Teaching Code in Law Clinics

Speaker(s):

Judson Mitchell

This presentation will survey Loyola College of Law’s experience in teaching law students to code. Started two years ago, Loyola’s Technology and Legal Innovation Clinic set out to teach law students with little or no previous experience the fundamentals of programming and to encourage them to create applications which are useful to lawyers and legal services programs. Because there are few examples of how such a curriculum should work, the clinic has necessarily proceeded on a trial and error basis, achieving quite a few successes as well as a number of “lessons learned”.
The presentation will seek to provide answers to the following questions:

Why teach law students to code in the first place?
How much can really be learned in the course of a one or two semester law clinic?
What educational and career value does such a program provide to law students?
What are the benchmarks for student achievement and success in this type of environment?

The program will review the pedagogical basis for such a program and make suggestions for best practices. We will demo some of the projects created by our students and give background information about the tools used to create these projects. Although touching on some technical subjects, the presentation will be geared to those of all experience levels and abilities and will try to suggest ways in which even non-technical teachers can introduce technology into their clinical curricula.
Featured Student Projects:

Interactive Decision Tree - a web-based tool which can be used by legal service providers to pre-screen potential clients and direct them to appropriate resources
JuJu Sentencing Calculator and Multiple Bill Calculator - Two calculators aimed at practitioners in the criminal justice system.
DocketMinder - A tool which parses non-machine-readable court dockets and alerts practitioners to new filings and changes in case status.

The presenter, Judson Mitchell, is an Associate Clinical Professor at Loyola College of Law, New Orleans. He teaches in the areas of Criminal Defense and Law and Technology. He is the author of ClinicCases, an open source case management system specially designed for law school clinics.

Slides: