The Cost of Clinical Legal Education

Critics of clinical legal education often malign its expense and look to clinical budget cuts as the primary means of reducing costs in legal education. This narrow focus, however, ignores the important function that clinical legal education plays in training law students to be ready for practice and assumes other legal education expenses are more important. The 1992 MacCrate Report, the 2007 Carnegie Report, and other studies demonstrate that clinical education is necessary to produce a well-rounded and practice ready law student. Though clinical legal education should not be immune to cost constraints, neither should any other type of law school expenditure. To succeed in economically difficult and demanding times, law schools must put every aspect of legal education through a cost-benefit analysis for cost-saving potential

Ensuring the Ethical Representation of Clients in the Face of Excessive Caseloads

This Article is divided into three substantive parts. First, I begin with a short discussion of the most important criminal justice right guaranteed to each of us under the Bill of Rights - the Sixth Amendment right to assistance of counsel. For most Americans, the right to counsel is obtained through indigent defense providers, and the quality of the representation is inextricably tied to three lesser known rights, or perhaps wishes, found in the Public Defender Bill of Rights: [t]he right to meaningful, weighted caseload standards ; [t]he right to judges who understand my [the public defender\u27s] role in the [justice] system ; and [t]he right to a boss who will back me up. Next, I focus on the ethical implications for line public defenders, their supervising attorneys, and managers of public defender programs. Finally, I conclude by discussing strategies for public defender supervising attorneys and managers to consider as tools to fulfill their ethical obligations and to advance the right to counsel for their clients

Law Schools and the Legal Profession: A Way Forward

This essay proceeds in four parts. Part II briefly examines the disengagement of law schools from the legal profession both in much of the scholarship produced and through courses required for graduation. Part III analyzes why some state bar regulators are imposing admission requirements in response to law schools failing to prepare students better for the practice of law. Part IV discusses the types of bar admission requirements being considered. Finally, in Part V, I argue that rather than being reactive and resistant to change, law schools should be forward looking and incorporate changes that will not only better prepare students for the practice of law as it is today, but also for the legal needs anticipated in the future. In this way, law schools may proactively and positively influence the norms of the legal profession