legal education

Washington University School of Law and Husch Blackwell announce the launch of an intensive professional development program designed to enhance Husch Blackwell attorneys’ client relations and financial and legal business skills. Husch Blackwell University at Wash U will begin in fall 2013, when 25 to 30 of the firm’s attorneys will converge upon the Washington University in St. Louis campus for a series of three, three-day sessions. ​

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.

Academicians, business leaders, judiciary members and a key watchdog group will come together to discuss the future of legal education at “The Law School in the New Legal Environment Symposium” at Washington University School of Law Friday, Oct. 26. The symposium will examine issues such as affordability and access to legal education; faculty; preparation for practice; job placement; and online legal education and how it will change traditional law schools. “Lawyers and law students are facing serious challenges with employment, debt and career satisfaction,” says Kent D. Syverud, JD, dean of the law school. “This symposium will address how American law schools can embrace needed change rather than avoiding it.”

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.”