"After decades of taking a back seat to doctrine, lawyering skills have lately become the star of the legal education reform movement. Few law schools continue to question whether essential lawyering skills such as legal writing, research, and advocacy deserve a prominent place in the curriculum. Yet law schools continue to struggle with an artificial split between "doctrinal" courses and "skills" courses-a split that ignores best practices and undermines student learning. In this book, which includes an Introduction by Sophie Sparrow, more than twenty law professors who have figured out how to bridge the gap show why integrating skills into traditional doctrinal courses is crucial to student learning and offer proven strategies for how to do it"--

Foregrounding the importance of schemata in learning, Teaching Lawyering Skills presents an integrated approach to the overall pedagogical theory of law. Stefan Krieger challenges the traditional stark dichotomy between doctrinal analysis and practice skills, arguing that skills education requires development of strategic reasoning in practice.

"Legal education has created silos where certain professors teach "skills" courses and others teach "doctrine." This book challenges that division by building on learning theories that establish students cannot truly learn doctrine without explicit instruction in skills. Moreover, it provides suggestions to demonstrate how law professors can seamlessly weave skills-based assessments into a course to spotlight for students what they have learned and for professors what students haven't learned (as required by ABA Standard 314)"--

The Challenge of Educating Lawyers "This volume, under the presidency of Lee Shulman, is intended primarily to foster appreciation for what legal education does at its best. We want to encourage more informed scholarship and imaginative dialogue about teaching and learning for the law at all organizational levels: in individual law schools, in the academic associations, in the profession itself. We also believe our findings will be of interest within the academy beyond the professional schools, as well as among that public concerned with higher education and the promotion of professional excellence." --From the Introduction "Educating Lawyers is no doubt the best work on the analysis and reform of legal education that I have ever read. There is a call for deep changes in the way law is taught, and I believe that it will be a landmark in the history of legal education." --Bryant G. Garth, dean and professor of law, Southwestern Law School and former director of the American Bar Foundation "Educating Lawyers succeeds admirably in describing the educational programs at virtually every American law school. The call for the integration of the three apprenticeships seems to me exactly what is needed to make legal education more 'professional,' to prepare law students better for the practice of law, and to address societal expectations of lawyers." --Stephen Wizner, dean of faculty, William O. Douglas Clinical Professor of Law, Yale Law School

Calls to reform legal education argue for increasing skills courses and for adding skills components to existing doctrinal courses. Doctrinal teachers naturally resist. The argument asks them to give up curricular space and syllabus time in order to advance the teaching goals of someone else's course. But what if doctrinal and skills courses are not naturally occurring categories at all, but rather subjective groupings of our own creation? What if skills teaching is actually an inherent part of deep doctrinal learning? This book dismantles the theoretical legitimacy of the doctrine-skills divide, identifies its unnecessary negative entailments, and suggests better alternatives.

This book is designed for teachers of legal research and writing courses. Both new and seasoned legal-writing teachers will benefit from the book, whether they are full-time professors, adjuncts, fellows, program directors, or teaching assistants. A Guide to Teaching Lawyering Skills explores the essential components of the teaching process, including setting course goals; creating a curriculum, syllabus, and assignments; developing teaching methods; providing feedback to students both orally and in writing; evaluating and grading student work; working with teaching assistants; and enhancing professional development. The focus of the book is practical, and its suggestions are specific and concrete. The book also provides lists of additional resources for teachers.

This article provides a framework for choosing among simulated and real clinical experiences by focusing on three primary achievements of "clinical methodologies": generating passion in our students, providing context for their learning, and teaching lawyering skills. On the basis of this framework, the article argues that 1) relying solely on simulation based experiences prior to the third year of law school neglects the "passion" dimension of legal education, 2) relatively unsupervised externships or paid work experiences can play a useful role in providing crucially important context for doctrinal learning, but they are not the most effective approach to teaching lawyering skills, and 3) clinical experiences should be integrated into the curriculum during the first and second years of law school.