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The Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) focuses on activities related to effective learning in law school. The results of this year's survey show how law students use their time and what they think about their legal education experience, while simultaneously providing guidance to law schools seeking to improve engagement and learning. The findings on the law school student experience reported in this report are based on responses from nearly 25,000 law students at 77 law schools who completed LSSSE in spring 2010. Results from several sets of experimental questions appended to the 2010 survey for a subset of respondents also are drawn upon. This study features three themes: (1) "From Law Student to Lawyer"; (2) "Understanding Motivation"; and (3) "Outside the Classroom". (Contains 6 tables, 8 figures and 18 notes.) [For the 2009 annual survey results, see ED512516.]

The Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) focuses on activities that affect learning in law school. The results in this year's survey show how law students use their time, what they think about their legal training, and what law schools can do to improve engagement and learning. The selected results reported in this study are based on responses from 26,641 law students at 82 law schools who completed LSSSE in spring 2009. The researchers also draw upon several sets of experimental questions appended to the survey for a subset of the 2009 respondents. This study features three themes: (1) "Another Look at Faculty Feedback"; (2) "Beyond the Classroom"; and (3) "Legal Education in a Changing World". Findings, both promising and disappointing, are presented. (Contains 5 tables, 7 figures, 9 resources and 4 footnotes.) [For the 2008 annual survey results, see ED506934.]

The Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) documents dimensions of quality in legal education and provides information about law student participation in effective educational activities that law schools and other organizations can use to improve student learning. The insights into the law school student experience reported in this study are based on responses from nearly 30,000 law students at 85 law schools who completed LSSSE in spring 2008. The researchers also draw upon several sets of experimental questions appended to the survey and given to a subset of the 2008 respondents. This study features three themes: (1) "Ethical and Professional Development in the Law School"; (2) "Developing Legal Skills"; and (3) "Computers in the Law School Classroom". Findings, both promising and disappointing, are presented. (Contains 9 tables, 7 figures, 6 resources, and 2 footnotes.)

This report is the third in a series of measure reports that examine the economic, civic, and social development of the state by its systems of higher education. This report measures degrees awarded in selected areas of employment against workforce demand. The report found: (1) California's postsecondary schools are not producing enough graduates with baccalaureate degrees to meet a growing demand by employers of workers with computer-related professional skills; (2) Overall there appears to be enough engineering degree graduates, but an increase in bachelor's degree level learners might help employers meet the need for entry-level workers; (3) State efforts to expand the number of college educated nurses, doctors and other health professionals appear to be helping to relieve shortages in these occupations, but California needs to maintain its commitment to such initiatives in order to avoid future labor shortages as the demand continues to grow for healthcare workers; (4) Workforce projections for attorneys suggest that the state's current capacity to train lawyers is adequate; and (5) California continues to face serious shortages of fully qualified teachers. K-12 schools with the neediest students often lack the resources or incentives to attract fully qualified teachers, undercutting the ability of California to provide an adequate education to all students. Based on this assessment, the Commission concludes that California's postsecondary education system is not producing enough graduates to meet the State's economic needs. California's employers are forced to import college graduates and pay inflated wage premiums in order to attract and retain the college educated workforce they need. The Commission sees a need to continue and strengthen efforts to expand degree earning in several occupational fields including: computer-related jobs; engineering professions; nursing and other health-related professions; and teaching. The Commission believes greater emphasis should be placed on tracking occupational outcomes for students and supports linking student data-bases with employment-wage data maintained by the state and federal government. (Contains 10 footnotes and 4 figures.)

Continuing Professional Education (CPE) is usually conceived as a planned and formulated process for individual members of professional associations. This paper, by contrast, examines professional learning as a collective and distributed process, taking a whole firm, as the unit of analysis. Action Research informed by activity theory is used to work with a law firm. The results show inherent tensions and contradiction in a process of knowledge sharing and practice improvement. (Contains 2 footnotes and 3 figures.)

In a "Stanford Law Review" article, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) law professor Richard Sander claimed to statistically prove that affirmative action at American law schools actually depressed the number of African Americans who become lawyers by "mismatching" them at schools where they were in over their heads academically. This policy brief demonstrates that Sander's prediction of a 7.9% net increase in black lawyers if affirmative action ended today is so unlikely that it is essentially impossible. In fact, based on the 2004 admissions data, an annual decline of 30% to 40% in African American attorneys is more likely if affirmative action ended. This policy brief also reviews the key methodological flaws in Sander's study of African Americans in legal education, and also situates Latinos in this analysis. The benefits Sander projects would result from ending affirmative action and shunting underrepresented students to lower-ranked schools are quite speculative. (Contains 1 figure, 1 table, and 41 endnotes.)

