News Archive
Professor Allison Martin’s Work Showcased at Legal Writing Conference in Pittsburgh
01/19/2010
The First "Colonial Frontier" Legal Writing Conference, "Engendering Hope in the Legal Writing Classroom: Pedagogy, Curriculum, and Attitude," held on December 5, 2009, was built around the article co-authored by IU School of Law – Indianapolis Clinical Associate Professor Allison D. Martin and Professor Kevin L. Rand, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis . Their article, entitled The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades: Law School Through the Lens of Hope , examines the personality traits of law students as predictors of success and then suggests that legal educators can engender hope in their students by helping law students formulate appropriate goals, increasing law students' autonomy, modeling the learning process, helping law students understand grading as feedback rather than as pure evaluation, and modeling and encouraging agentic thinking.
Martin and Rand presented their work at the opening plenary session of the one-day conference. Professor Martin says students from the Duquesne Law Review who attended the plenary presentation told her afterwards they could relate their own personal experiences in law school to “hope theory” and to the principles of engendering hope in law students outlined
in the article. Martin says, “Kevin and I thought their reactions were very interesting and affirming.”
The Duquesne Law Review will be publishing a proceedings issue about the conference.
The conference was hosted by Duquesne University School of Law and co-sponsored by Aspen Publishers Legal Education / Wolters Kluwer Law & Business, the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and the West Virginia University College of Law with additional support from Indiana University School of Law – Indianapolis.
