SAVE THE DATE

The Clinical Legal Education Association's

2017 New Clinicians Conference

Saturday, May 6, 2017

Denver, Colorado

This year's New Clinicians Conference, hosted by the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA), will take place at the Colorado Bar Association in downtown Denver, within walking distance from the AALS Clinical Conference hotel. The full-day program will include multiple plenary and facilitated small group sessions, as well as break-out sessions. If you are new to clinical teaching, please consider this event when making travel arrangements.

Online registration and additional details will be available in a forthcoming announcement. Registration for the New Clinicians Conference is separate from the AALS Clinical Conference.

If you have any questions, please contact: Cindy Batt (cbatt@law.stetson.edu) or Chrissy Cerniglia (cecernig@loyno.edu)

http://cleaweb.org/resources/Pictures/CLEANewsletter%20Winter%2016%20(FINAL).pdf

Dear CLEA membership,

This has been an exciting year for CLEA. One of our major accomplishments was finalizing CLEA’s Strategic Plan.  Please find attached the final Strategic Plan recently approved by the CLEA Board here.   

CLEA's Strategic Plan is based on a year-long endeavor to gather information and ideas from both our membership and CLEA’s board.  As you may recall, we first started this process last fall by surveying our membership to decipher what you saw as CLEA’s strengths as well as areas requiring further development.  We discussed strategic planning during the January 2016 Board and Membership meetings. We then held a strategic planning retreat where we generated many thoughtful, comprehensive, and exciting ideas about how to shape the organization over the next several years.  At each step along the way we were guided by our pro bono consultant, Peter Toran. 

At the beginning of the summer Margaret and I convened a strategic planning ad hoc committee, which included Beth Schwartz, Martina Cartwright, and Lisa Martin. This committee was invaluable for creating the version of the plan we are circulating today.  Based on all the feedback we received from the retreat, the meetings, and the survey, the ad hoc committee (in consultation with Peter) drafted the plan. Finally, we received feedback from our CLEA committee co-chairs and incorporated their suggestions into the final version after presenting the co-chairs’ feedback to the Board. We are very thankful for the feedback we received throughout this process and look forward to working with next year’s co-presidents, Benjie Louis and Beth Schwartz, on implementing the plan.

To accomplish our plan, of course, CLEA needs the involvement of its members!  If you are interested in serving on a CLEA committee, please let us know.  

As always, let us know if you have any questions.  Have a wonderful rest of 2016!

Best,

Maritza & Margaret

The Fifth “Colonial Frontier” Legal Writing Conference - Saturday, December 3, 2016

Hosted by: Duquesne University School of Law

Drafting Statutes and Rules: Pedagogy, Practice, and Politics

Practicing attorneys frequently engage in statutory, regulation, and rule drafting whether it be drafting corporate governance documents, crafting legislative initiatives for non-profit clients, or engaging with highly regulated industries. Despite increasing need for such skills in law practice, the drafting of statutes, ordinances, regulations, and rules (for public laws or governance of non-governmental entities) remains one of the least common law school subjects. Commonly, instruction focuses on the repercussions of poorly written statutes or rules, on the courts’ efforts at application and interpretation of statutory language, and on scholarly criticism of statutes. Instead, law schools should teach students and practitioners how to better draft statutes and similar documents to avoid confusion, ambiguities, disagreements, and litigation.

Duquesne University School of Law's 2016 legal writing conference offers attendees an opportunity to hear from academicians who teach how to write statutory materials, practitioners who craft statutes and similar rules, and other scholars who study all forms of legislation. Lawyers representing corporate and non-profit clients, as well as those practicing in highly regulated areas of law, will find this program helpful in developing both skills in the art of statutory and rule drafting, and in learning about resources available to clients in need of such drafting.

Attendance at the one-day conference, on Saturday, December 3, 2016, will be free for presenters, Duquesne faculty, and $50 for non-presenters with an academic or government affiliation; other attendees will be charged $125 for the full-day conference or $50 for those attending only the afternoon sessions. We anticipate offering continuing legal education credit of four hours for attorneys attending the entire conference; attendees may also register for the afternoon sessions for two hours of credit. Duquesne will provide free on-site parking to conference attendees. The conference will begin 9:00 a.m. with a welcoming breakfast and reception at the Duquesne University School of Law for persons attending the full day of the conference, followed by two hours of presentations. We will provide a catered, on-campus lunch for full-day or afternoon session attendees, followed by two hours of presentations, ending at approximately 3:30 p.m. We will then host a closing reception for full-day attendees, in the “Bridget and Alfred Pelaez Legal Writing Center,” the home of Duquesne’s LRW program.

Pittsburgh is an easy drive or short flight from many cities. To accommodate persons wishing to stay over in Pittsburgh on Friday or Saturday evenings, Duquesne is arranging for a block of discounted rooms ($144 per night) at the Marriott City Center hotel adjacent to campus, within walking distance of the law school and downtown Pittsburgh. We will also provide attendees with information about the Pittsburgh area’s attractions, including our architectural treasures, museums, shopping, and sporting events. To register for the conference and review the conference agenda, information about hotel accommodations and other materials, please visit the conference webpage at http://law.duq.edu/events/drafting-statutes-and-rules-pedagogy-practice-and-politics.

