Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2012

Abstract

This Essay is part of an ongoing classroom study and clinical service project addressing the mindful education of law students and the civic training of lawyers. Its purpose is to build a pedagogy of community and public citizenship within an outcome-based, rotation curricular model of legal education sketched out by commonly allied scholars in prior work here in the Wisconsin Law Review and elsewhere. The Essay seeks to advance this earlier curricular work by integrating ethics, education and psychology, and law and religion into a cohesive pedagogical approach to civic professionalism and community engagement. From the springboard of integration next follows a discussion of how normatively compatible a pedagogy of public citizenship and community is with traditional notions of the lawyering process and the adversary system. Additionally, the Essay explores the functional compatibility of public citizenship and community values with the current model of legal education. The issue of functional compatibility gains particular importance in light of recent and widening calls for institutional reform in legal education. The hope is to transform conventional notions of lawyer role and function in the adversary system and then, with those transformed notions in mind, restructure the curricular form and content of contemporary legal education to better serve communities in need through mindfulness and spirituality.

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