Getting Back to the Sandbox: Designing a legal policy clinic

This article will analyze contemporary educational psychology in an attempt to: (1) determine whether a sandbox can and/or should be added to the law school curriculum; (2) describe a constructivist learning environment with the goal of providing law students self-selected pro bono publico projects that may help internalize a life-long goal of public service; and, provide an interdisciplinary model that is feasible both in the large university law schools and in small and/or free-standing law schools. The second half of the article will describe my attempts to build a sandbox model into my Legal Policy Clinic

Systemic Governmental Recalcitrance in Regulating Confidentiality Under the Child Abuse, Prevention & Treatment Act (CAPTA): A Case Study

In 2003, Congress amended the Child Abuse, Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) to provide states with more flexibility in designing open child dependency hearings. The Federal Children’s Bureau has interpreted those amendments as a congressional waiver of CAPTA confidentiality in open court proceedings, and there-fore, currently tens of millions of abused and neglected children no longer have federal protection from being re-traumatized by disclosure of confidential CAPTA child welfare case information. This article demonstrates that the Children’s Bureau’s statutory interpretation is inconsistent with congressional intent and that states are still mandated to reasonably prevent the republication of confidential data by the media and the general public who attend those open hearings

A Blueprint for a Fairer ABA Standard for Judging Law Graduates’ Competence: How A Standard Based on Students’ Scores in Relation to the National Mean MBE Score Properly Balances Consumer Safety with Increased Diversity in the Bar

Current and recently proposed American Bar Association (ABA) standards regarding students’ bar passage rates have a significant disparate impact on states that have adopted difficult bar examination passage standards (the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE cut scores). Many scholars have demonstrated that the ABA bar passage standards have a negative impact on diversity in the bar by discouraging law schools from enrolling large numbers of minority students, who have, traditionally, performed below state mean in passage rates on the exam. This study presents a new and supplemental standard for the ABA to use in monitoring student outcome measures and law schools’ quality of instruction: a comparison of law schools’ mean MBE scores in relation to the national mean MBE score. This new metric levels the playing field among all law schools irrespective of state MBE cut scores, provides an incentive to increase diversity in the bar, and provides significant consumer protection