University of California, Irvine School of Law and New York Law School are in the process of editing their first issues as the new host schools leading the Journal of Legal Education (JLE).
The JLE is the peer-edited journal of record for the legal academy. Published since 1948 by AALS, it provides a scholarly forum for articles specifically about issues confronting law school faculty and leadership. The archive of current and past issues is available at jle.aals.org.
AALS News sat down with the new editors of the JLE to discuss their vision for the journal and scholarship on legal education.
Journal of Legal Education Editors
Kris Franklin (New York Law School)
William P. LaPiana (New York Law School)
Alison Mikkor (University of California, Irvine School of Law)
Austen Parrish (University of California, Irvine School of Law)
Historically, what has been the focus of the Journal of Legal Education, and how is it different from other school-sponsored law journals or law reviews?
Austen Parrish: The journal is unique: since its founding it has been one of the few journals at the nexus of everything we do as legal educators. Articles published in the journal explore key issues facing law schools, how we educate our students, the dynamics of law practice on the ground, the changing legal profession, legal education reform, and all the scholarly research that faculty do about legal education and the legal profession. Many of the school-sponsored, student-run law reviews are less likely to publish articles that are deeply focused on what law schools and law faculty actually do.
Kris Franklin: There are three things that make it distinctive. First is evident in the title, the Journal of Legal Education. It emphasizes our focus on what we do in this profession. This is the official publication of the professional organization for law professors and legal scholars. I contrast that with the official publications of academic organizations in other fields where they publish journals that cover general broad interest.
Second, I think it says something about AALS that we have a journal specifically dedicated to studying legal education and the preparation of students for the legal profession, rather than focusing on legal doctrine and ideas within law as I think most journals do.
And finally, it is peer edited. Articles are selected by, and are speaking to, colleagues who are deeply invested in legal education. There are a lot of people who care a lot about law. It is the purview and job of law professors and people invested in legal education to care also about how we train lawyers and what it means to think about legal education and the preparation of lawyers. And I’m delighted to work on a journal that is focused on this specific responsibility.
What made you interested in hosting the journal and serving as editors?
AP: Since its founding, one of UC Irvine’s areas of faculty strength relate to studying the legal profession. The Center for Empirical Research on the Legal Profession is located at UC Irvine School of Law. The journal also fits in perfectly with some of our broader goals: our focus on high-quality experiential, clinical, and skills-based education; our focus on service learning, and instilling a commitment to public interest and pro bono legal services; and our emphasis on interdisciplinary research as a way to properly train our students for practice.
It was also an appropriate time to host, as it was a time of transition from the previous host schools, Northeastern and American University.
UC Irvine and New York Law School have several faculty who either themselves have written extensively, or have thought carefully about, innovative teaching methods, as well as different kinds of movements and reforms in legal education. Hosting the journal is an opportunity to participate in the ongoing conversations, and read terrific work exploring some of the most important issues in legal education.
Anthony Crowell (Dean, New York Law School): NYLS sought to serve as a JLE co-host school for a variety of reasons. The foundation of everything we do is guided by our core institutional values and commitment to advance legal education through robust scholarship, innovation in law teaching and learning, and access. Because NYLS and UC Irvine shared a similar vision, we knew our partnership would be dynamic and allow us to take JLE to the next level. We also believed that NYLS’s experience publishing a symposia-based law review, as well as serving as the ABA’s “law school partner” in publishing the Family Law Quarterly, the nation’s leading family law journal, would benefit the process of repositioning JLE and ensuring it is a source of continual pride as the journal of record for American legal education.
William P. LaPiana: My dissertation was on the origins of the case method and the creation of modern American legal education. Serving as an editor felt like a wonderful opportunity to have some input on how we understand legal education today and also to help enlarge the journal’s scope to include more about the structure of what we do in law school. In addition to pedagogy and exactly what is done in the classrooms, I see it as a wonderful opportunity to read some very interesting scholarship and help get it into print, where it will help us understand both where legal education is today and where it is going.
