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.
Online
Academic 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.
NextGen 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.
Stategraft: Facilitating Predatory Takings by Eminent Domain
The following Case Study is published as part of the continuing conversation from the Wisconsin Law Review’s 2023 Symposium on Stategraft. Download PDF Tanya Washington The concept of stategraft, as described in Professor Atuahene’s groundbreaking article, frames …
Court Reform for Progressives: A Primer on Constitutional Considerations
This brief and basically unannotated essay lays out some constitutional considerations associated with prominent (and some not so prominent) proposals for Supreme Court reform circulating among progressives. The essay has four parts, dealing successively with low-hanging fruit (about which there are few constitutional questions—though not none), statutory term limits including “bells-and-whistles” proposals for accomplishing effective term limits, jurisdiction-stripping, and Court expansion. The conclusion: proposals for Court reform raise rather deep questions about the kind of democratic self-governance system we want to have—as does resistance to such proposals (that is, saying that Court reform is a bad idea raises deep questions about the kind of democratic self-governance system we want to have and which the objector believes to be close to what we actually have).
Conscription of Private Attorneys to Represent Indigent Criminal Defendants in States and Territories
This year marked the sixtieth anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright, the seminal case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution guarantee a right to court-appointed counsel to indigent criminal defendants charged with serious offenses. Very few would argue with that basic proposition today. Instead, the contemporary debate is whether to recognize a “civil Gideon,” i.e. a right to court-appointed counsel for indigent civil litigants.
Taxing Vulnerable Children and Families Through Stategraft: It is Time to End Racialized Wealth Extraction in Foster Care
As unjust and counterproductive public policies go, taxing vulnerable children and families is among the worst. For years, experts have been sounding the alarm that foster care “child support”—making parents pay the state when it takes away their children—is bad family policy and fiscal policy. Importantly, critics have also pointed to the
myriad ways the practice is unlawful. New guidance from the federal government to the states provides a generational opportunity to dismantle this form of stategraft in the foster care system. In this Case Study we highlight promising legislative and administrative responses to the recent federal guidance.
Using the U.S. Department of Justice to Help End Juvenile Stategraft
In 2013, Berkeley Law’s Policy Advocacy Clinic began working with local advocates to study juvenile administrative fees. We found that these fees were a form of regressive and racially discriminatory wealth extraction often imposed unlawfully on youth and families across California. As part of a statewide campaign to abolish juvenile fees, we turned to the United States Department of Justice for help fighting these illegal and harmful practices in Sacramento County.
Unraveling Stategraft: Ending Criminal Administrative Fees in California
In California, like every other state, courts charge administrative fees to people who come into contact with the criminal legal system. As recently as 2020, California authorized over 90 different criminal administrative fees. Since 2019, a coalition of advocacy groups known as Debt Free Justice California have pushed legislation to reduce that number in half by successfully raising questions about the legal and policy rationales for wealth extraction via monetary sanctions like fees.
Race, the Criminal Legal System, and Stategraft: The California Racial Justice Act (2020)
After decades of unabated growth in mass incarceration, the number of incarcerated adults began to decline following the Great Recession. Changes in sentencing, policing, pre-trial diversion, and the recategorization of offense levels, among other strategies, helped reduce the number of persons under carceral control. While the lifetime risks of incarceration and imprisonment have declined from all-time highs, the routine imposition of monetary sanctions (fines, fees, court costs, penalty assessments, etc.) have continued to proliferate in the criminal legal system.
The imposition of these monetary sanctions represents an immediately recognizable form of stategraft. In this essay, we argue that mass incarceration, and its attendant racial disparities in sentencing, is a form of stategraft that, in some cases, illegally transfers predominantly Black, Latine, and poor white bodies from control of oneself to control of the state. In doing so, the state appropriates the differential time and labor-power of persons under carceral control to illegally profit from racial inequality in mass incarceration and sentencing disparities.