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Teaching Modern Legal Skills to Law Students in a Comprehensive Law Course,Part TwoDave Cole, Office of the Arizona Attorney General, Phoenix, USA (drcoleua@gmail.com)Comprehensive Law is an upper-division course designed for second and third year law studentsat the Phoenix School of Law. The course provides exposure to modern therapeuticjurisprudential legal theory, practice, and skills of law as a helping or healing profession. It usespsychology to assess the consequences of law and legal procedures on people in an effort tomake law have a positive effect, and examines and teaches more effective communication andinter-personal skills for the students to use as they begin to practice law. The course focuses oncreative problem-solving, restorative justice, transformative mediation, preventive law,therapeutic jurisprudence, and law and socioeconomics. The lecturers, Jones and Cole, willcritically assess and discuss their teaching goals, methods, exercises, and the students’expectations and reactions. Jones and Cole will offer suggestions for improving the law schoolcurriculum by inclusion of a comprehensive law course component.Discussant: Michael JonesPreparing Law Students for the Emotional Dimensions of Lawyering: TwoStudents’ Perspective for Needed Change in Legal Education (Part One)Kim Culver, Phoenix School of Law (kkculver@phoenixlaw.edu)Empathy, active listening, compassion…these are traits which law school, in its traditionalsocratic form, fails to instill in its students. Legal education should prepare students for theemotional dimensions of lawyering; that is, for the impact that a client’s emotional well-beingwill have upon their lawyer’s practice of the law. Studies have shown that students are critical ofthe content of legal education, calling it “too theoretical” and “indifferent to real world issues."This is why legal education needs to shift from the traditional framework and seek creative,collaborative, holistic, and positive, client-centered solutions to legal disputes. By incorporatingthese principles of therapeutic jurisprudence and comprehensive law into the classroom, lawprofessors can provide their students with important insights into some of the difficult problemsraised when dealing with clients. Rather than teaching law students to “think like a lawyer,”students will learn to identify in their clients critical issues such as grief, anxiety, depression,anger, etc. In doing so, they can develop a plan to assist the client in resolving and/or dealingwith such issues; as well as better understand how these issues will affect the clients’ case andthe way the lawyer should handle it. In this forum, we hope to give attendees the law student’sperspective as to ideas and suggestions for influencing this change in legal education. This ispart one of a two-part presentation.433