Alison Lefkovitz is an assistant professor in the Federated History Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology [NJIT] and Rutgers University-Newark. She is also director of the BA Program in Law, Technology & Culture at NJIT.
 
I have the opportunity to run a pre-law program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology that is unique in two ways. First, it resides at a tech university. Second, this university is one of the top twenty most diverse research universities in the nation. This presents distinct challenges and opportunities. Being at a tech school brings in students who may have only considered going to law school in recent years—they didn’t necessarily have family or cultural heroes who were lawyers. More likely their heroes were chemists or biologists or doctors or engineers. Only later did they discover an interest in patent law, health care law, digital crime, or intellectual property. Being diverse means that even those students who may have long sought out a profession in the legal arena may not have the resources or connections to ensure an easy application process. Many of our students are first-generation college students. Many are first-generation Americans. Many work jobs part- or full-time in addition to their studies. Many provide their families with a substantive portion of their household incomes. Our students are amazing. But because they lack a long-term interest in law school and extensive connections with the legal field, our students sometimes need to be introduced to the legal profession.
 
This has led us to innovate to provide stopgaps for some of our students’ worst disadvantages, though we are always looking for additional resources. We bring many speakers of all kinds to campus; everyone in the pre-law major must have an internship; we advise the Pre-Law Society on campus; we set up mentors for all incoming students; and we have provided a one-day LSAT prep course taught by professional tutors. But I think one of our most important programs is to offer a one-credit course titled “Professional Development in Law.” The idea behind the course is that students will have every component they need to apply to law school in place by the end of the semester—the spring before their senior year. This course started in the spring of 2013 as a workshop—but attendance and participation was voluntary. Students participated enthusiastically at the beginning of the semester. By the end, attendance slowed to a trickle. So we proposed the workshop as a course and added some pedagogical heft. Readings now include some basic chapters on logic, instructions on how to read a legal brief, sample personal essays, etc. Instead of every other week, we meet in three-hour blocks for the first six weeks of the semester. Students work a little harder, since they know they’ll get a grade. Mostly, however, it looks the same.
 
The layout of the six-week course is simple. The first day begins with an introduction to the basics—what LSAC is, what applying will look like, what resumes should look like, how to pick schools to apply to, and how to consider whether the debt they will face is worth it or not based at least in part on Michigan’s debt wizard. The next week is a primer on how to write a personal statement and how it would compare to a diversity statement. The third week, we take a full practice LSAT exam. I try to be as mean and discombobulated as the real proctors. It’s not such a stretch for me, so it works out. Then the next week, we workshop each student’s personal statement draft that they’ve written in the interim. Students have turned out to be each others’ own best critics. They are gentle, kind, and mostly right on the money about their suggestions. The next week, I present some basic LSAT preparation advice, and we work through some LSAT logic game questions as a group. Some students have already taken the LSAT, and they prove to be  much better tutors than I am. We also go over some basics about writing a legal brief to provide students with the tiniest bit of confidence going forward—they WILL get into law school and therefore they will need to know this. Finally the last week they submit a portfolio to me—it includes a receipt for registering for LSAC or an LSAT exam, a resume, a list of schools they plan to apply to, three sample LSAT scores, a personal statement, a diversity statement, any addenda, and drafts asking professors and internship supervisors to be their letter writers. They then consult with me about the final product, getting last minute advice and a calendar—about when they should be getting back to me over the summer with new drafts.
 
In sum, our students are helping each other get into law school at first because we make them in class and via mentoring, but later because they want to.  This fall, the New York Times published a piece on why historically black colleges and universities are better—statistically and in real numbers—at getting black students into medical school than more elite institutions. One of the things the Times cited as making the difference is a real investment by students in each other. The students are taught and take heed that they owe it to each other to get each other into medical school. It’s a template we accidentally stumbled over and as yet enact imperfectly. But even though the HBCU model shows how much more we have to work for, students’ impressive dedication to the process in our “Professional Development in Law” class has already shown us that our students are each others’ own best resource. Our job is simply to facilitate that. 

Talia Schiff is a JD/PhD candidate at Northwestern University and a teaching assistant in Northwestern University's Legal Studies program. 

My experience as a teaching assistant for the Advanced Legal Studies Research Seminar (a two-quarter thesis seminar required for all Legal Studies majors at Northwestern University) has been a formative part of my graduate career. The seminar provides a unique forum where students majoring in different fields come together to think and discuss the ways in which law is embedded in social life; students develop their own research paper using a variety of methodological approaches to law. As a teaching assistant for the course I had the opportunity to guide students from the early stages of finding an idea to the later stages of articulating a well-defined research question and positioning it within the broader literature on the topic.  

The opportunity to be part of the process through which an abstract idea develops into a well-formed research claim has been extremely rewarding, not only from the standpoint of an instructor but also from that of a researcher. My discussions with students made me more conscious of my own choice of sources and methodology. They reminded me of the constant challenge that we all face as researchers posed by the attempt to emphasize a project’s unique contribution while simultaneously learning to position it within existing scholarship.

