law school

Nancy Staudt, JD, PhD, vice dean for faculty and academic affairs at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, has been named dean of the School of Law at Washington University in St. Louis, effective May 15, 2014, according to Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. She also will become the Caroline and Howard N. Cayne Professor of Law as well as a professor at the Brown School.

Michael Sherraden, PhD, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, moderated a panel discussion April 6 at the sixth annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U). The session was titled “Poverty and Promise in America’s Rust Belt” and was held in Umrath Hall on the Danforth Campus. Kailey Burger, third-year law student, served as a panelist.

Beginning in fall 2013, Washington University School of Law will offer the Semester-in-Practice Externship, an innovative program that empowers second- and third-year law students to gain hands-on professional experience anywhere in the country. Through the externship program, students will earn academic credit by spending a semester working full time for a nonprofit, government, or in-house corporate law office in the location of their choice.

The economic model of law schools is broken, says Brian Z. Tamanaha, JD, JSD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis and author of the new book, Failing Law Schools, published by the University of Chicago Press. “The best example to demonstrate this is that in 2010, the average debt of law students was $100,000 and the median salary was $63,000 — so a person who obtains the median salary cannot make the monthly payments on the average debt,” he says. “This involves thousands of law students. For the majority of law students, the cost of obtaining a law degree and the economic return on a law degree are out of whack.”

Constitutional courts worldwide are increasingly turning to legal arguments and ideas from other countries for guidance and inspiration. But scholarly interest in the growing judicial use of foreign law paints a very misleading picture of the globalization of constitutional law, says David Law, JD, PhD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. He says that for those who want to see the U.S. Supreme Court make greater and more sophisticated use of foreign law, encouraging its members or inviting them to additional conferences and gatherings is likely to have little impact. “At this point in time, the greatest obstacle to judicial comparativism in the United States is not the unwillingness of individual judges to consider foreign legal materials, it is the current political economy of the American legal education.”