|
Jan. 17, 2005.
Kristy Moon, editor.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
The third Monday in January is the Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr. national holiday. It is a day to celebrate and honor the life of a
remarkable leader who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for his struggle to
bring about social change through nonviolent direct action. To commemorate Dr.
King and the values that he exemplified – courage, truth, justice, dignity,
compassion, and service – we invite you to take a look at the following sources
and reflect upon his legacy.
- Martin Luther King, Jr., Day of Service,
http://www.mlkday.org/. This website
provides a state-by-state listing of MLK Day service opportunities. For
service opportunities through UW, see
http://admin.urel.washington.edu/ur/mlk/production/index.asp?nav=varMLKHome.
- The Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project at Stanford
University,
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/.
This site links to the text of Dr. King's most famous sermons, speeches,
and publications, including his "I Have a Dream" speech and the "Letter from
Birmingham Jail."
- The King Center,
http://www.thekingcenter.org/, web site of the official MLK memorial
established by Coretta Scott King.
- Anthony E. Cook, Beyond Critical Legal Studies: The
Reconstructive Theology of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 103 Harv. L. Rev.
985 (1990).
- Randall Kennedy, Martin Luther King's Constitution:
A Legal History of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 98 Yale L.J. 999 (1989).
- Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here:
Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper & Row, 1967) (E185.615 .K5 at Classified Stacks).
Remote Access to Library’s Online Resources
UW law students, faculty, and staff have access to legal
and non-legal online resources that are licensed by the Gallagher Law Library
and the UW Libraries. Most of these resources restrict access to computers
that bear UW Internet Protocol (IP) address. If you want to access these
resources from a home computer, you can do so in one of two ways:
- Install the UW Internet
Connectivity Kit (UWICK) on your home computer,
http://www.washington.edu/computing/software/uwick/contents.html. The
UWICK CD-ROM is available at the University Bookstore for about $20 (must show
your Husky Card). Installing UWICK will provide your home computer with a UW
IP address when you connect to the UW server.
- Connect via the UW Libraries
proxy server,
http://www.lib.washington.edu/help/connect.html. Use this service if you
have wireless, DSL, or cable access to the Internet. The proxy server will
require you to input your UW NetID and password, the same information you enter
to access email.
For more information about remotely accessing library's
online resources, see our detailed guide at
http://lib.law.washington.edu/ref/computing.html.
For a list of online legal resources, see
http://lib.law.washington.edu/research/dbind.html. For a list of other
online resources, see
http://www.lib.washington.edu/ under “Resources.”
For help with computing problems, visit the Computing
Services site at
http://www.law.washington.edu/Computing/. It includes, among others, FAQs
and wireless configuration instructions.
Law School Survey of Student Engagement
--Mary Whisner
What do law students do? How many work during the school
year, how many participate in clinics, and how many do volunteer work? What do
they think of legal education? OK, you know about yourself and your friends,
but what about your cohort around the country?
See Student Engagement in Law Schools: A First Look,
http://www.indiana.edu/~nsse/lssse/2004_annual_report/pdf/LSSSE%202004%20Annual%20Survey%20Results.pdf,
which reports on a spring 2004 survey of students at 42 law
schools.13,000 students responded (53% of those surveyed, more or less at
different schools). The survey covered, among other things:
- satisfaction with legal education and choice of law
school
- hours spent preparing for class
- contact with faculty outside of class
- participation in volunteer work
- participation in clinics
- whether students engage in serious conversations with
classmates with different political or religious beliefs
- whether they engage in serious conversations with
classmates from difference races or ethnic groups
- satisfaction with career services
- satisfaction with library services
- how much debt they have
The Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research –
with the support of the Association of American Law Schools and the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching – conducted this Law School Study of
Student Engagement and plans to do it annually.
A website with more detailed data than the 20-page report
above is at
http://www.indiana.edu/~nsse/lssse/2004_annual_report/html/.