Finally, a core part of the seminar consists of group work, where students provide feedback on each other’s research projects. These work groups provide students not only with the opportunity to critically engage with one another’s work through an analysis of each other’s arguments for evidence of strength, credibility and context, but also present an occasion to learn of the ample ways in which law shapes and is shaped by our social world. 

One of the most exciting aspects of my role as an assistant instructor in the seminar was 
witnessing the variety of topics related to law and the assortment of methods used to study it. Research topics ranged from examination of rape laws to nuclear licensing litigation to rap music and its effects on legal consciousness. Notwithstanding this diversity of themes, many of the research projects similarly grappled with the complex ways in which the law simultaneously provides a language for making claims while at the same time shaping the very rules, categories and policies through which we make sense of these claims. This created a common thread across otherwise diverse research topics, allowing for a fruitful and enriching scholarly debate. It was a privilege to have the opportunity to be a teaching assistant for the Advanced Legal Studies Seminar and to take part in the exciting journey of researching the world of law.

The OAH Magazine of History is available on JStor; while no new issues are forthcoming, back issues have useful lesson plans and teaching resources. Issues of possible interest to interdisciplinary legal scholars include: Beyond Dixie: The Black Freedom Struggle Outside the South; Human Rights; Lincoln and the Constitution; Jim Crow; and Desegregation.

*Mary Nell Trautner is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, and a CULJP board member.

Paper Assignment Idea: Obesity Lawsuits

One of my favorite topics to teach in undergraduate law & society courses (I teach a 300-level “Sociology of Law” course in a large public university) is the topic of disputing. We spend quite a bit of time considering the question of “frivolous” lawsuits, including the now-infamous McDonald’s Hot Coffee case. In this paper assignment, I ask students to apply evidence and theory to the question of whether obesity lawsuits should be considered frivolous or meritorious.

I’ve only used this assignment a few times; my experience has been nearly every student initially believes that obesity lawsuits are frivolous and should be banned. Some are never able to make an argument that contradicts their personal opinion, even as they seem to recognize that the evidence doesn’t support their opinion. Most students, however, really enjoy watching the film and learning how to build an argument from myriad sources. The feedback has generally been quite positive, in that they view the assignment as an opportunity to a) re-evaluate their personal opinions and b) see how their personal opinions have been socially constructed.

Here is the assignment:

In 2002, two teenage girls issued a complaint against McDonald’s for contributing to their obesity because it did not provide the necessary information about the health risks associated with its meals. The company’s lawyers argued that the case did not even warrant the court’s attention, saying the matter was really about common sense and individual responsibility. Most people who heard about the case found it absurd, including Morgan Spurlock, the director of Super Size Me. When asked what prompted him to make this film, he said, in an interview:

In March 2004, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would ban individuals for suing fast food companies for making them fat. Based on the evidence presented in course readings and discussion and in the film Super Size Me, is such a ban a good idea? Why or why not? What might be some positive and negative consequences of such a ban? Are the obesity lawsuits “frivolous”? Why or why not? What are the arguments on both sides? You must use at least two course readings to support your argument and to anticipate–and address–counterarguments.

I want you to make an argument in your paper. Have a specific point/thesis that you develop and support throughout. Your paper should reflect careful and thoughtful analysis of the film and course materials. It is not to be based solely on your opinions (e.g., “Why I Think Lawsuits Are Stupid” or “My Observations About the Disintegration of Society”). In your paper, your views are important, as they may shape your ultimate argument, but you are expected to use evidence from the film, readings, and class discussions to not only support your argument, but to also explore possible counterarguments.

Your paper should begin with an introduction that clearly states the argument you are going to make and that provides an overview of the paper. The rest of the paper is up to you. You need to accomplish several tasks: you need to describe/summarize the film, describe/summarize obesity lawsuits and the ban on them, and most important, offer an in-depth analysis of the viability/legitimacy/frivolity/whatever of obesity lawsuits. Be sure to support your analysis with specific examples drawn from the film itself and to link your arguments back to the ideas in course readings and discussions. There are many acceptable ways to structure your paper. Feel free to be creative! The movie does not have to be the central focus of your paper.

You should write your paper as if your intended reader was an intelligent person, perhaps another college student, but someone who has not taken this class and has not seen the film. Therefore, if you refer to a scene or person in the film, you must provide sufficient detail for the reader to understand. Similarly, when referencing a course reading, you should outline the argument or describe the research finding in sufficient detail for someone not in the class to know what you are talking about. If you use any technical term from the readings, be sure to define it in your own words. 

Paul M. Collins, Jr. is the Director of Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is also a board member for the Consortium for Undergraduate Law & Justice Programs.

One of the things I have always struggled with in introductory classes is extra credit assignments. Over time, I came to learn that students expect their instructors to assign some type of extra credit, but I have often found my assignments consisting largely of busy work that seldom engaged students in any real way. Seeking to remedy this, last fall I introduced a new extra credit assignment in my Introduction to Legal Studies course: