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Moving Education Forward:
Perspectives and Innovations in Education Law and Policy


Duke Forum for Law & Social Change
Conference Agenda
February 13, 2009

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OVERVIEW

 9:00-9:45 -     Welcome Guests, Check in Get Name Tags (Third Floor Loggia)
 9:45-10:00 -      Introduction and Overview (room 3041)
10:00-11:00 -    Panel I, Does Integration Still Matter? (room 3041)
11:10-12:00 -     Breakout Session(s) (see below for locations)

Breakout Session A: Careers in Education and the Law (3171)
Breakout Session B: The Time Is Now: Enforcing A State Right To Education Through A Private Right Of Action (4044)
Breakout Session C: Moving Education Forward: Where are we going? (4046)

12:10-1:15 -     Keynote Luncheon (Burdman Lounge)
 1:20-2:20 -     Panel II, Innovations in Legal Education (room 3041)
 2:20-2:30 -     Closing Remarks (room 3041)
 2:30-3:15 -     Student Reception (Third Floor Loggia)


CONFERENCE AGENDA – FEBRUARY 13, 2009 (9:30 AM – 3:30 PM)


Introduction and Overview (9:45 AM):
Participants:    Executive Board, Dean Levi
Location:     3041


    This Introduction will give an overview of the day’s events, first a panel presentation titled, Does Integration Still Matter?, second, breakout sessions involving the sponsoring students groups, third the keynote luncheon featuring President Rufus Williams, and a final panel discussion of Issues and Innovations in Legal Education.
The panels will together create a continuum focusing on ways to improve education: from primary and secondary education (Does Integration Still Matter?) to post-secondary education (Issues and Innovation in Legal Education). Through this progression, we will potentially show that the path towards educational equality is not about one short fix. Rather it is a series of steps in the right direction.
    The Introduction will leave enough time for guests and students to mingle before arriving at the first panel discussion.

Panel Discussion: Does Integration Still Matter? (10:00 AM)
Moderator:    TBD
Participants:    Professor Olatunde Johnson, Columbia University
        Professor Kristi Bowman, Michigan State University
        Professor Wendy Scott, North Carolina Central University
Location:     3041
   
    This panel will discuss issues particular to primary education, and whether integration is an answer to educational disparities in public schooling. Professor Olatunde Johnson will speak on her piece Does Integration Still Matter? along with Professor Wendy Scott and her piece From Desegregation to Diversity Jurisprudence. Also contributing to this conversation will be Professor Kristi Bowman and her manuscript, A New Strategy for Pursuing Racial and Ethnic Equality in Public Schools.
    This article presentation/conversation aims to spark a dialogue about what are the important legal avenues that may and should be taken to ensure educational parity; and what current practices need improvement.

Professor Olatunde Johnson
Associate Professor of Law
Professor Johnson currently teaches at Columbia Law School. She received her J.D. from Stanford Law School and attended Yale University as an undergraduate. Professor Johnson has expertise in many areas, including: Anti-discrimination, congressional power, and public interest law practice. She was a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Stevens and also served as a member of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee.  In addition, Professor Johnson has worked for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and as a senior consultant on racial justice for the ACLU National Legal Department.
Professor Johnson will contribute a manuscript that considers the question of whether integration still matters for educational inequality.  She will consider what the case of Parents Involved in Community Schools and social science show us in regards to this question.

Professor Wendy Scott
Professor of Law
Professor Wendy Scott is a professor of law at the NCCU School of Law.  Professor Scott has written extensively on desegregation Law and Jurisprudence and Race and the Law.  Her articles have appeared/are scheduled to appear in various law journals, including the Harvard Law Review, the NYU Review of Law and Social Change, the Emory Law Journal and the Tulane Law Review.
Professor Scott will contribute a manuscript reviewing the history of desegregation jurisprudence, and question whether diversity jurisprudence has the same potential to impact the development of law as desegregation law.

Professor Kristi Bowman
Associate Professor of Law
    Professor Bowman is a 2001 graduate of Duke Law School. With academic interests in Educational Law and Policy, Professor Bowman has published numerous articles examining the teaching of evolution in public schools as well as school desegregation. Prior to working at Michigan State University, Professor Bowman worked at the United States Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, and clerked for the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
    Professor Bowman is contributing a manuscript questioning whether socioeconomic diversity can substitute for ethnic diversity in improving public schools.

Breakout Session: Student Groups (11:10 AM)
At least three breakout sessions will be offered for conference participants and attendants to enjoy discussion topics related to the conference, but in a more intimate, informal setting.

