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This week, we are also highlighting portions of the “Arizona Attorney” magazine’s annual Updates for Arizona’s Law Schools column, in which I shared with readers about JD-Next, training for law librarians, experiential education and more. Excerpts of the article are below. Read more here.
What are a few significant developments you’d like to share about your law school?
This year has been a time of ongoing change for legal and higher education. Some of those changes have been under way for years, such as new pathways for J.D. admissions, expansion of legal education to degree and certificate programs in addition to the traditional J.D., creative responses to the deep and longstanding access to justice challenge, and the forthcoming changes to the bar exam used by most states. Other changes appeared more suddenly, like Chat GPT and the significant change in the methodology for US News.
JD-Next operates on a different testing theory than the legacy admission tests. That theory goes by several labels, including proximal testing. The idea is that we train people to do the actual kind of reasoning they will do in law school, then test them on that actual skill. We believed this theory had the potential to reduce or eliminate disparate racial outcomes in the existing tests.
Our findings show that the JD-Next exam predicts law school performance as well as or better than the LSAT and GRE. Critically, the JD-Next exam predicts performance without reproducing the racial score disparities seen on other standardized tests. Reducing score disparities has become a priority for law schools as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that affirmative action in college admission is unconstitutional. Affirmative action had been barred in Arizona and a handful of other states by state law before the Supreme Court decision.
Law schools often play the role of legal innovation laboratory. Can you share new practice areas the school is excited to instruct in?
Much of the scholarly work of our faculty has qualities of legal innovation, in the topics, research methods, and focused recommendations.
Innovation for Justice is literally a legal innovation laboratory, aimed at developing access-to-justice solutions. Led by Professor Stacy Butler, it is conducted jointly by University of Arizona Law and the University of Utah Eccles School of Business. That makes i4J the nation’s first and only cross-jurisdiction and cross-discipline legal innovation lab. This past year, we announced the Changemaker Award, an honor recognizing a law firm, non-profit or government organization that has made an original, creative, distinctive or sustained contribution to increasing access to legal services.
The award was made possible through a generous contribution from Stephen Golden, like Stacy a 2002 alumnus of the University of Arizona College of Law. Nominations will be solicited throughout the summer and fall, with the award committee selecting a winner in November. Self-nominations will be accepted.
Another great example is the expansion of educational pathways for law librarians, led by Associate Dean and Law Library Director Teresa Miguel-Stearns. Arizona Law has long had a leading program to train law librarians with J.D. and MLIS (Master of Library & Information Science), in partnership with the University of Arizona School of Information. But there is a need for more – and more diverse – librarians. Teresa and her colleagues recognized that our MLS and BA degrees could provide alternative but excellent pathways to legal information careers.
Our international connections and proximity to the Mexican border have led us to create two one-of-a-kind programs for lawyers and professionals in Tucson and abroad. Our Foreign Diplomat Training Program has trained 230 Mexican diplomats on foundational U.S. law to better serve their citizens living, traveling and working in the U.S. The distinct Diplomado Program in Mexican Public Law and Policy, offered through a partnership between the University of Arizona and the Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), is taught in Spanish by elite Mexican legal scholars and practitioners. Available to University of Arizona graduate and advanced undergraduate students as well as lawyers, judges and working professionals, this certificate program expands students’ understanding of Mexican public law and helps them develop immediately useful expertise.
Do you have any news to share about new hands-on clinics or expansions of current ones?
As a national leader in practical training, our clinics are a core element of ensuring our students graduate fully prepared to enter the job market. With 16 clinics, we guarantee placement for every student who wants it.
I should mention that our current fundraising priority, in additional to the eternal efforts to raise funds in support of students, is called A New Day in Court, which will completely redo our two law school courtrooms to beautiful modern form and standards, to match our highly rated advocacy program, and to honor the retirement of legendary Professor Tom Mauet, for whom the program is now named.
In the Spring, the University of Arizona Innocence Project was awarded a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to increase the clinic’s capacity to investigate, litigate and overturn wrongful convictions in Pima County. The funding comes from the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s Upholding the Rule of Law and Preventing Wrongful Conviction Program, which awarded grants to five other organizations this fiscal year.
Innovation for Justice celebrated their fifth-year anniversary this past spring, reflecting on the dozens of projects they have taken on since their 2018 founding. Among them is the Housing Stability Legal Advocate Initiative, which has received approval from the Supreme Courts in Arizona and Utah to implement a new legal service model that aims to keep more low-income families in their homes by training licensed advocates to provide limited-scope legal advice and services to tenants who are facing housing instability.
Our Natural Resource Use & Management Clinic has also received funding this year as part of a new state statute allowing the clinic staff to support those hoping to adjudicate small water claims in the region.
While you asked about clinics, I would also note that from an educational standpoint the relevant category may be the entire panoply of clinical and experiential education, including externships, and our top-ranked legal writing program. Indeed, our superb writing program led by Professor Susie Salmon, and which has ranked 8th in the country by US News, is a critical foundation and advanced ally for so much of what we do at University of Arizona Law – and so much of what our students do out in the world.
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