Recent WLR Forward Articles
Flexibility & Resilience are Essential Legal Skills
The legal profession is facing an era of change driven by technological advancements, environmental crises, shifting client expectations, and evolving societal norms. This article argues that flexibility and resilience are not just positive personality traits but essential legal skills that should be intentionally cultivated in law school curricula. By integrating adaptability into legal education—through emphasizing the evolving nature of law, incorporating interdisciplinary approaches, reshaping assessments, and fostering collaborative learning—law schools can better equip students to navigate an unpredictable future. Encouraging law students to embrace flexibility and resilience as a professional skill will not only enhance their long-term success but also strengthen the legal profession’s ability to lead in times of transformation.
April 18, 2025Academic Limbo: Reforming Campus Speech Governance for Students
This essay examines the structural inequalities in academic freedom protections between faculty and students at private universities, highlighted by the 2023 Gaza-related campus protests. While faculty members enjoy multiple layers of protection through tenure, contracts, and legal precedents, students must rely solely on discretionary university policies interpreted by the administrators who restrict their speech. Through analysis of recent campus conflicts, this essay argues that current frameworks for protecting student academic freedom in private universities are fundamentally inadequate and proposes establishing institutional oversight boards inspired by social media governance models. Unlike temporary committees, these boards would provide consistent, transparent adjudication processes while building precedent for future cases. This essay demonstrates why university implementation of such oversight mechanisms offers distinct advantages over social media models, including manageable case volumes and clearer contextual standards. By creating institutional separation of powers, these reforms would help align administrative actions with stated commitments to academic freedom while maintaining necessary operational control.
March 19, 2025NextGen Bar Success: A Student-Tested, Student-Approved Method for Completing Counseling Integrated Question Sets
Legal educators nationwide need to begin teaching students a method for completing Counseling Integrated Question Sets, a novel type of question the National Conference of Bar Examiners (“NCBE”) is introducing on the NextGen bar exam. Counseling Integrated Question Sets require students to answer a series of six multiple choice or short answer questions focused on client counseling or dispute resolution, as they work through an unfolding common fact pattern that also contains rules or elicits rules students have memorized.
March 2, 2025- More Forward Articles