KF: A fair amount of my scholarship has specifically focused on areas that we publish. I’m acutely aware of how people respond to that work. I know, for example, that junior scholars are sometimes discouraged from writing about legal education, because the perception is that you have to do “serious” work first to establish yourself professionally. That attitude really troubles me. All the work that engages our training, and affects what we do with students, is important. What we do with the legal profession, what we do with other law professors and practicing lawyers, and how we ascend to the bar , those too are important parts of the scholarly mission. That means all of these inquiries are as “serious” as any other.
Alison Mikkor: I care deeply about teaching and legal education precisely for the reasons Kris alluded to. It really matters in the real world. The joint enterprise we are involved in as legal educators has a significant impact on our students, on the practice of law, and on society. Plus, the issues that the journal tackles are intellectually interesting to me.
AP: As Alison says, many of the issues impacting legal education are discussed and appear in the journal’s pages. The journal is the place to turn to learn about major trends in legal education: issues of access to legal education, program innovations, the rise of AI law and technology, the development of new fields that previously didn’t exist, the evolution in the way that we teach specific kinds of courses, professional responsibility, changes in licensing, and the big debates relating to the bar exam. All these conversations appear in the Journal of Legal Education.
The faculty research and insights that appear in the journal also reflect the way that AALS has become a resource for faculty and schools, such as the Before the JD project, the antiracism clearinghouse project, the American Law School Dean Study, and the American Law School Faculty Study. The journal reinforces the Association’s role as the key voice for faculty in legal education, telling the stories of individual faculty and individual schools.
Dean Parrish, how is the journal different than when you first hosted it as dean of Southwestern Law School?
AP: The journal is different because legal education is markedly different than it was a decade ago, and we’ve seen major changes in legal education over the last two decades. Better appreciating how we educate, how faculty make a difference in the world with their research, and innovations around how to best prepare the next generation of lawyers is important. Understanding and pub lishing scholarship about what we do, why we do it, and how we do it is critical for the future of legal education broadly.
I wasn’t deeply involved when I was at Southwestern, as Bryant Garth, Gowri Ramachandran, Molly Selvin, and others were the editors. I was involved only briefly at the end of my time serving as interim dean. At that time, there was tremendous energy in legal education around the Carnegie Foundation Educating Lawyers Report and the Best Practices in Legal Education report. That wave of changes were later put on hold by many schools because of the recession and financial challenges that schools were facing.
Today, legal education faces similar, but a different set of challenges. It’s exciting to see how some innovations that began a decade ago have taken hold and become more commonplace, and how some changes that were predicted to happen didn’t. The journal has a role in understanding these changes and exploring the new challenges.
What is your vision for the journal as editors?
AP: One thing that we all agree on is the need to increase the journal’s profile. It has long been the place for high-quality scholarship. It needs to continue to do that and expand its readership as the go-to source for faculty throughout the country, but also those not in the academy—lawyers, judges, and others—who want to better understand legal education.
There’s a dearth of good information in the public about what happens at law schools, and currently we’re seeing lots of misinformation. The Journal of Legal Education has been a place where you can find more accurate in-depth, careful analysis, and high-quality scholarship.
KF: We have a shared vision in wanting to make every single word in the title matter. And the first word in the title is “journal.” We want this to be valuable scholarship, but valuable scholarship that encompasses the broad range of creativity and what scholarship means, which means it doesn’t have a unitary vision of either perspective or approach. We want it to be about legal education, and we want to understand and define legal education broadly.
It’s always been true that the journal has included teaching and pedagogy. But it also includes pieces on the direction legal education is heading, and ideas about ways that legal education interacts with the profession. We want to emphasize and expand that while building on the core project, which is genuine, serious, creative, and thoughtful academic research into legal education.
WPL: The time in which we live makes the journal all the more important. As both Austen and Kris said, there’s a lack of understanding of what we in legal education do and probably a large gap now between legal education and the profession. That is something the journal should work on bridging, particularly as states approach different methods of licensure and face other general challenges to the way our legal system works.
Could you discuss the submission and selection process for articles?
AM: The journal is a place for creativity. We encourage articles that fit into any of the topic areas that we’ve just highlighted. If your scholarship does not neatly fit within the bounds of a traditional law review article, submit it to the JLE. It is the place for thoughtful, intellectually rich work on the topic of our profession and on legal education. It’s a unique publication in terms of its audience, and it offers a forum for conversations that there isn’t space for in most student-edited publications.