On Tuesday, January 3, 2017, the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) will hold back-to-back Board of Directors and Membership Meetings, shortly before the start of the AALS Annual Meeting. For those of you planning to be in San Francisco in January, we hope you’ll arrive early enough to attend one or both of these meetings.

We want to thank the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, for generously providing the space, which is walking distance from the conference hotels.

• The CLEA Board of Directors Meeting, open to all, will be held from 3 to 5 PM at 100 McAllister Street, at the corner of Leavenworth Street. The exact location is the large seminar room in the Community Justice Clinics on the third floor.
• The CLEA Membership Meeting, also open to all, will be held from 5:30 to 6:30 PM at 198 McAllister Street, at the corner of Hyde Street. The meeting will take place in Classroom A on the ground floor.

The CLEA Elections Committee—Anju Gupta (Rutgers School of Law), Steven Wright (University of Wisconsin School of Law), Erma Bonadero (University of Houston Law Center) and Tiffany Murphy (University of Arkansas School of Law)—is soliciting nominations of individuals to serve on the CLEA Board starting in January 2017. In addition, we are also seeking nominations for the Vice-President and Treasurer positions on the Executive Committee. Nominations are due October 1, 2016.

All positions require a three-year commitment. We have attached a memo prepared by last year's CLEA Elections Committee, which sets forth the activities and responsibilities of CLEA Board members in more detail.

Current CLEA members are invited to nominate themselves or other CLEA members as candidates for one of these positions. The committee also encourages “new clinicians” (defined as clinicians with fewer than 6 years of experience) to run for the CLEA Board. Our Bylaws create a separate election process for candidates identified as “new clinicians,” to ensure that the identified “new clinician” candidate who receives the greatest number of votes will be assured a place on the Board.

The Committee strongly encourages CLEA members to nominate individuals from groups that are currently underrepresented within the leadership of various clinical institutions, including CLEA, the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education, and the Clinical Law Review.

The nomination process is simple. Nominate yourself or someone else by replying to this email (please do not reply-all). If you are nominating yourself, please include a paragraph or two about why you are running and a link to your faculty profile, which will be included with the elections materials to be sent later in the fall. If you are nominating another CLEA member, there is no need to include such a paragraph; the name of the individual and institution will suffice, and the Election Committee will contact the nominee for further information. If you have fewer than six years of clinical teaching experience and wish to be identified as a “new clinician” candidate, or if you want to nominate a candidate for the “new clinician” category, please indicate that as well. Although the process of nomination is easy, our Bylaws set a strict deadline for receiving nominations. All nominations must be received by October 1, 2016.

If you have questions about the CLEA Elections process, please reply to this email or contact the Chair of the Elections Committee, Anju Gupta, at agupta@kinoy.rutgers.edu.

CLEA submitted a report to the ABA regarding CLEA’s activities since June 2016. Janet Jackson and Maritza Karmely will be attending the ABA Annual Meeting on behalf of CLEA in August 2016.

CLEA submitted a letter to the California State Bar regarding the proposed 15-unit experiential bar admission requirement. The proposal was passed unanimously by an appointed task force in September 2014 and then by the state bar board of trustees in November 2014, but has never been formally presented to the CA Supreme Court. See here for the proposal: http://board.calbar.ca.gov/docs/agendaItem/Public/agendaitem1000012730.pdf. 

The AALS Deans Steering Committee, a group of CA Deans and the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar all submitted letters in support of reducing the 15-unit recommendation to 6 in order to be consistent with NY and the ABA. CLEA submitted a letter in strong support of the 15-unit requirement. Recently, the Bar’s Admission & Education Committee voted for Jon Streeter, chair of the previous task force and now a state appellate judge, to work with bar staff to re-draft revisions to the original TFARR proposal to present to the board in October 2016. CLEA previously has submitted multiple comments in support of the proposed 15-unit experiential requirement. Again, we thank the Advocacy Committee and our California clinical colleagues for their work on this letter.

CLEA submitted a comment regarding ABA’s proposed revision for Standard 316.  For those who are not familiar with the change, the proposed revision to Standard 316 eliminates a number of provisions from the existing standard.  It aims to streamline the reporting of bar passage by requiring law schools to show that “at least 75 percent of a law school’s graduates in a calendar year who sat for a bar examination must have passed a bar examination administered within two years of their date of graduation.”  Here is a link to the proposed Standard, which includes a redlined version of the original standard: 

http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/council_reports_and_resolutions/20160325_notice_and_comment_memo.authcheckdam.pdf

We are concerned about the lack of evidence-based research considered by the ABA to fully understand the impact of proposed Standard 316 on schools in states with low bar passage rates, and more importantly, the impact of the new standard on students of color and the diversity of the profession.  In addition to asking the Council to gather more data on the issue before voting on the proposed changes, we also urge the Council to consider ways to move states away from the bar exam as the sole criterion for licensing new attorneys.  We are thankful to the CLEA Advocacy Committee members for their hard work in preparing this comment.