Learning in Context: Land Use and Community Lawyering

26 Pages Posted: 3 Feb 2013

Date Written: 2011

Abstract

The premise behind the conference for which this essay has been written — identifying Best Practices for Skill Building in Teaching Land Use, Environmental, and Sustainable Development Law — engages concerns relating to curriculum development with respect to a specific subject area but offers as well a suggestive road map for course design in other domains of law. In this essay I apply that premise, tracing the trajectory of a process for designing a two-credit upper-level course, Land Use and Community Lawyering, that I introduced in the Fall 2011 semester at the City University of New York School of Law (CUNY). With its social– justice mission, CUNY is dedicated both to preparing students to practice law in the service of human needs and to diversifying the legal profession.

First, I address the multiple goals of this interdisciplinary, interdoctrinal course, the desired learning outcomes associated with those goals, and the instructional methods and assessment devices I have chosen. I relate the design of the course to CUNY’s institutional mission and curricular commitments and consider how both the 2007 Best Practices and Carnegie reports and frameworks have informed its development. Next, I discuss possible constraints and costs associated with undertaking the course and show why I believe that the anticipated benefits of offering the course justify the commitment of institutional resources. Finally, I discuss an early iteration of the syllabus, included as an Appendix to this essay, in an effort to concretize the goals, learning outcomes, and methods of the course and to situate them in the Best Practices framework.

Keywords: Land Use, Urban Land Use, Community Economic Development, Legal Pedagogy

Suggested Citation

McArdle, Andrea L., Learning in Context: Land Use and Community Lawyering (2011). 2 Pace Environmental Law (PELR) Review Online Companion 135 ( 2011), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2211277

Andrea L. McArdle (Contact Author)

CUNY School of Law ( email )

2 Court Square
Room 4/309
Long Island City, NY 11101
United States
(718) 340-4348 (Phone)

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
38
Abstract Views
346
PlumX Metrics