LII Donor Profile: Professor Stephen Yale-Loehr
While gifts of money are crucial to our operating model, the vote of confidence they represent is just as important to us. Donations to the LII come in many forms, all of them helping us realize our mission in different ways.
As we note in our story about IRS Written Determinations, some people give us great ideas to explore. We are always interested in hearing about problems like, for example, unavailable or poorly-organized government data we can help organize into a useful tool for researchers, academics, businesses, attorneys, or just “the general public.” Send us your ideas here.
But right now, we’d like to focus on a third kind of donor: our donors of content. Whether it is a retired computer scientist writing about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or a practicing attorney updating our overview of bankruptcy law, folks from many different walks of life contribute content, primarily through our Wex legal reference feature. (You can join them by signing up here.)
Recently, law professor and long-time friend of the LII Stephen Yale-Loehr upped the ante by getting his students involved. He made writing for Wex part of the coursework in his immigration law seminar. We caught up with Steve to talk about why he’s donating effort–both his own and his students’–to the LII.
You are both a law professor and a practitioner of immigration and asylum law. How do those two roles complement each other?
I think the two help each other. Practicing law allows me to bring real world stories to my immigration law classes, which my students always find interesting. And having to keep up on the latest immigration law developments for my classes helps my immigration clients.
You’ve been on the Law School faculty since 1991. Has the advent of the Internet had a bigger impact on teaching law or practicing it? Why?
The Internet has had a big impact on both. For example, most of my assignments for my immigration classes now are links to articles or cases on the Internet, rather than a hard copy. I also use YouTube video clips to illustrate certain points. That was not possible before the Internet.
The Internet has dramatically changed immigration practice. I do almost all of my research online now rather than through books. With the advent of the Internet we can represent clients anywhere in the world. For example, over half of our immigration clients at Miller Mayer live overseas. We never may never meet them, but we communicate effectively with them via email and receive and send them documents electronically.
This year, you asked your students to publish summaries of important Supreme Court immigration decisions in Wex. Did you have a particular pedagogical goal in mind, or did you just want to see the content added to Wex?
Both. I wanted to see if my students could summarize Supreme Court immigration opinions, which can be pretty dense and complicated, in a way that would be accessible to lay people. Also, some of the Supreme Court’s key immigration decisions were decided 50 or 100 years ago, but remain important today. While Wex has started summarizing major Supreme Court decisions, a lot of older opinions have not been summarized yet. People should know about key immigration decisions, no matter when they were decided.
Do you think your students approached that particular assignment differently because their work was going to be (and is now) viewable by the general public?
Like any teacher, he called on one of his students to answer this question. Jessica Flores, a member of the Class of 2015, replied:
“I approached the writing to the immigration case summary differently to some extent. Since I knew my audience was going to be the general public, as opposed to other law students or lawyers, I wanted to make sure I carefully explained the case and the legal concepts of the case in a simplified way. I wanted to make sure that anyone without any legal or immigration knowledge/background would be able to understand the case. I know that legal cases can sometimes be difficult even for law students to understand so I tried to explain the case as clearly as possible. I liked that I could hyperlink legal concepts in my case summary to other LII posts because I knew that other summaries would assist the general public in understanding my case summary. For example, I hyperlinked the Fourth Amendment in my case summary.”
How much editing did you do of the student pieces before LII published them in Wex?
Very little. I was pleasantly surprised at how well the students did. This is in part because of the excellent template and instructions that LII developed.
This seems like a fairly simple model that could be replicated in other classrooms–and not just law classrooms–around the country. Do you see any potential pitfalls to LII expanding it into other seminars writing on other areas?
None at all. LII has developed a good template and instructions to make it easy for any professor to give this assignment to his or her students. It is also a good way to see if students really understand key cases!
To see the finished summaries from Steve’s students, click here.