The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires schools, districts, and states to recruit and retain "highly qualified teachers" and to show annual progress toward the goal of 100 percent student proficiency in reading and mathematics by 2014. This heightened attention to teacher quality and pressure to improve achievement leaves educators facing a myriad of challenges with little data to guide them in achieving these goals. Many stakeholders concede that traditional teacher preparation and in-service training have failed to produce the level of quality demanded by the new educational environment. Clearly, educators face some daunting challenges, but this analysis recognizes that the education field is not alone in its quest for quality and that examining how other fields prepare and train professionals can provide ideas and approaches for education to consider adapting in its own efforts. This analysis compares professional development--both pre-service preparation and in-service training--in education to six other professions: law, accounting, architecture, nursing, firefighting, and law enforcement. This comparison illuminates similarities and differences in the approaches taken to preparation and in-service training to inform the debate over how to improve teacher quality and also highlights important areas for further study and possible policy development.

To explore possible sources of the underrepresentation of minority groups in law school, this paper brings together existing data that describe the participation of members of different racial/ethnic groups, especially African Americans and Hispanics, at successive points along the way to employment in the law. It focuses on the process by which prospective lawyers are educated through the steps that lead to a career in the law, comparing the experiences of minorities with those of their nonminority cohorts. The objective is to identify places along the path to the legal profession at which minority members are most likely to fall by the wayside. Data suggest that African Americans are completing high school later than Whites, but Hispanics are completing high school at lower rates. College enrollment rates have been increasing steadily among high school graduates from all racial/ethnic groups, but only about 16% of African Americans and 10% of Hispanics held baccalaureate degrees. Among the first professional degrees recorded by the National Center for Education Statistics, a law degree appears to be a popular choice for members of minority groups. College graduates who are members of minority groups are proportionately more likely than their white counterparts to consider attending law school. There is no disproportionate loss of any single group at the stage of application to law school. At the level of admission, the racial-ethnic profile of the group of applicants admitted to law school is different than that of the applicant pool. The overall rates of admission of minority groups are generally lower than those of white applicants. These differences may be attributed, at least in part, to the majority-minority gap in Law School Admission Test and undergraduate grade point average measures. Minorities enter legal education at rates that are lower than those of their white counterparts, and law school persistence and completion are lower for Black, Hispanic, and Native American students. The article concludes by identifying possible targets for action to increase minority representation in legal education and the professions. (Contains 11 figures, 24 tables, and 24 references.) (SLD)

Lawyers' work, home, and family demands and their strategies for coping with those demands were examined through telephone interviews with practicing lawyers from Calgary, Alberta. Of the 121 lawyers interviewed, 56 were men and 44 were women who worked full-time and 21 were women who worked part-time. Sixty-seven percent of them were associates or partners at law firms. While the lawyers worked an average of 50 hours per week, more than half regularly worked evenings and weekends. Most considered their long hours necessary to meet client demands, professional expectations, and/or billing requirements, and many expressed considerable dissatisfaction with their job's time demands. Those time demands most often interfered with the lawyers' family time. The difficulty women face in combining a successful career and a balanced family life proved a general concern. Their division of household tasks appeared fairly traditional, with the wives tending to do more "female tasks" and husbands tending to do more "male tasks." About half those interviewed indicated that most of their stress was due primarily to work. Coping strategies cited by the lawyers included turning to their spouse and family for support, attempting to keep their work in perspective, and trying to place limits on their work time. The interview protocol is appended. (Contains 38 references.) (MN)

The District of Columbia passed appropriation acts for fiscal years 1999, 2000, and 2001 to limit the amount of appropriated funds that could be paid to an attorney representing a prevailing party in an action brought against District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). A study investigated court mandated attorneys' fees paid by the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) and attorneys' fees awards that were in excess of the appropriation act's limitations. A review of DCPS's February 28, 2002, report on Individuals with Disabilities Education Act awards and payments for fiscal years 1999, 2000, and 2001 indicates the appropriation act's limitations had little if any impact on the total amount awarded by the courts for the attorneys' fees of prevailing parties. Court decisions make it clear that the appropriation act's limitations applied only to the amount that the District could pay to a prevailing party under IDEA and not the amount that the court could award. The decisions also make it clear that where there in an independent legal basis to award attorneys' fees, such as the Civil Rights Act, the court could do so without regard to the appropriation act's limitations. (CR)

