Legal Skills Training Opportunities
The College of Law has designed a comprehensive approach to skills training that begins in the first year and continues throughout the second and third years of the curriculum. It employs the latest technology, both as teaching tools and as means of communication and persuasion with which the present day advocate must be familiar. It is also distinguished by the high degree of involvement of members of the full-time faculty. This provides for the ultimate integration of the theoretical and practical aspects of a well-rounded legal education.
In the first year, students take two full-year, required courses, Basic Legal Research and Legal Writing and Advocacy. Recognizing that effective legal research and communication are the basic skills utilized every day by the successful practitioner, these courses address these skills at the beginning of law school. The two courses employ coordinated, real-life exercises.
Various clinical experiences are offered each semester at the Zeke Giorgi Legal Clinic in Rockford, IL. Students represent clients under the direction of well-qualified supervising attorneys. The clinical courses each have a classroom component in addition to the practice experience. They are taught by members of the College of Law faculty in conjunction with the supervising attorneys. These classes bring academic and practical worlds together, addressing a range of issues students experience in their cases, from honing legal skills, to exploring issues of substantive law and procedure, to considering real-world issues of professional responsibility and ethics.
The clinical opportunities taught at the College of Law in recent years include: Domestic Abuse Clinic, Elder Law Clinic, and Mediation Clinic.
Read more about this topic: Northern Illinois University College Of Law
Famous quotes containing the words legal, skills and/or training:
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made—constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.”
—Jean Szarkowski (b. 1925)
“Unfortunately, life may sometimes seem unfair to middle children, some of whom feel like an afterthought to a brilliant older sibling and unable to captivate the family’s attention like the darling baby. Yet the middle position offers great training for the real world of lowered expectations, negotiation, and compromise. Middle children who often must break the mold set by an older sibling may thereby learn to challenge family values and seek their own identity.”
—Marianne E. Neifert (20th century)