Giving your Students Some "Real Life" Experience
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Participants at the Institute's 1994 conference offered many ideas for giving their students "real life" experiences. Here are some suggestions:

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At the beginning of each new semester, the new interns for our real client clinical program have an orientation period to familiarize them with the local court procedures, clinical program office procedures, and general family law statutes and mandatory, statewide forms.

As part of that orientation, interns are required to observe four family law motion dockets. They are to observe one docket call and the four hearings may be on one to four different dockets.

The intern records the following information: (1) date of docket; (2) name of case; (3) commissioner hearing case; (4) respondent's attorney; (5) petitioner's attorney; (6) type of motion; (7) issues being argued; (8) decision; (9) your reaction to decision (i.e., fair and equitable?); (10) good points of the arguments and attorney styles; (11) aspects of the argument or style that were poor or ineffective; and (12) why they were ineffective.

This forces the intern to familiarize themselves not only with the local courtrooms and family law procedures, but also with the various court commissioners and their approaches to decision-making. The interns frequently compare notes and reach conclusions about members of the bench. They also begin to know the family law members of the bar who may well be opposing counsel at some future date.

Submitted anonymously

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To make ethics and ethical dilemmas more "real" to students, we have tied our Ethics seminar into the work done by the students in the Legal Aid Clinic.

The class is limited to approximately 12 students. The students and I meet once a week for two hours, basically to talk about ethical problems that the students or I have encountered in the cases that they work on in the clinic. I assign a reading for the students each week, and I require them to keep a journal containing their reflections. Their reflections may be on the reading and how it relates to their cases, or it may be on any matter that arose and that relates to ethics in any way.

Before the group meeting, I ask students' permission to talk about their journal entries in class or ask the students themselves to talk about their journal entries. Occasionally, we invite a guest speaker to participate. This has been helpful when the topic that we are discussing relates to a particular area of expertise such as representing children.

I have found that because the ethical dilemmas encountered arise in actual rather than hypothetical cases, students are more prone to seek solutions. This is not to say that one solution is prescribed or mandated, but the student who has the ethical problem actively seeks help from his or her peers; this encourages and stimulates group participation.

This method of teaching ethics is much more rewarding than teaching Professional Responsibility from the Model Rules. It encourages students to explore ethical and moral issues, and it also highlights the fact that the ethical rules and code more often than not do not provide the answers.

Submitted by Christine Venter, Notre Dame Law School

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Last semester, the class and I agreed to incorporate "service learning" into our course on housing and community development.

We had a recent alumna who was interested in working in the public interest/housing area, but was unable to find a job. She decided to form her own nonprofit corporation and apply directly for funding for a home for single, unwed mothers. She had to develop a plethora of legal documents to support her application.

I originally planned the class as a traditional two-hour course with a three-hour final at the end of the semester. On the first day of class, I told the class I wanted to try something different, and proposed that we adopt the nonprofit corporation as our "client," write two or three papers each on different topics designed to help the alumna in her application, and still have a one-hour final at the end of the semester.

Because the registration material had listed the course as a non-paper course, I told the class I had to get the consent of each student to convert to a paper course. I then said that before we voted on the proposal, I wanted the class to meet the "client." The alumna stepped forward and spent the next hour setting out the dire need for safe housing for unwed mothers with small children that exists in south-central Los Angeles and her proposal to buy a boarded-up building and turn it into a mixed-use housing and training center for the tenants. By the end of the hour, the class had unanimously and enthusiastically adopted the proposal.

The service-learning component of the class really brought the class to life. I had the "client" come in several more times during the semester to update us on her progress. We took a field trip to the boarded-up building she had under contract to view the environment and to visualize her plans. We also were able to relate the materials in the course to her particular project. And we were able to contribute toward a project that will make a difference in the lives of the people selected as tenants and in the immediate community around the building. It is impossible to discuss in detail all the tangible and intangible benefits we received from adding the service-learning component of the class, but I can say without question it made the class the most meaningful class I have ever taught. Several students said it was the most meaningful class they took in law school.

Submitted by Peter Wendel, Pepperdine University School of Law

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As I was trying to develop a syllabus for a Criminal Law class, I remembered how dry and boring the course seemed when I was in law school. It was not until I had been practicing for several years that I stumbled into the exciting realm of criminal defense.

I am a chronic newspaper-clipper. In my apartment are withered snippets of articles going back for years. Many of those articles deal with the bizarre things people do that lead them to getting arrested and prosecuted. While looking through my collection, the germ of an idea began to crystallize. I decided to select what turned out to be three major stories involving different types of crime. Each news story formed a unit from which I developed three to four weeks of reading and discussion.

After some slight modifications, I gave the stories to the students. We spent the next class discussing what the students knew about the actual case; what they thought they needed to know about the crime, the victims, or the defendants if they were going to prosecute; and what they needed to know if they were going to defend the accused. Based on their discussion, I assigned readings from the casebook and supplemental materials if required. After discussing the assigned reading, we talked about what the principles in the reading meant to our unit case.

This approach allowed the students to learn about crimes, defenses, and theories of punishment in a real context. The level of discussion and participation in the class was outstanding. Having the context of the original news story before they did the reading allowed students to quickly decipher the significance of the cases and note material.

Submitted by Michelle Jacobs, University of Florida College of Law

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