Podcasts about law school admissions council

Kristin Theis-Alvarez, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at the UC Berkeley School of Law, shares her insider perspective on the recent decision to withdraw from US News Rankings and describes how students can demonstrate the Berkeley ethos to secure a spot in this prestigious program. [Show Summary] Thanks for joining me for the 504th episode of Admissions Straight Talk. Are you applying to law school this cycle? Are you planning ahead to apply to law school next year or later? Are you competitive at your target programs? Accepted's Law School Admissions Quiz can give you a quick reality check. Just go to accepted.com/law-quiz, complete the quiz, and you'll not only get your assessment but also tips on how to improve your chances of acceptance. Plus it's all free.  I'm delighted to have on Admissions Straight Talk, Kristin Theis-Alvarez, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at the University of California Berkeley School of Law. Dean Theis-Alvarez earned her BA in Rhetoric and Native American Studies from UC Berkeley and her JD from Stanford Law, graduating from Stanford in 2000. She has been with Berkeley Law in different roles since 2007 and became Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid in 2018. In addition to her duties at Berkeley, she's a member of the Board of Trustees and Chair of the Diversity Equity and Inclusion Committee for the Law School Admissions Council.  Can you start by giving an overview of the more distinctive elements of the Berkeley Law JD program? [2:08] It's a little bit challenging to encapsulate them, but I will try to hit some of them and I imagine through the rest of the questions, others may emerge.  I like to start with the first year because frankly, it's a point of distinction between us and a lot of our peer schools. We are firm believers that there are a lot of law schools that give a really great education and it becomes more about fit and where you want to spend three years as well as what in particular you want to get out of it. One of the places where we are different is in what we will allow people to do in the first year. You may have this idea that all of the curriculum in the first year is set and you just sort of suffer through it and then you get to do fun stuff in your second and third years. That's the case probably in many places, but certainly not the case at Berkeley. We made a really distinct choice, many years ago that if we're going to recruit, and we do like to recruit students who have a strong track record of engagement, then we should allow them to be engaged and to do what they care about most. That shouldn't take away from, but augment their experience. We will allow people to join any of the journals except California Law Reviews as first-year students. We'll allow students to get involved in our pro bono program, which has a number of distinct aspects, but the most well-recognized is the student-initiated legal projects, which are hands-on legal work, supervised by attorneys and community partners. First-year law students are actually doing things that make a difference like representing someone who is in the process of seeking asylum. There are over 40 of them this year.  We also let people try out for the competition team. If you're someone who's really passionate about moot court or mock trial and you plan to be a litigator and you want to keep doing that, you can do that in your first year.  Similarly, the curriculum is actually not nearly as fixed as it used to be. We went through curricular reform a few years ago, and we made the decision to remove property, which is typically one of the core required courses, not only as a first-year requirement but as a graduation requirement. We also took a unit from torts and reduced it by a unit to add a unit, which sort of equates to hours in legal education to the legal research and writing program so that people were getting more practice, developing more skills,

It's one thing to say that politics has always been a tough business, but it's another to confront the reality that public insults have become more frequent, more intense, and more personal.  Ruth Colker explains this is not an accident, but often part of intentional efforts to hijack public issues. Colker is a leading scholar in the areas of Constitutional Law and Disability Discrimination and currently serves as the Heck Faust Memorial Chair in Constitutional Law at the Moritz College of Law at the Ohio State University.  She is an award-winning author of 16 books and has published more than 50 articles in law journals including the “Boston University Law Review,” “Columbia Law Journal,” “Georgetown Law Journal,” “Harvard Law Review,” “Michigan Law Journal,” “University of Pennsylvania Law Review,” “University of Virginia Law Review” and “Yale Law Journal.  Her work has been cited by the United States Supreme Court in Tennessee v. Lane, 541 U.S. 509, 527 n.15 (2004), which cited Colker and Milani, “The Post-Garrett World: Insufficient State Protection Against Disability Discrimination,” 53 Ala. L. Rev. 1075 (2002).  In 2014, she was appointed as a disability expert to help resolve a consent decree between the United States Department of Justice and the Law School Admissions Council.  Her work helped change the way the LSAC determines whether applicants are entitled to testing accommodations on the LSAT.  She has also served on the National Board of the ACLU since 2013.  Colker is also an innovator in the classroom and has studied the effectiveness of an ungraded formative assessment in first-year classes.  Before joining the faculty at Ohio State, Colker taught at Tulane University, the University of Toronto, the University of Pittsburgh, and in the Women's Studies graduate program at George Washington University.  She also spent four years working as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, where she received two awards for outstanding performance. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

