Liberty University\u27s Lawyering Skills Program: Integrating Legal Theory in a Practice-Oriented Curriculum

Law schools are not preparing lawyers for the practice of law. While modern legal education may teach analytical reasoning, skills training continues to suffer. The lawyering skills program developed by the Liberty University School of Law addresses the need to train lawyers in the practice of law. When seeking to build a top quality law school, Liberty University took seriously the challenge to address the void in legal education, particularly with respect to lawyering skills. The foundational principles of law are infused into the legal curriculum and lawyering skills program. The required substantive law courses are structured to have a relationship with lawyering skills so that they mutually reinforce each other

Religious Lawyering\u27s Second Wave

Since the mid-1990s, the religious lawyering movement has expanded dramatically, receiving greater attention within the academy and the bar. As the movement enters what we term its second wave of development, this essay begins with a look back to its first wave of path-breaking scholarship and its gradual shift toward more institutionalized structures and programs. It argues that the predominant characteristic of first-wave religious lawyering scholarship was to claim a space within the professional conversation for lawyers to bring religious values to bear on their work. The essay then predicts that in the second wave religious lawyering conversations and scholarship will increasingly move beyond the question of whether lawyers should bring religious values to bear on their work, toward the difficult issues of how this should be done. It concludes with a glance toward the ways in which international horizons might bring new and refreshing challenges to the religious lawyering movement

A Penal Colony for Bad Lawyers

In this article I set out what I believe is an extreme and unconventional way to discipline egregiously bad lawyers. For starters, I think it might be useful to survey briefly the kinds of lawyering conduct currently subject to disciplinary sanctions. Regulation of the conduct of defense lawyers in the U.S. is hedged by various legal and professional rules that are enforced by courts and disciplinary bodies essentially to ensure a minimum level of competent and ethical representation. The Sixth Amendment right to counsel--the so-called “sacred” right--seeks to ensure at least a reasonable degree of lawyering skill. Also, professional codes seek to ensure zealous and meaningful representation. Nevertheless, these standards are very broad, and bad lawyering often escapes sanctions or even notice. Ironically, although bad defense lawyering, in my opinion, happens at least as often as bad prosecuting, the latter appears to have elicited more criticism by the media and the academic community. Why this disparate treatment of prosecutors and defense lawyers? It is a curious dichotomy, especially since bad lawyering by defense attorneys, as documented in many studies, accounts for at least as many miscarriages of justice as misconduct by prosecutors. To be sure, just as most prosecutors behave fairly and professionally, so do most defense lawyers represent their clients with skill and dedication. But, just as some prosecutors behave dishonorably, some defense lawyers behave incompetently. However, bad prosecutors are excoriated; bad defense lawyers are marginalized or ignored. Thus was born the idea--borrowed loosely from Kafka--of a “Penal Colony” as a disruptive innovation to improve the quality of American lawyers and punish the bad ones

Community Lawyering: Introductory Thoughts on Theory and Practice

There are several fundamental questions that one might ask in seeking the meaning of the term community lawyer. Albeit somewhat theoretical, the most basic questions involve delving into exactly what is meant by the term community. For what, exactly, is the community-lawyer lawyering? Further, once a client has been identified, questions will arise about how the lawyer should relate to that client and about the role the lawyer ought to play in assisting the client to achieve its goals. There is a long and rich literature concerning the latter question but a fairly sparse body of legal writing on the former. In this essay, I would like to elaborate on both of these issues and then bring these ideas together to develop a concept of community lawyering. I will then discuss some practical applications of community lawyering in the context of an affordable housing program I run at the Georgetown University Law Center

Faith and the Lawyer\u27s Practice Symposium: Law Religion and the Public Good

If there is a religious way to read, is there a religious way to be a lawyer? More and more lawyers, judges and scholars are answering yes to that question. We heard earlier from Cardinal Bevilacqua about the history of the Religious Lawyering Movement, which blossomed in the 1990s. There was writing about the law and religion before that time. We can date religious lawyering as a body of work in mainstream legal literature, as Cardinal Bevilacqua did, to the work of Professor Thomas Shaffer in the 1980s.Why did this movement take off in the 1990s? Again, what accounts for the growth of the Religious Lawyering Movement? A renewed interest in religion across society as a whole is one reason. Related to that, lawyers, like others, are engaged in a search for meaning in their work. In the past, many lawyers would have found this meaning in professionalism, but during today\u27s crisis of professionalism, lawyers are unable to find a satisfactory way to reconcile their personal aspirations with what they consider to be the harsh realities of the marketplace