KF: This is the only academic publication in our profession that lands in hard copy on professors’ desks at their schools. This is a way of reaching and speaking to law professors that is utterly unparalleled to any other scholarly production. We want to encourage potential authors to think about the audience that this reaches in a way that differs from other publication opportunities. It comes with the imprimatur of the implicit support of AALS, and there’s the fact that it’s one of the few law-related journals that is peer selected. That comes with a different kind of heft, and we want prospective authors to understand that JLE publication carries something different than the ordinary means of student-produced law review publications that is the norm in our profession.
AM: As to the practicalities, the editors are an energetic group, and we commit to both turning submissions around very quickly and giving each one a careful read. We exclusively use Scholastica to manage submissions for the journal, so scholars should submit there.
What kind of contributors are you looking for?
KF: We do get a fair number of international submissions even though the journal is focused on publishing scholarship that is of direct interest to people in legal education in the United States. That means we don’t conceive of ourselves as a genuinely globally focused journal. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot we can learn internationally.
AP: We like high-quality comparative work and research that illustrates innovations occurring in other countries and how it compares to American legal education. We’re less interested in an article that says, “I did this once my classroom, in this particular university, in this particular school,” especially if it can’t be replicated or scaled.
The same is true for contributors from US law schools. We want, as Alison and Kris said, serious scholarship. Random musings that a professor cranks out on Friday afternoon to post on a blog, and then sends it to us Saturday morning is unlikely to be accepted to the journal. We’re looking for thoughtful, high-quality, well researched work.
KF: We want to see pieces from anyone who is invested in the future of legal education. Obviously, that includes law professors. Law professors at the beginning of their careers, law professors at the end of their careers, and law professors in the middle of their careers. We also want to hear from a much wider array of people than just law professors. People who work in student services have something to teach those who care about legal education. People who work in admissions have things to teach us. We also want to talk to people who work in the profession and want to talk about what would best prepare people for their areas of practice. As long as what we’re getting is genuinely serious scholarship, we want to hear from a lot of people who don’t ordinarily think of themselves as the kind of people who write law review articles.
Do you have any theme or symposia issues planned?
AM: Soon, we’ll have an issue on restorative justice that came out of a symposia at Vermont Law and Graduate School earlier this year featuring pieces from faculty and practitioners from across the country, as well as several international contributors. The issue focuses on how to incorporate restorative justice education in our courses. It’s a fabulous issue.
AP: We will also have a call for papers going out soon for another symposia issue. One of
the brilliant things about the journal is its themed issues and symposia. They allow the journal to serve as a place for critical insight into core areas that are of interest to our readers.
KF: You tend to draw from a broader range of writers through symposia than we might otherwise read as well. Another call for proposals coming up soon is for a virtual symposium that will look retrospectively at important works that have been published in the Journal of Legal Education over the years. We are asking scholars to think about how they might update these important pieces given the environment today. Some contributors may also choose to write shorter works collectively with other scholars to comment on some early and important and influential thinking about legal education.
What else do you think people should know about the Journal of Legal Education?
KF: That there’s an enormous amount of vibrant scholarship on legal education, and plenty is coming out in other journals as well as ours. I think that’s a transformation over the course of my career.
There was a time when there were fewer journals accepting scholarship in the same areas we’re interested in. Legal education itself has been thoughtful about undergoing transformations, but also recognizing what’s already working. We’re thrilled with that development, even though of course we want everybody to publish with JLE as the journal of record for legal education.
AP: If you have a good idea or thoughtful idea you want to talk through, we’re happy to connect. We’re not one of those journals where it’s impossible to get hold of a real person. If you have an idea for a symposium or themed issue that you would like to see over the next couple of years, we’d love to have a conversation, and people should be reaching out and thinking about how the JLE might be part of their publication plan.
2025 Annual Meeting Session
A Discussion About the Future of the Journal of Legal Education
January 9, 2025
2:40 – 4:10 pm
Moscone Center, Room 208 (Level Two South)
The new editorial team wants to hear your thoughts on how the Journal of Legal Education can best fulfill its role. To that end, the editors need to hear your views on the role of JLE in the academy and how the publication can better serve American legal education and your own scholarly development. Your participation will be an important part of creating a new five-year plan for the journal.