Using Therapeutic Jurisprudence in Teaching Lawyering Skills: Meeting the Challenge of the New ABA Standards

Authors

Bruce J. Winick, University of Miami School of Law

First Page

429

Document Type

Article

Abstract

At some law schools, existing courses already involve a simulation component. Some use a problem method approach whereby students are provided with written problems in advance and asked to come to class prepared to role play attorneys solving the problems or presenting opposing arguments concerning them. In the past, when I taught courses in Administrative Law and Federal Courts, I used a problem method approach that sought to blend skills training with doctrinal learning. For many years I have taught, and continue to teach, a course in Advanced Criminal Procedure using a variety of problems crafted over the years that call for students to role play prosecutors and defense lawyers in class. One is a plea bargaining exercise in which the class hears an audiotape of me interviewing an actual client - a New York City taxi cab driver who went to Vermont to purchase a handgun to protect himself using phony identification, and who was arrested and charged in federal court with a false statement offense. The students are provided a copy of the criminal complaint. Over a period of about two weeks, during which we consider the chapter in the casebook on plea bargaining, students assigned to play defense lawyers contact those assigned to play prosecutors and initiate plea bargaining discussions, conclude a guilty plea, and prepare a plea agreement in conformity with Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure. They then submit their plea agreements and participate in plea colloquies in which I play the sentencing judge. In addition to these approaches, law schools should offer interested students a separate course devoted to lawyering skills that includes a variety of simulated exercises. The remainder of this article describes a fairly new course at the University of Miami School of Law that I taught in the Fall, 2004 semester for the second time. The course, entitled New Directions in Lawyering: Interviewing, Counseling, and Attorney/Client Relational Skills, illustrates the kinds of new approaches that law schools will need to develop to satisfy the new skills training requirements. Its guiding principle is Therapeutic Jurisprudence, an interdisciplinary approach to legal scholarship and law reform that has increasingly been applied to lawyering and judging. In addition to describing this course, the article suggests that training students in Therapeutic Jurisprudence and in the Therapeutic Jurisprudence/Preventive Law model that it has spawned constitutes an excellent way of meeting the new ABA standards and moves legal education into the modem era in a manner that will significantly increase the quality of lawyering and both client and professional satisfaction.

Recommended Citation

Bruce J. Winick, Using Therapeutic Jurisprudence in Teaching Lawyering Skills: Meeting the Challenge of the New ABA Standards, 17 St. Thomas L. Rev. 429 (2005).
Available at: https://scholarship.stu.edu/stlr/vol17/iss3/4