A survey was conducted on the use of lay advocates to investigate state reaction to a recent court decision in Delaware on the use of lay advocates and the availability of representation for parents of students with disabilities in due process hearings. The Delaware Supreme Court found in 1999 that lay advocates representing parents at due process hearings were guilty of practicing law without a license. Data from the survey indicate states do not gather formal information about the availability and use of attorneys or non-attorney advocates to assist parents in due process hearings. Many respondents expressed difficulty in answering survey items because data on parent representation at hearings are not compiled. Survey results on state practices related to the involvement of lay advocates in due process hearings do reveal that their use varies from state to state. Only 6 states indicated that there was an insufficient number of attorneys available for parents, regardless of cost, in more than 60 percent of their state, while 15 states indicated that over 60 percent of their state lacked sufficient reduced cost or free attorney services. Very few states indicated that they had taken any specific action in response to the Delaware decision. (CR)

A qualitative interpretivist study analyzed interrelationships among professional practice, knowledge gained in continuing professional education (CPE) programs, and context of employment. Eighty semi-structured, tape-recorded interviews were conducted with social workers, lawyers, adult educators, and nurses who had attended continuing education programs 9-24 months previously. Findings indicated professionals construct a knowledge base by moving back and forth between continuing professional education programs and their professional practice. Each profession described the process used to construct knowledge differently. Social workers framed their construction of knowledge from CPE programs through their advocacy role. Lawyers saw CPE as providing a "road map" for their practice. Adult educators indicated that from attendance at CPE programs they often would get one idea that was the "spark for a creative process" of connecting the new information to ideas and experiences, or "connecting different bodies of knowledge." Nurses described how they linked client needs with new information from CPE so the entire knowledge base became integrated. This process of knowledge construction was affected by elements of the structural, human resources, political, and symbolic frames of the contexts in which professionals were employed. (Contains 36 references.) (Author/YLB)

This paper examines the focus on formal training and proposes a new way of incorporating communities of practice into professional development. It describes formal and informal learning found in organizations and discusses the implications of using communities of practice to foster professional development. Data collection involved observations in one public defender's office between October 1998 and March 1999, examining the daily work practices of attorneys, shadowing two attorneys during their work days, sitting in on two jury trials, visiting the local jail, and attending various social gatherings. Interviews related to learning experiences in this community were conducted with seven attorneys at the beginning and end of the fieldwork. The first interviews were relatively general, and the second interviews focused on specific incidents occurring during the observations. Newsletters and a Web site provided by the public defender council were also reviewed. Data analysis indicated that public defenders engaged in informal learning through conversations with colleagues, reflection, and practice. Formal learning opportunities mainly involved required continuing legal education (CLE). Most of the attorneys were positive about the CLE, and they generally valued both formal and informal learning. (Contains 25 references.) (SM)

Increasing the mobility of service providers, including professionals, via mutual recognition (of regulatory systems) agreements (MRAs) has become a significant issue worldwide. Despite increasing interest in MRAs, it may be argued that MRAs are but one of a larger range of major developments that have fueled current interest in occupational competence descriptors and professional practice. Other important developments are as follows: rapid and accelerating change; public dissatisfaction with the professions; the limited understanding of the nature of professional practice; the emergence of a knowledge society; globalization leading to a corporate model of service provision; and moves to alternative and flexible modes of service delivery. The claim that mutual recognition is but one issue among these major developments may be illustrated by the examples of the following accreditation schemes: (1) the Law Society of New South Wales Specialist Accreditation Scheme; (2) the regulatory model recently developed in the United States by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing; (3) the competence-based assessment strategy developed by the Dietitians Association of Australia; and (4) various practices being used to assess competence in 17 Australian professions. These examples demonstrate that the role of professional competence standards in MRAs and in professionals' mobility is far from clear. (Contains 25 references.) (MN)

A study demonstrated that court interpreter failure to preserve pragmatic features in the interpreted version of courtroom testimony can potentially distort both the lawyer's question and the witness' response. Pragmatic features are defined as those aspects of an utterance that signal how the speaker intends the message to be taken. While some of the alterations made in translation are relatively trivial, others are serious and may critically influence the jury's assessment of whether the defendant is guilty or innocent. Data were drawn from court colloquies involving English-speaking attorneys and Spanish-speaking witnesses, using audio and videotapes from four trials. Focus of the analysis is on alterations to pragmatic markers, words or phrases that modify the basic message or signal a separate one. Results indicate that addition of pragmatic markers and features to witness answers can make the witness appear less confident of the testimony. When the witness is the defendant, the situation is potentially more critical. In contrast, deleting these same features from a witness response removes disfluencies, making the witness or defendant appear more confident, and he/she may be potentially perceived more favorably by the jury. (MSE)

