At Hamline Bobbi and Sharon (and others) have developed a new 1st year course called Practice, Problem-Solving and Professionalism and their paper describes their experiences teaching the first iteration of the course last year. In gathering information, they found that thinking about this as outside of “ADR.” Thus there should be something that all students start off w/ this is what it means to be a good lawyer, not an alternative to traditional lawyering.
- How can we make this happen at other places that aren’t special like Hamline?
- Macro and micro campaings –
- macro – getting away from the silo-ization of ADR
- micro – discussing this class
- We enable the dominant discourse of law schools by proposing ADR courses – in fact the ADR world took on the MacCrate and Carnegie Reports, which releases the larger endeavor from implementing the reports’ ideas.
- Don’t other faculty believe they’re teaching problem solving. What exactly is problem-solving?
- Explicitly excluding litigation from the class might exacerbate the divide b/c 1st years don’t see that they’re being taught in a litigation environment.
- Remember there are audiences of believers and non-believers, and the non-believers are hard to reach – a better hook is needed for them.
- Note that there are a lot of “Emperors with no clothes” when it comes to this issue.
Adding such a course to the first-year curriculum that introduces ‘problem solving’ techniques is an idea that resonates well with me.
Current law school curriculum is so very litigation-centric to a degree that is hardly reflective of the actual practice of law, which sees the great majority of cases settling before trial.
To make matters worse, the methods of negotiation, mediation, and arbitration are marginalized as “Alternative” means of dispute resolution, implicitly suggesting that these other methods exist on a tier beneath litigation or are somehow not as important.
In reality, these methods often yield more favorable outcomes for both sides to the dispute.
If law schools are truly genuine in their self-declared purpose of teaching students how to “think like lawyers,” then crucial concepts like the Problem Solving approach should be at the forefront of legal education. Such material should be first year law students as early as possible!