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Admissions Office Tips: Application Components

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To kick off the start of application review season, our Assistant Director of Admissions breaks down the various application components to help potential law students apply as strategically as possible. Numerical Indicators One of the most common things on an applicant’s mind are the numerical indicators – the LSAT score and the UGPA. They can be intimidating factors for some applicants, or something to brag about for others. What’s important to remember is that the application process is about highlighting your strengths and putting your weaknesses into context. A strong application will do both. Taking the LSAT more than once isn’t bad – either is taking it only once. It all depends on the individual’s application, and no two applications look the same. Think about your LSAT score or scores – what story do they tell? If you’ve taken it only once, was that your ideal score? If you’ve taken it more than once, does it show a persistent effort to improve? Whatever your LSAT story is, make sure to frame it in a way …

LRW Faculty Summer Update: Legal Writing Institute Conference

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This summer, Professors Carpenter, DeJarnatt, Margolis, Murray, Stanchi, and Tavares attended the 18th Biennial Conference of the Legal Writing Institute in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Professor Kristen Murray shares a short summary of how she and the Temple Law Legal Research and Writing faculty are involved in the Legal Writing Institute. For news from our Legal Research and Writing Faculty, follow @TempleLawLRW.

Summer Internships: The Ella Baker Internship at the Center for Constitutional Rights

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This summer I had the amazing opportunity to be an Ella Baker Intern at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. CCR is a legal organization whose work is centered on supporting social movements. This means that, at CCR, lawsuits are not simply about who wins and loses in the courtroom, but how legal work can support wider systemic change. The Ella Baker program is named after one of the most brilliant strategist and organizers of the Civil Rights Movement and carries forward her work by equipping young lawyers with the necessary tools to become movement lawyers. I, along with 11 other law students and two undergraduate interns from across the country, started the program with an exercise asking four questions: Who are the people who inspire us to do social justice work? What is our superpower? What was our “aha moment” that led us to law school and CCR? What we each do to relax? The people who inspire me have always been my family and my community in the Bronx. I …

Temple Law’s Summer Vacation

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Temple Law students use their summer months to relax, catch up on reading, take classes, study abroad, and to gain necessary skills and experiences by working outside of the law school. We asked three law students where they worked this summer and what they learned: Adetola Ajayi, LAW ‘19 There is no substitute for real legal experience. My summer experience was nothing short of amazing. I split my summer at the Philadelphia City Law Department and Archer Law in Haddonfield, New Jersey, through the Temple-Archer Diversity Scholarship program. Archer’s program provided me the opportunity to gain insights into both the public and private sectors of law. At the City Law Department, I worked in the Civil Rights Unit and was able to attend state and federal trials, write memos, and observe settlement conferences and depositions. I learned about topics such as 42 U.S.C. § 1983, qualified immunity, and the spoliation of evidence. During the second half of my summer at Archer, I conducted research and drafted memos. My assignments were from various practice areas including …

On Temple Lawyers, Mentorship, and Starbursts: Notes from the Breakfast of Champions

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Before law school, I was a community organizer for the Children’s Defense Fund, a national child advocacy organization founded and directed by the extraordinary and inimitable civil rights lawyer Marian Wright Edelman.  In her book, Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors, Edelman writes of “the crucial influences of the natural daily mentors” in her life, whom she refers to as “lanterns” who lit her path from her small hometown in Benettsville, South Carolina, to Spelman College, to Yale Law School, to the front lines of the civil rights struggle, to the founding of the Children’s Defense Fund.  Like Edelman, the path of my own career has been lit by mentors, who showed me what was possible and bolstered my confidence along the way.  I would not have decided to attend law school or pursued a public interest career were it not for my own mentors.  And I have done my best to light the path of others.  I am grateful that my role as a clinical professor at Temple Law affords me an ongoing opportunity to …

2L’s Take Ireland – Spring Break 2018

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As a law student, one of the most common questions I get from prospective students is: does my social life suffer when I start law school? The answer: It does, but you can work around it. During my spring break this year, I took a trip with two friends, who are also Temple Law 2Ls, to Ireland for no other reason than we (1) wanted to and (2) we could. We found cheap tickets and accommodations and set off to visit Galway, Killarney, and Dublin for a week. Our trip got off to a shaky start as Ireland was hit with its worst snow storm of the decade. Our flight was cancelled, but after some logistical changes, we were off! We visited museums, castles, and briefly, got a little lost in the mountains. It was a truly amazing experience. A big part of going to law school is learning to take a break when you need it, and this spring break trip was exactly what I needed. I was well-rested and happy when I got …

Temple Owls are Everywhere – XXIII Olympic Winter Games Edition

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My name is Christina and I am a 3L at Temple University Law School. For my last semester of law school I am participating in the Japan study abroad program, which I highly recommend. Living in Tokyo for the semester has been an amazing experience and allowed me to see parts of the world I never imagined visiting. I knew one place I had to visit was South Korea for the 2018 winter Olympics in PyeongChang. I love watching both the summer and winter Olympics and when I realized I would be 3 hours away I had to go. My school schedule in Tokyo allowed me to go Friday to Monday. Wearing USA gear head to toe, I was ready to go. There is something really special about visiting another country and experiencing their culture. The small city in South Korea was filled with Olympic pride. I met so many people not only from the US but from all over the world. There were plenty of interpreters and volunteers, the language barrier was not an issue. …

A Reflection on Justice

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For her undergraduate thesis in criminal justice, Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve organized court watchers in Chicago’s Cook County courthouse. She hoped to create an ethnography of America’s largest courthouse across thousands of hours of interviews and first-person observations. More than a decade later – and now as Professor Gonzalez Van Cleve – she published these observations as Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court. Professor Gonzalez Van Cleve spoke about her recent publication on November 9th here at the Beasley School of Law, alongside Professor Hosea Harvey of Temple University. Employing an interrogative style, Professor Gonzalez Van Cleve began by presenting some of the results of her research. As an ethnographer, Gonzalez Van Cleve pointed out that language in her field functions both as indicator and as an active, purposive agent. She was particularly interested in the way that language – specifically racially coded language – worked in court communities and the justice system itself. In this way Professor Gonzalez Van Cleve’s Crook County expands on the work of Michelle Alexander’s The …