Transactional Community Lawyering

The racial reckoning during the summer of 2020 presented a renewed call to action for movement lawyers committed to collaborating with mobilized clients to advance racial equity and economic justice. During the last thirty years, community lawyering scholarship has made significant interventions into poverty lawyering and provides the theoretical framework for contemporary movement lawyers. Conceptually, community lawyering theory can be implemented in any practice area; however, prevailing narratives and models for community lawyering are based on group advocacy campaigns and, to a lesser extent, individual representation in dispute resolution. Transactional lawyers—who use private ordering to represent business entities as they form, transact, and manage risks—have been largely ignored in community lawyering scholarship, which focuses on governmental policy reform and rights acquisition. As a result, community lawyering scholarship remains inaccessible to many transactional lawyers, who are beginning to form a critical mass in antipoverty representations. Moreover, transactional lawyering theory does not meaningfully address how transactional lawyers can effectively advance social change. To fill this gap in theory and praxis, community lawyering theory needs to evolve to contemplate and respond to the nuances of transactional lawyering if transactional lawyers are to become movement lawyers advancing racial and economic justice. This Article provides the first textured description of “transactional community lawyering”—the intentional application of community lawyering theory into a distinctly transactional practice. It argues that community lawyering theory must evolve to (1) demand structural, not merely cultural, competency; (2) emphasize strategic alliance building to supplement the boundaries of subject matter expertise; and (3) contemplate the impact of digital technologies in expanding community lawyering beyond its traditional geographic limitations in order to integrate transactional lawyers as community lawyers. By so evolving, community lawyering theory would not only better inform antipoverty transactional lawyering but also prepare the next generation of diverse movement lawyers

Opening Address For The Seventh Annual Stein Center Symposium on Contemporary Urban Challenges

This article is a published version of the opening address of Peter Edelman at the Seventh Annual Stein Center Symposium on Contemporary Urban Challenges, which identifies the challenges in lawyering to the poor and proposes approaches for lawyers to reduce poverty. Peter Edelman\u27s speech challenges the private Bar to take on greater responsibility in helping to formulate policy that will work to eradicate the plight of the poor, calls for greater lawyer involvement in policy adaptation and implementation, identifies new roles that lawyers can and should play in helping to build and strengthen community institutions, and maintains that community building needs to become a major focus of lawyering for the poor

Religious Lawyering in a Liberal Democracy: A Challenge and an Invitation William A. Brahms Lecture on Law & Religion

At a time when many believe that law is no longer a noble profession, many lawyers see no reason to devote time and energy to promoting the public good. Religious lawyering may offer a powerful antidote: a robust framework for lawyers to integrate into their professional lives their most deeply rooted values, perspectives and critiques, and persuasive reasons to improve the quality of justice and work for the common good. At its best, religious lawyering echoes Martin Luther King\u27s advice to the street sweeper. How wonderful it would be, indeed, if we practiced law so well that the host of heaven and earth would pause to say, here lived great lawyers who did their job well

Foreword

Is there such a thing as subversive lawyering? And if so, what is it? These are the questions that motivate this colloquium issue. To be sure, other, similar terms exist and have been explicated. Movement lawyering. Rebellious lawyering. Resistance lawyering. Indeed,we were particularly inspired by Daniel Farbman’s article Resistance Lawyering, in which he uncovers the stories of abolitionist lawyers who, confronting the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, “employed every means at their disposal to frustrate, delay, and dismantle the system within which they were practicing.” But still, we wondered if subversive lawyering might be something different. Something akin to resistance lawyering, and yet distinct. We ourselves were unsure of the answer, but our intuition suggested there was a there there, if we could simply puzzle it out. It was with this openness in mind that we reached out to scholars writing and practicing in different areas of the law—housing law, criminal law, labor law, etc.—who we suspected might be interested in exploring the topic

Damned to the Inferno? A New Vision of Lawyers at the Dawning of the Millennium

This Article seeks to explain the negative perception the legal profession and lawyers have in the eyes of the American public. Disregarding common answers such as the disproportionate amount of influence lawyers have or high salaries and extravagant lifestyles, this Article argues that a cultural shift has led many Americans to see the law as an arbitrary device. Consequently, this belief is reinforced by lawyers and and perpetuated by law schools, leading to the negative perception of the legal profession. In the process, the Article addresses five main issues: the definition and purpose of the law, the republican theory of lawyering, the realities and effectiveness of modern day law school, whether a republican theory of lawyering is in line with American realities, and prescriptions for the future