This report examined 10-year trends in applications to Maryland's two law schools (the University of Baltimore School of Law and the University of Maryland School of Law), enrollment, and the first-time passage rates of graduates on the Maryland Bar Examination. Breakdowns by gender and race are also provided. The study also explored the projected need for lawyers in the state through the year 2005 and reviewed the results of surveys of graduates from the two law schools regarding employment. It was found that applications to Maryland's two law schools declined by 42 percent between 1992 and 1997, although enrollments remained relatively constant during the period. For the past four years, a substantial majority of graduates who have taken the bar examination administered in July passed it on their first try. It was also found that although at least 80 percent of 1996 graduates reported that they had full-time jobs within six to nine months of graduation, less than two-thirds of these graduates were working in full-time legal positions. The report also found that employment for lawyers in Maryland is expected to grow 29 percent from 1992 to 2005. (MDM)

What is the best course of action when students engage in non-aggressive intimidation of teachers? Fortunately, only about 34% of teachers in Wyoming report ever being harassed, threatened or intimidated by students at anytime during their career. As such, Wyoming Schools are considered some of the safest working environments for teachers in the United States. Because Wyoming teachers are so seldom harassed or intimidated by students there are very few (if any) specific laws, rules or regulations regarding such behavior. Student behavior that intimidates teachers may be dealt with using a statute that permits suspension or even expulsion in cases where a student's behavior is, in the judgment of the local board of trustees, clearly detrimental to the education, welfare, safety or morals of other pupils, including the use of foul, profane or abusive language or habitually disruptive behavior. "However, because the behavior of the students is not overtly aggressive, a conference with your school board attorney is a good first step before disciplinary action is taken in this situation." While there may be grounds for disciplinary intervention under this statute, it may be more useful to explore current research pertaining to bullying in schools as the students' behavior clearly falls within the definitions of school bullies. A solution would seem to have two parts; first, quickly and firmly intervening with the offending students, and working with faculty and staff to develop a comprehensive anti-bullying program for the school. (Contains 5 online resources.)

Social science research can make a valuable contribution to family law analysis and formation. It can help define problems, identify possible solutions, and challenge underlying normative assumptions. Recent studies related to family law reform have analyzed the use of wage-withholding and other changes to increase child support amounts and collection, the impact of divorce on children, and parental decision making about custody on divorce. To encourage the responsible use of social science research for policymaking, including educational policymaking, this article explores the limits and potential of law and social science research interaction. Part II of this article explores these limitations by describing four major methodological problems with which family research, as a type of social science, must deal: (1) measurement; (2) sampling and generalizing; (3) problems of causal inference; and (4) researcher bias. Included in this discussion is a detailed assessment of the problem of bias in the research process and recent feminist contributions to the analysis of bias. It also discusses recent advances in the quality of family policy research. Part III deals with the use of research for policy analysis and formation and explains the need for multiple studies and the normative nature of policymaking. It also analyzes possible roles for comprehensive reviews of research literature in the policy process. The conclusion of the article emphasizes that developing criteria for the use of family social science research in law formation is a formidable undertaking. A proposal is presented for the collaboration of social science researchers and lawyers to improve this relationship. The proposed panel of lawyers and researchers would not be a funding agency, but would be a structured forum for discussion of the family policy process. (SLD)

This paper addresses recurring ethical questions faced by college and university attorneys concerning who is the client, representation of individual and institutional defendants, and the witness-advocate rule. It also provides an overview of ethical considerations which can arise when the college/university attorney participates in the investigation of possible employee/student misconduct and in campus adjudicatory hearings. The college/university can act only through its duly authorized constituents, which the attorney usually has no difficulty identifying. Board by-laws, institutional policies and delegations of authority define responsibilities and define who speaks and acts for the institution. When the university and faculty/staff/administrators in both their official and individual capacities are named as defendants, responding on behalf of each named client appears to be the most appropriate action unless there is no difference in the facts and legal theories of defense available to each defendant. Lawyers generally cannot act as advocates at trials in which they are likely to be necessary witnesses. The paper includes two hypothetical cases that present additional questions of ethics for college/university attorneys. (Contains reference footnotes.) (MAH)

Goal-directed performance appraisal (PA) theory includes four components: rating context, performance judgment, performance rating, and evaluation. This study focuses on the components of rating context and performance rating. For the study, the rating context was a large civil service organization that must produce documentation for attorney promotion decisions. Performance ratings were written documentation of the message a rater wished to convey to audiences who read the rating form. Whether the raters in this context communicated their PA judgments using the broad categories of attorney performance defined by the organization's PA form (case analysis and preparation skills, advocacy and communication skills, and role attitude, work habits, and leadership skills) was studied for 142 attorneys for one year and 174 for the second year. Results supported the assertion that performance appraisals by the attorney supervisors could be accurately summarized in the broad performance categories. Rater goal-directed PA theory provided a framework for interpreting these research results. (Contains 2 tables and 14 references.) (SLD)