While attending the NFB 2019 Convention in Las Vegas, Jeff Thompson stopped by the Law School Admissions Council booth and talked to Michele, the accommodated testing manager. At LSAC. There is a ton of information on the LSAC web site and Michelle gives a great overview on how LSAC and accommodated testing can enhance your opportunities on your admission to a law school. You can find LSAC on the web at www.LSAC.org For information about accommodated testing you can send an email to Accom@LSAC.org Here is one example of information you will find on the web site: Accommodations That May Be Available on the LSAT The following is a non-exhaustive list of testing accommodations that may be available on the LSAT (or may have an equivalent accessibility feature on the Digital LSAT or the LSAT Writing). The inclusion of a particular accommodation in the list below does not guarantee that you will receive this accommodation if requested. Each request is reviewed, and a decision whether to grant any testing accommodations is made, on a case-by-case basis in accordance with LSAC’s stated policies. Unified English Braille (UEB) version of the LSAT Large print (e.g., 18-point font or higher) test book Screen-readable HTML test (including, where applicable, use of screen-reader software (e.g., JAWS)) Extended test time Use of spell check Use of a reader Use of an amanuensis (scribe) Additional rest time during breaks (standard break is 10–15 minutes between third and fourth sections) Breaks between sections Sit/stand with a podium Wheelchair accessibility (if table is requested, specify height) Separate room (e.g., small group testing) Private testing room (e.g., low-distraction setting) Stop-the-clock breaks Voice recognition software (e.g., Dragon) Physical prompts (e.g., for candidate with hearing impairments) Reserved or assigned seating location (e.g., seating near the exam proctor) Bring and eat food Permission to bring insulin, check blood sugar Permission to bring and take medications Earplugs Use of magnification devices (e.g., magnification reading glasses, handheld video magnifier, closed circuit television (CCTV), ZoomText) Ability to pace (walk around) Book stand Braille writer Braille graphics and figures Braille Note Braille paper Braille watch Tactile manipulatives (e.g., rubber graph board and tactile letters or pictures; magnetic board with magnetic letters or objects ) Use of adaptive writing instruments (e.g., thick or felt-tip pen/marker, pencil grips) Excel spreadsheets ***** Contact Your State Services If you reside in Minnesota, and you would like to know more about Transition Services from State Services contact Transition Coordinator Sheila Koenig by email or contact her via phone at 651-539-2361. To find your State Services in your State you can go to www.AFB.org and search the directory for your agency. Contact: Thank you for listening! You can follow us on Twitter @BlindAbilities On the web at www.BlindAbilities.com Send us an email Get the Free Blind Abilities App on the App Storeand Google Play Store. Check out the Blind Abilities Communityon Facebook, the Blind Abilities Page, the Career Resources for the Blind and Visually Impairedand the Assistive Technology Community for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

