Foreword

This Foreword highlights the central points of the Articles in Volume 43, Issue 1 of Western New England Law Review. The Article topics include emotional support animals, distribution rights for small beer brewers, fairness in accident insurance coverage, alternative legal education materials, and custody challenges for parents with abusive partners. Each share the identification of a perceived problem with the legal status quo and presents proposed solutions

FOREWORD

This Foreword highlights the central points of the Articles in Volume 43, Issue 1 of Western New England Law Review. The Article topics include emotional support animals, distribution rights for small beer brewers, fairness in accident insurance coverage, alternative legal education materials, and custody challenges for parents with abusive partners. Each share the identification of a perceived problem with the legal status quo and presents proposed solutions

Unpopular Contracts and Why They Matter: Burying Langdell and Enlivening Students

Thus, the purpose of this piece is to provide an alternative: a transformation of how Contracts is taught in law schools so that we meet a variety of educational objectives. This is less of a prescription than it is a resolution made in the public sphere: a promise to shake things up in my own classroom and thus hopefully do better by students in the long run. It is also the beginning of a search to benchmark against the practices of others, and to seek input from those who have already begun to transform their Contracts teaching materials and methods. This Article is organized into three parts. Part I, entitled “Teaching Contracts: Obstacles and Opportunities,” shares outsider and insider critiques and data about the current Contracts classroom. This sets out anecdotal evidence and also draws upon the 2013 survey of Contracts instructors by the Washington Law Review. This first part also explores Langdell’s innovations as well as how Contracts was addressed in subsequent curricular reform efforts, including the MacCrate Report, the Carnegie Report, and the most recent 2013 American Bar Association (ABA) Report. Part II, entitled, “Lawrence Cunningham’s Contracts in the Real World: Stories of Popular Contracts and Why They Matter,” provides an example of a contemporary innovative approach to teaching Contracts. By presenting as the central subject matter disputes seemingly “ripped from the headlines,” Cunningham’s book is engaging and current. In the foreground of each chapter, he presents disputes that a student might encounter on a blue book exam, or in practice after graduation. After sketching the modern dispute, he dips into older, often classic cases at the intersection of various doctrines to illustrate the modern relevance of the common law. Instead of beginning with a “hairy hand,” Cunningham’s book begins with a more current and familiar dispute over a wedding party interrupted due to a major storm.16 If this book were used as a supplement or main text in the classroom, students might better appreciate the role of courts in interpreting, enforcing, or refusing to enforce private arrangements, as well as the likely remedies. Part III, entitled, “Modernizing the Contracts Classroom,” sets out recommendations for modernizing the teaching of contract law, theory, and transactional skills. These recommendations include (1) flipping the case method by properly placing contemporary disputes at the center of the class, not the margins, and thereby inviting students to struggle with “unpopular” contracts––not simply the ones that reinforce the doctrine––including contract disputes that never land in court; (2) accurately treating common law as only one source of law, alongside federal and state statutes and regulations, to reference when creating agreements, struggling to interpret their provisions, or questioning their enforceability; and (3) devoting at least one-third of the semester to negotiating and drafting skills and also offering at least one upper-level transactions course or upper-level negotiations course to hone those same skills

A Critical Analysis Of Time Allocation In Psychoeducational Evaluations

This study provides results form a national survey examining school psychologists’ allocation of time in psycholeducational evaluations. A total of 177 participants with an average of 13.45 years professional experience in school psychology, representing 39 states, participated in the survey. The results indicate that school psychologists spend the majority of their time engaging in test administration and report-writing components of the evaluation process. The data also revealed that the evaluation of students with possible emotional disabilities is most time intensive when compared to evaluations of students with possible learning or intellectual disabilities.  Implications of the results relating to policy and procedures to improve the learning outcomes of students in public school settings are provided

Wraparound Case Management for Children with Serious Emotional Disturbance: A Qualitative Look at Caregivers\u27 Experiences

Wraparound treatment has been described as a unique set of community services and natural supports for a child/adolescent with serious emotional disturbance (SED) based on a definable planning process, individualized for the child and family to achieve a positive set of outcomes. Research has focused on many components of wraparound interventions, but little attention has been paid to experiences of the caregivers of children receiving services. One of the few studies addressing this issue found higher levels of caregiver satisfaction with wraparound services than with treatment-as-usual. The critical role of caretakers in the wraparound process suggests many important research questions including: What is it about wraparound services that meet caregivers\u27 needs? What aspects of wraparound do caregivers feel work best for their child and family? Are there components of wraparound that could be improved? Findings could suggest strategies for informing and potentially improving services to children with SED and their families

Law and Economics: Contemporary Approaches

A relatively narrow version of Law and Economics has dominated public policy for several decades. This school of thought has mainly focused on neoclassical microeconomics. It fails to recognize the pluralism of contemporary economics in general, and the relevance of macroeconomics in particular. So-called “market forces” are thoroughly intertwined with law and cannot be understood without some reference to history, sociology, psychology, and other social sciences. It is time for legal scholars to develop a law and economics curriculum that catches up with the advance of economics as a discipline. The urgent challenges of the 21st Century also call for a new Law and Economics. Solutions to problems such as extreme inequality, climate change, deindustrialization, infrastructure deterioration, underdevelopment, and financial instability will depend on deepening understandings of how economics is interrelated with complex legal rules and legal institutions. Lawyers with a more advanced and nuanced understanding of economics will be far better poised to help solve these problems than those lulled into thinking that simple neoclassicism reflects all that economics can offer to law. A new casebook, developed by the Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and Law, will reflect these concerns. The attached piece, written in response to Yale Law School’s Conference on Law & Inequality, describes the scope and aims of the casebook project. Martha McCluskey, Frank Pasquale, Jennifer Taub, and Faith Stevelman will be editing the casebook, to be compiled from contributions from leading scholars focusing on their substantive areas of expertise