Books of the Week
Law School: Legal
Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s,
by Robert Stevens
Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the System: A Critical
Edition, by Duncan Kennedy
--Kristy Moon
Does the recent release of the first annual Law School Survey of Student
Engagement survey make you wonder how law schools have evolved and, as a
result, affected the legal profession? Here are two books that will shed light
on the law school experience that you’re having today and influence how you
think about the legal profession.
Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s
to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983)
(KF272.S8 1983 at Classified Stacks) is written by Robert Stevens, a one-time
Yale law professor, president of Haverford College, and chancellor at U.C.
Santa Cruz. This is the best book on the history of American legal education,
and is one of fifty most-cited law books between 1978 and 1999 (for a complete
list of most-cited law books, see
http://lib.law.washington.edu/ref/mostcited.html).
In Jacksonian America, lawyers were a governing elite, but there was more
than one path to the law. Some clerked in prestigious New York law firms. Others taught themselves through practical experience and reading of
Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. A few attended Yale,
Harvard, and Litchfield. Scarcity of law schools before the Civil War meant
that there was more than one way to becoming a lawyer.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the options begin to narrow as bar
members saw law schools as a way to raise the professional status of the bar
and, at the same time, keep out immigrants and their children from entering the
profession. Harvard set a trend by conceiving the case method, employing
academics as law professors, and requiring students to obtain an undergraduate
education first.
The twentieth century saw a time of tension between elitism and
egalitarianism in legal education. Efforts to abolish night law schools, and
hence keep out immigrants and the poor from the legal profession, failed.
Efforts to raise the entry barrier by requiring seven years of post-secondary
education succeeded. Curricular conformity was imposed on the law schools.
In the end, prevention of law schools from becoming trade schools, decline
of apprenticeship, conformity and standardization of curricula, appeal of
clinical programs, and opening of the profession to minorities and women are
all explained in this comprehensive chronicle.
Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the
System: A Critical Edition (New York: New York University Press, 2004)
(KF387.K45 2004 at Classified Stacks) was first self-published in 1983 by
Harvard law professor Duncan Kennedy, one of the leading scholars of the
Critical Legal Studies movement (for a brief explanation of CLS, see
http://lii.law.cornell.edu/topics/critical_theory.html).
The book is a biting critique of the modern law school system which the
author argues reinforces class, race, and gender inequality in our society. It
“offers an analysis of how legal education participates in the production of
what sucks about the system” (p. 1) by ideologically training the students for
"willing service in the hierarchies of the corporate welfare state" (p. 15). The author's primary audience is law students, particularly first-year
students. “Because most students believe what they are told, explicitly and
implicitly, about the world they are entering, they behave in ways that fulfill
the prophecies the system makes about them and about that world.” (p. 16). And
here is what he says about law faculty, a group that he is a member of:
You may sense that they have dropped out of the world you're entering and
that they are delighted not to have to do what you will have to do. Along
with, or instead, of their bar admission certificates, they have family
pictures and their children's paintings on their office walls, announcing
things they care deeply about (one doubts they have students' pictures on the
walls at home), things they are spending a lot more time on than you will be
able to for many associate years to come. They are helping you adjust to that
reality rather than resist it. (p. 6).
The author offers the solution of resistance - resistance inside law
school, against law school: standing up to authoritarianism in the
classroom, advocating for less corporate curriculum, and demanding a legal
services clinic.
You may agree or disagree with the author's viewpoint, but this book is
worth the read, especially the short introduction, so you can decide for
yourself whether his arguments are still valid today as when the book was first
published. Furthermore, this is a well-known critique that was reviewed in
several major law journals when first published, unprecedented for a
self-published work.
The 2004 reprint
by NYU Press includes an introduction and afterward by the author, and
commentaries by five other legal scholars. Both the 2004 and 1983 editions are available
at KF387.K45 in Classified Stacks.
|
