Law Clinics in Taiwan: Can Clinical Legal Education Succeed in this Civil Law Jurisdiction with an Undergraduate Legal Education System?
Law school clinics are an important part of legal education around the world, but there are still many places without clinics, including Taiwan. It is important for Taiwanese legal educators to consider whether and how clinical education might fit into the Taiwanese legal education system. When discussing clinical education, several concerns are commonly raised: are undergraduate students capable of doing and benefitting from clinical work? Is student practice legal? What effect does student practice have on quality of representation? How does a clinic fit with the existing apprenticeship program? Who would teach a clinic? How do clinics fit with the legal academy’s view of itself and its purposes? Can Taiwanese law schools afford to operate clinics? Ultimately, none of these concerns presents a serious obstacle to the introduction of clinical education. Taiwanese law schools should introduce clinics to their curriculum to give students the opportunity to enjoy the many benefits of clinical education.
A Tale of Election Day 2008: Teaching Storytelling Through Repeated Experiences
This Article describes the experience of two law professors and clinicians supervising several students on Election Day 2008 as they represented prospective voters who had been turned away at the polls. The Article analyzes the students' rapid progress through the lens of recent cognitive science research, and concludes by suggesting ways that the educational experiences of that day might be incorporated into other clinical settings.
Bridging the Gaps: How Cross-Disciplinary Training With MBAs Can Improve Professional Education, Prepare Students for Private Practice, and Enhance University Life
What can law schools do to address the criticisms in the Carnegie Foundation's January 2007 report on legal education? That report found that law schools are not teaching students how to be competent lawyers. One particularly promising answer is cross-disciplinary training with MBAs, which leading law schools such as NYU, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard have embraced in recent years. In this article, I explore the value of such courses, and discuss a cross-disciplinary course that I successfully debuted in the Fall of 2006 at NYU entitled, "Negotiating Complex Transactions with Executives and Lawyers." More generally, I argue that cross-disciplinary courses offer special advantages for students, schools, universities, and employers, and deserve much more emphasis in professional training and higher education.