Dean Weissenberger and the DePaul University Law School are inviting law school deans to a symposium entitled " Vanishing Act: Legal Education in a World Without Trials" on July 31-Aug. 1, to coincide with the annual American Bar Association meeting in Chicago. The symposium is being sponsored by Clifford Law offices, a Chicago personal injury firm which has made contributions to the DePaul Law School for an endowed faculty chair in tort law and social policy that makes possible an annual symposium addressing a timely issue in the tort law area.
A June 10, 2009 story in The National Law Journal story about the symposium, cites the statistic that federal civil trials dropped to 3,500 in 2006 from about 12,000 in 1984. Attorney Robert A. Clifford finds this reduction to be a serious concern because "The rise in alternative dispute resolution and the corresponding increase in confidential settlement agreements is problematic because the lack of transparency will make it difficult for the government and taxpayers to determine how the court system is performing and to what it extent it should be funded." Dean Wiseenberger says "This is an issue of huge concern," that may affect the value of the case law method that is used in most law schools.
"University of Chicago Law School Professor Craig Futterman, Yale Law School Professor Judith Resnik and Duke Law School Dean David Levi are among the panelists who will speak at the symposium. The keynote speaker for the event will be Kenneth Feinberg, a Washington attorney and law school lecturer who was appointed to oversee the federal government's September 11th Victim Compensation Fund."
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Book and essay on the issue :
From The University of Chicago Press release :
In The Death of the American Trial, Robert Burns warns that this decline could lead not only to the loss of a vaunted institution, but also to the dangerous erosion of American democracy."..."As one federal judge put it, the jury is the ”canary in the mineshaft; if it goes, if our people lose their inherited right to do justice in court, other democratic institutions will lose breath too.“
SSRN( Social Science Research Network) essay on "The Death of the American Trial" by Robert P. Burns, Northwestern University - School of Law
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