From Socrates to Selfies: Legal Education and the Metacognitive Revolution

Metacognitive thinking, a methodology for mastering intellectually challenging material, is revolutionizing legal education. Metacognition empowers people to increase their mental capabilities by discovering and correcting flaws in their thinking processes. For decades, legal educators have employed metacognitive strategies in specialized areas of the curriculum. Today, metacognition has the potential to transform legal education curriculum-wide.Current scholarship is rich, generous, and creative in exploring how metacognition can be used to enrich specific sectors of the law curriculum. What is missing, however, is a holistic examination of how metacognitive theory and practice have developed across these different sectors, with the purpose of improving the theoretical framework and increasing its effectiveness. This Article comprehensively reviews the many facets of the metacognitive revolution, drawing parallels for the first time between experiential and non-experiential pedagogies and further relating them to recent accreditation mandates. It then addresses the likelihood that an important phase of the metacognitive revolution—the mandate to implement formative assessments with meaningful feedback—might be widely but poorly implemented, and thus cause more harm than benefit. To mitigate this problem, the Article suggests two new ways of conceptualizing what constitutes “meaningful feedback.” The first is that for feedback to be meaningful, it must be accompanied by metacognitive reflection. The second is that feedback takes on meaning when prefaced by the deconstruction and abstraction, or “naming,” of legal thinking processes. Both insights emerge only upon a holistic examination of metacognitive theory and practice as they have developed across disparate sectors of the legal curriculum

Can You Hear Me Now?: Making Participatory Governance Work for the Poor

Participatory governance engages people who are affected by a problem in the process of solving it. A participatory-governance approach to inner-city crime, for example, might include local residents in the process of designing a community-policing program. In recent decades, courts, legislatures, administrative agencies, and other institutions all have used participatory-governance approaches to tackle complex problems of law and public policy. Some herald the potential for participatory-governance schemes to improve legal and policy outcomes, increase institutional accountability, empower marginalized groups, and further democratic ideals of self-determination and equality. Yet participatory-governance schemes can also promote the capture of public power by private interests, the evasion of accountability, and the deepening subordination of already marginalized communities. This is especially true when marginalized stakeholders are unable to meaningfully participate in the process. This article seeks to articulate a conceptual framework for better promoting meaningful participation by marginalized stakeholders. To do so, it draws a seemingly unlikely parallel between participatory governance systems and business transactions. Applying the framework to both court-based and non-court-based systems, it analyzes how various mechanisms might be used to promote meaningful participation by marginalized stakeholders. It concludes that where such participation cannot actively be promoted, the participatory approach should be rejected in favor of other problem-solving methods

Turning Participation Into Power: A Water Justice Case Study

This Article offers a revamped model of participatory governance—the Constituent Empowerment Model (CE Model)—which affirmatively shifts power to the voices of marginalized constituents so that they can influence governmental policy. The CE Model focuses on three concepts necessary to produce this shift in power to those who are traditionally unheard: operationalized (feasibly realized) participation; constituent primacy; and structural accountability. To illustrate how a CE system might be constructed, this Article examines a model recently adopted in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, that is designed to shift the balance of power between the water utility and its customers. Baltimore offers a blueprint for how this new form of participatory governance could make local institutions more responsive to the needs of disempowered constituents

Rights at Risk in Privatized Public Housing

Traditional public housing is dwindling. Federal policy has increasingly encouraged privatization, shifting stewardship of public housing out of the hands of government and into the hands of private, for-profit companies. Privatization in this context has both benefits and risks. A particularly compelling area of study is the attempt by lawmakers to conscript private contractors into serving public policy goals. Private landlords are obligated not merely to provide housing, but to conduct themselves in ways that promote the interests of vulnerable people. The case of public housing suggests that legislative mandates and contractual obligations are not enough to assure this outcome, and must be accompanied by a commitment to vigorous monitoring and enforcement

Poverty, Dignity, and Public Housing

Antipoverty efforts are persistently subverted by broad societal contempt for poor people. The belief that poor people are morally and behaviorally inferior, and that their personal failings are the cause of their own poverty, is a staple of American opinion polls and political rhetoric. This presumption is so widespread that it even permeates antipoverty programs, which treat poor people with disdain even as they offer aid and assistance. Income discrimination creates not just social stigma, but legal inequalities. The Supreme Court recognized some forty years ago that welfare law promoted wealth-based Constitutional inequalities, and responded by invoking the doctrines of equal protection and due process to protect the rights of the poor. The Court grounded these rulings in an affirmation of the human dignity of all people, regardless of wealth. Yet these dignitary rulings have not prevented societal discrimination against the poor from flourishing. This societal discrimination has consistently undermined antipoverty initiatives and turned programs meant to alleviate suffering into tools of subordination

Rights at Risk in Privatized Public Housing

Traditional public housing is dwindling. Federal policy has increasingly encouraged privatization, shifting stewardship of public housing out of the hands of government and into the hands of private, for-profit companies. Privatization in this context has both benefits and risks. A particularly compelling area of study is the attempt by lawmakers to conscript private contractors into serving public policy goals. Private landlords are obligated not merely to provide housing, but to conduct themselves in ways that promote the interests of vulnerable people. The case of public housing suggests that legislative mandates and contractual obligations are not enough to assure this outcome, and must be accompanied by a commitment to vigorous monitoring and enforcement

Building Community, Still Thirsty for Justice: Supporting Community Development Efforts in Baltimore

Baltimore is a city of many challenges, but it possesses true communitybased strength. The city’s residents and community organizations are its greatest assets. This article highlights some of the community’s work and how the Community Development Clinic at the University of Baltimore School of Law (CDC) supports this work through its experiential learning curriculum. The challenges facing Baltimore’s communities (systemic disinvestment, structural racism, vacant buildings, unemployment, and the criminalization of poverty, to name a few) existed long before the national media coverage and uprising surrounding the death of Freddie Gray, an unarmed Black man who suffered a fatal spinal injury while in Baltimore police custody in April 2015.1 In the days that followed Gray’s death, thousands of Baltimoreans took to the streets to protest state-sanctioned violence in low-income Black neighborhoods across the city. After the Baltimore Uprising,2 and in the spirit of the city’s long history of community organizing, new community-based groups formed and existing organizations created wide-tent coalitions to collectively advance their organizing efforts.3 These groups have fostered public discourse not only about police violence, but also about the economic violence that poses an everyday threat to individual and community safety and security, such as the lack of access to basic human needs—food, water, and housing.

Confidentiality in Mediation

As mediation has become a more widely practiced method of dispute resolution, many jurisdictions have enacted rules forbidding participants to divulge information discussed during the mediation. Two recent cases, Paranzino v. Barnett Bank and Bernard v. Galen Group, are among the first to deal with the enforcement of such rules by judicial sanction. In both cases, participants in judicially required mediations were severely sanctioned for breaching confidentiality in violation of mediation rules and/or court orders

Confidentiality in Mediation

As mediation has become a more widely practiced method of dispute resolution, many jurisdictions have enacted rules forbidding participants to divulge information discussed during the mediation. Two recent cases, Paranzino v. Barnett Bank and Bernard v. Galen Group, are among the first to deal with the enforcement of such rules by judicial sanction. In both cases, participants in judicially required mediations were severely sanctioned for breaching confidentiality in violation of mediation rules and/or court orders