Taking the Punishment Out of the Process: From Substantive Criminal Justice Through Procedural Justice to Restorative Justice

If the punishment is taken out of the process, and the processes of criminal justice become effective at restoration--and if rigorous empirical research might show that a restorative process costs less money and produces greater public safety--that would be a result everyone would embrace

Should American Law Schools Continue to Graduate Lawyers Whom Clients Consider Worthless?

At a recent national conference on legal education, the associate general counsel of one of America’s largest corporations said that his company no longer allows first or second year associates to work on their matters “because they’re worthless.” At one time many law schools were comfortable in relying on large firms to turn their graduates into lawyers worthy to represent clients, but the famous “Cravath” system for such training has been in decline and is now severely threatened by the current economic crisis in law practice. The article contrasts the American approach to training lawyers to that in place in other major jurisdictions related to the common law tradition, with a particular focus on Scotland. The article then concludes with an examination of a ground-breaking experiment at the University of New Hampshire Law School, where students who complete a special two year honors program designed to make them “client-ready” are being admitted to practice upon graduation without taking a conventional bar examination

Hearing Voices: Why the Academy Needs Clinical Scholarship

The following Article is a lightly edited transcript of remarks made on October 14, 1995 at the annual meeting of the Central States Law School Association at St. Louis University School of Law. A few hours before my presentation, I learned that Herbert Eastman, director of clinical education at St. Louis University, had died. Herb had been diagnosed with cancer a few months earlier; he was forty-four when he died. Although Herb was unfailingly genial and seemingly mild-mannered, he was, in fact, driven by a fierce passion for justice. Teacher, scholar, advocate-exemplary in each field as if he had but that one trade alone. Herb lived in the split between the academy and the outside world, but moved in the opposite direction of schizophrenia. The voices he heard in the outer world were projected with great force into the inner world of mind. Perhaps the intensity with which he taught, advocated and wrote might have seemed a bit crazed, yet he would have not chosen to live differently even if the reward was a longer life span. And perhaps with those heaven-bound cries forever in his ears, he could not have chosen differently. This essay endeavors to show why the legal academy needs clinical scholars like Herb Eastman

A Linguistic Analysis of the Meanings of Search in the Fourth Amendment: A Search for Common Sense

This article offers a new technique for analyzing and evaluating competing interpretations of a legal text and applies that technique to one of the most debated questions of modern constitutional interpretation: the meaning of searches in the first clause of the fourth amendment. This Technique is called the common sense approach because it begins with a semantic analysis of the text in terms of the sense that the key words have in everyday speech. Such analysis reveals a complex of interlocked concepts that underlies the ability of speakers to recognize meaningful uses of these words. The common sense approach then examines competing interpretations of the legal text in terms of their selection, modification, or rejection of these conceptual elements, which linguists call semantic features. Differing interpretations can thus be evaluated by comparing the meaningfulness of each of the meaning generated by common sense understanding of the text

In Search of Common Sense: A Lingustic Approach to Fourth Amendment Law

Professor Cunningham was the winner of the 1988 Scholarly Paper Competition sponsored by the Association of American Law Schools. The following article is an abridged version of that winning paper, adapted from a transcript of his presentation to the 1988 AALS Annual Meeting. His thesis is that semantic analysis of common sense meanings of the word search can provide and approach to interpreteing the scope of the Fourth Amendment which is both faithful to the text and flexible enough to meet the demands of changing times. In a much longer article appearing in 73 Iowa Law Review No. 3 (March 1988) he supports his common sense approach with a detailed analysis of the amendment\u27s legislative history and its relation toe pre-Revolutionary events and , picking up where this paper ends, applies the semantic analysis to the Supreme Court\u27s major cases of the last 20 years which have interpreted the scope of the Fourth Amendment