Doctrine, experiential learning, and client-centered lawyering: Teaching family law in a post-pandemic world

ABSTRACT

The restrictions of pandemic teaching served as a catalyst for the authors' integration of the skills-based and client-centered teaching. Their refurbished models of teaching family law aspire to capture the needs of under- and unrepresented populations of society, build students' lawyering skills including "soft" skills like client interviewing, contemplate what a satisfying career in family law could look like, and deliver instruction on the theoretical underpinnings of the law governing the creation and dissolution of familial units. The article summarizes the authors' methods for incorporating such "hands-on" learning into our classes, and demonstrates how these ideas are malleable enough to work in in-person, remote, concurrent, asynchronous, and synchronous classes.