Breakout Session A: Careers in Education and the Law
Hosts: Alan Dickenson, former in-house legal counsel for Winston-Salem, NC Schools; Professor Kristi Bowman, Michigan State University
Location: 3171

Breakout Session B: Student Note Presentation and discussion: The Time Is Now: Enforcing A State Right To Education Through A Private Right Of Action.
Hosts: Sonja Ralston-Elder, Duke Law 2009; TBD
Location: 4044

Breakout Session C: Community Discussion
Hosts: Black Law Students Association; South Asian Law Students Association; Women’s Law Student Association; (potentially) Hispanic Law Students Association
Location: 4046


Keynote Luncheon (12:10 PM)
Host: Duke Education Law & Policy Society
Moderator: TBD
Keynote Speaker: President Rufus Williams, President of Chicago Schools
Location: Burdman Lounge, third floor of the Law School


Panel Discussion:  Issues and Innovations in Legal Education (1:20 PM)
Moderator:    TBD
Participants:    Professor John Garvey, Franklin Pierce Law Center
Professor Irene Ayers, New York University School of Law
        Professor Andi Curcio
Location:     3041

This panel will discuss critical issues in legal education, as well as innovations and work being done to evolve legal education in keeping with social and practical developments.  It will also discuss the disparities in information provided to law school applicants, and the issue of law school and law firm preparedness. NYU School of Law Professor Irene Ayers will speak regarding her article entitled The Undertraining of Lawyers and its Effect on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in the Legal Profession.  Professor John Garvey will speak regarding his article Making Law Students Client-Ready, which describes his ground-breaking work to evolve the law school curriculum after 150 years of relative stasis.  Finally, Professor Andi Curcio will discuss whether alternative assessments of law students should be implemented in law school with her piece, Developing Alternative Assessments and Empirical Studies of Law School Assessments:  Can We Open The Doors A Little Wider?
Once opened for discussion, this panel will aim to be an opportunity for self-reflection for Duke Law students and faculty, creating critical thought about the shortcomings of current legal education, praise for its successes, and vision for how we can improve the ways we imagine, teach, and learn the law. 

Professor Irene Segal Ayers
Acting Assistant Professor, New York University School of Law
Professor Ayers teaches in NYU’s rich lawyering department, where students learn practical skills in legal process, advocacy, legal writing, and various forms of experiential learning, such as negotiation.  Established as a practitioner and scholar of copyright law, she also previously wrote on the First Amendment before turning to focus on her current interests in legal education. 
Professor Ayer’s creative article, The Undertraining of Lawyers and its Effect on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in the Legal Profession, studies emerging literature on narratives of professionalization by women attorneys of color, linking two previously unrelated research fields.  Professor Ayers explores how the undertraining of law students interacts with postgraduate opportunities for advancement for women minorities in law firms.  This article, which is the fruit of research and discussion with her lawyering colleagues at NYU, will highlight and analyze some of the principal issues in legal education today.

Professor John Burwell Garvey
Professor of Law, Franklin Pierce Law Center
Director, Daniel Webster Scholars Program
Professor Garvey, himself an established lawyer, directs the Daniel Webster Scholars Honors Program, an innovative program at Franklin Pierce that is dedicated to preparing students for admission to the bar, the practice of law, and to making them “client ready.”  The program has received national recognition and praise from judges, lawyers, and legal education scholars, resulting in Professor Garvey’s selection to serve on the Carnegie Foundation’s Initiative on the Future of Legal Education. 
Professor Garvey’s article, Making Law Students Client-Ready, will explore the Program, both in terms of the problems in legal education it is meant to address, as well as in terms of its successes, locating it in the context of evolutions in legal education.  His contribution to the Forum’s publication will be the first time he has written on this exciting new program, placing our publication on the cutting-edge of legal education scholarship. 

Professor Andi Curcio
Professor of Law, Georgia State Law School
Professor Andi Curcio currently teaches at Georgia State Law School.  She is Chair of the bar committee of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT), a progressive law professor organization dedicated to reforming legal education, including how students are assessed.
Professor Andi Curcio will contribute an article that examines alternative assessments in our law school classrooms, how we can empirically demonstrate that alternative skills can be validly, reliably and cost-effectively measured, and how that will both benefit our students and hopefully, ultimately, lead to a change in the existing bar exam.


Closing Remarks: 2:20-2:30
Location:     3041

Reception 2:30-3:15
Location:     Third Floor Loggia