Report on the April 2011 Standards Review Committee Meeting (Part II)

This report reviews the results of the April 2011 meeting of the Standards Review Committee (SRC), but omits discussion of the committee discussion of security of position, which is reviewed in a previous report, available here. In each section, reference is made to subcommittee reports; those are subcommittees of the SRC, charged with drafting language and bringing it to the full committee for discussion and ultimate decision.

The standards and topics addressed in this report are:

* Bar pass rate requirements (Standard 301)
* Admissions and student services, including use of the LSAT in admissions (Chapter 5)
* Student learning outcomes (part of Chapter 3)
* Other issues in Chapter 3: Program of Legal Education, including discussions of attendance policies, distance education, and paid externships
* Faculty responsibilities (Standard 404)
* Law school administration and organization (Chapter 2)
* Facilities (Chapter 7)

What Happened at the Public Forum on Accreditation Issues

The Standards Review Committee (SRC) held an open forum at the beginning of its meeting on April 2-3. Commentators focused on security of position and its relationship to law school governance and academic freedom. Speakers from SALT, CLEA (the Clinical Legal Association), ALWD (the Association of Legal Writing Directors), and the AALS, along with a number of individual faculty members, raised concerns about a subcommittee draft that would eliminate any requirement of tenure or other job security for law faculty from the ABA’s accreditation standards. This memo summarizes the public testimony on tenure and security of position, the SRC’s debate about the proposed changes to the tenure/security of position standard, and the outcome of that debate.

13th Annual Trina Grillo Retreat:Trina: Looking Back and Forging Ahead

The 13th Annual! That phrase in some ways is numbing. It is a solemn reminder that it has been fifteen years since Trina Grillo, our colleague, friend and inspiration, too soon left the planet, three years shy of her fiftieth birthday. That phrase – the 13th Annual – is also inspiring as it demonstrates the lasting power of Trina’s legacy and the persistence of the struggle in which we all engage and to which the annual retreat is dedicated.

March Madness

Peter King is my representative in the United States Congress! There I said it. I apologize to everyone and assure you I have never done anything to get him elected or reelected. One would think that living in Nassau County, Long Island, under an hour by car or train to New York City, would mean I was living in a fairly progressive community. When I moved here in 1987, I thought I was. But Long Island has a nasty history: in the 1730s, there were more enslaved men and women living here than anyplace else in the north. The Levitt family which singlehandedly created the concept of the cookie-cutter suburbs that soon led to white flight and sprawl, had restrictive covenants in the leases and deeds to their homes in Levittown. (Levittown still is less than 1% African American!) Long Island has 127 individual school districts, each devised to assure homogeneity and racial purity. So Peter King as an elected official somehow fits the demographics of a region trying to stave off modernity despite its proximity to Manhattan.

Defacing Ruins: Rhetoric, Law, Power

The business of rhetoric is persuasion. At its zenith, rhetoric functions like a jedi-mind-trick, making us amnesiacs to the history of the present. The law is no exception, where persuasion is everything. Everything about the profession whittles down to persuasion in some form or other—lawyers use verbal tactics to persuade judge and jury, judges use it to write persuasive legal opinions – not to mention legal scholars who ruminate over sexy titles and themes for their articles. Under close inspection, then, the language of law proves to be one big rhetorical script. It is crucial, then, to consider rhetoric within a framework of oppression, both legal and linguistic.