As Dean, Elena Kagan Moved Harvard Away From Requiring Law Students to Study Constitu

Revmitchell · May 28, 2010

Elena Kagan, President Barack Obama’s choice to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court, is best known for moving Harvard Law School away from the 100-year old “case-law method” of legal study.

But in the process, critics say, she moved the nation’s premier law school away from requiring the study of constitutional law towards the study of the laws of foreign nations and international law.

More Here

HankD · May 28, 2010

Revmitchell said: ↑

Elena Kagan, President Barack Obama’s choice to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court, is best known for moving Harvard Law School away from the 100-year old “case-law method” of legal study.

But in the process, critics say, she moved the nation’s premier law school away from requiring the study of constitutional law towards the study of the laws of foreign nations and international law.

More Here
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But I thought it was "a living breathing document".

Maybe she thinks it died?

HankD

Gold Dragon · Jun 1, 2010

This is what actually happened with the change in Harvard Law School's curriculum which was voted on unanimously by the faculty in 2006.

Harvard Law Bulletin: A Curriculum of New Realities

For more than 130 years, Harvard Law School’s curriculum has been modeled on the plans drawn by Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell in the late 1800s: intense immersion in property, contracts, torts, civil procedure and criminal law during the first year, followed by two more years—less structured than the first—in which students have been free to choose most of their courses from an increasingly extensive catalogue of specialized offerings.

Much of the teaching has employed the case method, born of a belief that law students can best gain the ability to “think like lawyers” by learning to make subtle distinctions between the facts and language of cases and judicial opinions.

But over the last several decades, with the rise of specialization, globalization and an increasingly regulatory environment both at home and abroad, the practice of law has become more international in scope and has come to require a systematic grasp of statutory and regulatory institutions and practices as much as an ability to glean principles from appellate decisions.

As a result, there has been a gathering consensus on the Harvard Law School faculty that the curriculum should better ensure that students are introduced to administrative, international and comparative subjects when forming their maps of the legal world. There has also been a growing sense that the traditional focus on court opinions should be supplemented more by materials and methods that better address the role lawyers play as problem-solvers and leaders in public and private settings.

That’s why, in two separate votes over the last 18 months, the faculty voted—unanimously—first to implement new, optional programs of study for second- and third-year students, and then to retool the first-year curriculum for the first time since the late 19th century.

The Process

The unanimous faculty votes made the process of curricular reform look almost breezy. In fact, the votes were the culmination of a three-year process of intensive review and information-gathering.

Proposals for curriculum reform have been discussed at HLS for several decades. In the 1980s and early ’90s, one section of each first-year class pursued experiments in collaborative and interdisciplinary teaching. But the efforts aimed at reform didn’t gain enough traction among the faculty until Kagan became dean, says Professor Martha Minow.

Kagan set her sights on curricular reform just as she took the helm of HLS four years ago, appointing a faculty committee to study the issue. She asked Minow to lead it.

“After becoming dean, I spent a lot of time talking to alumni and faculty who felt that our curriculum needed to catch up with the changing nature of the law in the world,” said Kagan. “It was time for some change.”
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Revmitchell · Jun 1, 2010

HankD said: ↑

But I thought it was "a living breathing document".

Maybe she thinks it died?

HankD
Click to expand...

No just wanting to move us toward a one world government.

billwald · Jun 1, 2010

>Elena Kagan, President Barack Obama’s choice to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court, is best known for moving Harvard Law School away from the 100-year old “case-law method” of legal study.

Then you all should support her because it is case law that 90% of this list objects to. You know what case law is? Case law is all the judicial decisions that you hate. When you claim you want to go back to the Constitution as written you are asking to scrap case law. You can't have it both ways.

Revmitchell · Jun 1, 2010

billwald said: ↑

>Elena Kagan, President Barack Obama’s choice to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court, is best known for moving Harvard Law School away from the 100-year old “case-law method” of legal study.

Then you all should support her because it is case law that 90% of this list objects to. You know what case law is? Case law is all the judicial decisions that you hate. When you claim you want to go back to the Constitution as written you are asking to scrap case law. You can't have it both ways.
Click to expand...

maybe you should rethink what you said.

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