A weird speech by Antonin Scalia, a visit with some serious legal tortoises, and a testy exchange with the experts at the Law School Admissions Council prompts Malcolm to formulate his Grand Unified Theory for fixing higher education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s episode addresses the increasingly contentious and much-discussed issue of non-disclosure agreements in terminations for sexual misconduct. NDAs, as they are known, are sometimes justified as being in the interests of the victim – in fact, as the first part of this podcast reveals in a discussion with Julie on the defamation case against her, NDAs are commonly used by universities to quietly “pass-the-trash” to other schools, which then hire persons fired for sexual harassment and other misconduct with no knowledge of their history. Moreover, victims are sometimes pressured to sign an NDA as a “gag”, as the story of Dr. Emma Chapman, an astrophysicist at Imperial College London, and a member of the UK-based 1752 advocacy group, illustrates. Finally, Julie talks to Connor Spencer, chair of the national student group lobbying to address sexual violence cover-ups in universities across Canada, about how students view NDAs. This episode is being released on the day of a court hearing in Julie’s case against the University of Windsor insurer. Julie is presently being represented pro bono by the wonderful Natalie MacDonald. If you are interested in contributing to this cause, you can find a GoFundMe page here: https://www.gofundme.com/EndNDAs. In other news: former Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin has written an article in Lawyers Daily summarizing some of the important discussions that took place at the Annual Summit of the Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters; the Law School Admissions Council announced last week that they will be implementing a new initiative to increase access to legal education, and access to law school more specifically; a recent article from the CBC analyzed the appointments of judges from 2016 to 2018, and noted that Canada's judiciary is gradually becoming more diverse; NSRLP is collecting survey data from self-represented litigants who have been labeled as “vexatious”, or been subject to a court restriction order; and finally, last week NSRLP published a blog post written by Honourable Robert Bauman, Chief Justice of British Columbia. For related links and more on this episode visit our website: https://representingyourselfcanada.com/ndas-a-toxic-bargain/ Jumping Off the Ivory Tower is produced and hosted by Julie Macfarlane and Dayna Cornwall; production and editing by Brauntë Petric; Other News produced and hosted by Ali Tejani; promotion by Moya McAlister and Ali Tejani.

Lee Merritt, the rapper turned poet and Civil Rights Attorney is on the front lines with those being wounded in the struggle for the mattering of Black lives. Marlin Gipson, Jordan Edwards, Jacqueline Craig and others...Lee has been with them trying to tend to their wounds and advocate on their behalf. And in this episode, he shares his larger vision for the legal struggle to make Black lives matter in America. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTvg-BB06tI Oh yes - Lee dropped a verse at the end of this interview! And I want to get him to share more... But to get to that larger vision will take more than Attorney Lee Merritt representing clients when the frequent need arises. It takes a village, right? Not just an attorney...not just several attorneys. So the question becomes, how do we play our part? And that's part of the discussion for this episode. Because we have to have some solutions, right? Don't get me wrong...I'm grateful for Lee Merritt, Darryl Parks, Aramis Ayala, Benjamin Crump, Greg Francis, others I don't know to name and so many more I'm sure. (Please add the names of others so I can learn of their efforts...even if that other is yourself! LOL) We have to have more than an army of Attorneys. I mean, we do need more attorneys. Listen to the absolutely crazy statistics on Black lawyers shared in the conversation I had with Yusuf Kareem of the Law School Admissions Council. But all the attorneys in the world ain't gon ensure the Justice system works to protect and advance the freedoms of Black people. It takes many things for sure. But Attorney Lee Merritt wants to share his vision from his perspective, and I think it definitely needs to be a component to our strategy. But what do you think? Do you report the police when you've experienced discrimination? Why or why not? Should Jury Duty be part of the strategy and what type of teachings/programs do you think would help add Jury Duty as a major reason for registering to vote, and as a major component of the fight for justice? I want to hear from you... Click the banner and become part of the solution to making Black lives matter in America. Resources Mentioned in this Episode: Johnnie Cochran's Civil Rights Legacy Pedro Hernandez John RK Howard rape trial Woke Folks (Facebook group as website isn't live at time of this post)

Suffolk University, Suffolk University Law School, Boston, Office of Academic Access and Opportunity, LSAC, Law School Admissions Council, Diversity, Inclusion, Disadvantaged Groups, Minority Students, Access to Higher Education, Diverse Populations