reclassification by the court for purposes of the litigation. Thus, employers may use their power to classify to write workers out of the law, and workers who cannot win a misclassification challenge cannot gain access to antidiscrimination rights. Little is known about which workers are misclassified, however, or about the outcomes of misclassification challenges in court. Drawing on existing and newly collected data, including ten years of misclassification decisions in cases brought under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,this article shows that women and people of color are overrepresented in the occupations at highest risk for misclassification. The article also raises questions about courts\u27 role in checking employers\u27 power to classify, as many of the workers who are most at risk for misclassification and discrimination do not appear to be filing suit, and many courts\u27 handling of misclassification challenges is deeply flawed

Transformative textiles: integrating material and information in the design of sonified textiles

Digital technologies are now deeply embedded in our everyday lives, becoming seamlessly integrated with objects and materials that we engage with routinely. Digital information is no longer confined to screens as “painted bits”, but is spilling into our environments creating a seamless extension of the physical affordances of objects into the digital domain. This seamless integration is enabling information to be explored through new modes of interaction, utilizing interactive materials that can be manipulated, accessed, and programmed. The progressive, ubiquitous nature of computing is creating a need to re-evaluate the ways in which new technological emergences affect how we relate to and understand the world around us. A key area of material technologies development contributing to this seamlessness is “interactive textiles”, also known as smart textiles or “e-textiles”. These materials are the amalgamation of digital technologies and textiles, allowing materials the ability to sense, react, and display. This utilization of digital media within our materiality is producing textiles that are no longer mute, but are responsive, amplified through a number of outputs, including light and sound. This transformation of materials from passive to responsive is being driven by the informational capacity of embedded technologies. Küchler (2008) describes e-textiles as existing not simply as material but also informational. This material-informational duality highlights a need to understand the way in which we relate to material in our changing technological world, and a closer consideration of our “dual citizenships” between our physical (material) and digital (informational) spaces. Through a practice-led investigation, utilizing the processes of the creation, prototyping and performance of sonified textiles, this paper presents current research into the relationship between textile as material and information and the way in which these dimensions may be aligned successfully through design. It also draws on key theoretical texts and the work of other designers. Considering closely this transformation of textiles, this investigation intends to understand the evolving relationship between material and information; the physical and the digital

Improving the Learning Environment Through Communication: A Systems Perspective

The call centre can be best described as an organizational system with three sub-systems made up of 15 sections. Systems are impacted by their environment and respond by outputting their own impact onto the environment (Jones, 2013; Kast & Rosenzweig, 2017). In the case of the call centre’s system, the environment is the caller (client), and the impact is the increased complexity in the types of questions asked. The call centre was impacted by clients who posed complex questions, and the system responded by outputting incorrect information to its clients (Internal Report, 2015). Internal research revealed that the system was unable to prepare its parts (sub-systems and sections) for the changes in the types of questions asked by clients (Internal Report, 2015). A solution was devised to transform the call centre into a system that is prepared to output correct information when impacted by changes to question types. The solution focuses on changing the formal learning process because its function is to prepare the system for outputting correct information. This organizational improvement plan (OIP) uses a transformational leadership approach to identify the problem, define the desired end-state, outline a strategy, and communicate the change plan

Explaining Peripheral Labor: A Poultry Industry Case Study

Drawing on data and anecdotal accounts from a wide variety of sources, this Article investigates the law and economics of peripheral labor, so called because low wage, low skill workers on the periphery are excluded from the promotion ladders, job security, and steadily increasing pay available to supervisory and managerial workers in the core. Using the U.S. poultry industry as a case study, this Article describes the terms and conditions of peripheral poultry work: de-skilled jobs, low wages, lack of job security, and negligible prospects for promotion. Worker bargaining power is also highly constrained, as workers have little ability to demand concessions, and overt claiming behavior such as filing a lawsuit, complaining to a government agency, or forming a union often is not effective, rational, or safe. The Article hypothesizes that the reasons for these conditions may be found in poultry firms’ labor practices and modes of economic organization, in the transnational nature of the external labor market, and in the structure of labor, employment, and immigration laws that apply to peripheral poultry work