Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

This week I'm chatting with Villanova Law Dean Mark Alexander about his student-driven election law course, and why election law is having a moment. Next, I'll highlight two interesting initiatives from the University of Florida Levin College of Law and Vanderbilt University Law School that are finding new ways to bring legal education to unconventional audiences. And finally I pen a short love letter to the University of Virginia School of Law's student-run publication Virginia Law Weekly, which manages to be informative while not taking itself too seriously.

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Election Law Is Cool Again

Let's keep it real: Election law hasn't always been the sexiest of legal topics. In fact, relatively few scholars focused on election law until 2000's Bush v. Gore thrust it into national headlines. That's according to election law expert Mark Alexander, who also happens to be dean of Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law. Interest in election law waned a bit in the years following that blockbuster Supreme Court case but something interesting has happened over the past couple of years: Election law became cool again. Alexander had to turn students away from his election law class this semester because he couldn't accommodate everyone who wanted in, and he has heard similar things from his colleagues across the country.

“It's definitely having a nice boost,” Alexander told me last week. “Obviously people see the world of law, elections and politics front and center every day.”

And unsurprisingly, students are more jazzed about learning when they can see those legal principles play out in real time on the national news.

But there's another reason why I wanted to chat with Alexander, which is that his election law course is unusually student driven—yet another reason he says his students have such a high level of engagement.

Here's how he starts the semester: He asks students to read the table of contents and the first chapter of their text book, which offers an overview of election law. Then, they hold a debate during the first class of which topics they want to focus on for the rest of the course. That culminates in a class vote to determine the syllabus.For good measure, Alexander provides three different voting formats to demonstrate how rules and procedures can influence outcomes. This semester, the class chose to cover voting rights, gerrymandering, campaign finance and the Voting Rights Act. They also chose to cover what happens when elections go bad, i.e. Bush v. Gore.

Beyond that, Alexander asks students to start each class by presenting a current event pertaining to election law. There's so much happening that he has to cut off the discussion lest it subsume the entire class, he said.

“Their engagement is through the roof. Part of it is that we all see things in our daily lives. If you're learning about it contemporaneously in your class, that brings a different level of engagement. I also put the students in charge of the class, in this regard, so they are driving the content in a way that's not typical.”

The takeaway: Hey law deans, this might be a good time to up your election law offerings if they aren't already robust. I'm also impressed with Alexander's student-led approach to the class. But he offered a few caveats when I asked whether that approach can be replicated in other law courses. Election law isn't a black-letter law topic. It's not tested on the bar exam, and that gives professors far more latitude than, say, constitutional law. Moreover, there are so many different aspects of election law that professors can structure their courses very differently. Some may opt to focus on campaign finance law, while others may zero in on political parties or voting rights. But it makes sense to harness current events to get students excited about what they're learning.

Law Schools Find New Ways to Stay Relevant

A couple of law school initiatives caught my eye this week, and each represent ways in which law schools are trying to find expand into new niches and broaden their offerings. The first is an intensive two-week course on e-discovery that University of Florida Levin College of Law professor William Hamilton taught last month at Southeast University in Nanjing, China. And Vanderbilt University Law School has launched an online legal certificate for business leaders. Let's start with the e-discovery course. You can get more details about it in this storyfrom Law.com sister publication Legal Tech News. But the gist is that foreign lawyers increasingly need to understand U.S. discovery rules and e-discovery technology, and faculty at overseas law schools aren't necessarily in a great position to teach it. Thus, it makes sense for foreign law schools to partner with U.S. faculty to leverage their expertise. In Hamilton's case, he set up the course as a simulation do the Chinese students could see how discovery would occur in a cross-border case. Meanwhile.

Vanderbilt's new V-Legal Executive Certificate targets business professionals who would benefit from some basic knowledge about legal issues and how to work effectively with lawyers. The three courses are entirely online, and I'm thinking of this as a masters in “legal studies-lite” for professionals who don't want to spend the time and energy on a year-long masters program.

My thoughts: Both of these programs seem like smart moves. It appears that the market for international LL.M students is pretty saturated at this point, with so many U.S. law schools adding programs over the past decade. So why not look for ways to outsource faculty to foreign law schools to meet a growing need? As for Vanderbilt, they may have pinpointed a new market in busy professionals who need a relatively quick and accessible intro to the law. We'll have to wait and see how popular V-Legal turns out to be.

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Props To Virginia Law Weekly

OK, so this may not fall into the category of “need to know” news. But I want to give a shout out to Virginia Law Weekly, which is a weekly publication produced by students at the University of Virginia School of Law about campus goings on.UVA isn't the only law school to have a student-run paper, and I'm not saying that it necessarily the best. But last week's edition offered a delightful mix of updates on how students spent their summer and write-ups of notable speakers alongside an exhaustive rundown of LL.M.s attending a campus concert by the rapper T-Pain as well as well as the executive editor's critique of the Dandelion Parade—apparently a tradition in which 1L sections perform for upperclassmen with the winner getting the best seeding in the upcoming 1L softball tournament. (For the uninitiated, softball is a really big deal at UVA Law.)

This year's Dandelion Parade was marred with heavy rain, but the punny section names could not be washed out. (Think, “Beyond a Reasonable Out,” “C's and Desist,” and “Docket Like It's Hot.”) And I wouldn't know about any of this without the comprehensive coverage of Virginia Law Weekly. Bravo.

Extra Credit Reading

University of California, Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinskydiscussed the proposal to strip the name of John Boalt from the law school, after word surfaced of the 19th-century lawyer's racist campaign against Chinese immigrants.

The now-closed Charlotte School of Law and its parent company, InfiLaw Corp., have reached a $2.7 million preliminary settlement with former students who sued alleging fraud.

High tuition deters aspiring lawyers from applying to certain law school, right? No so, according to a new study that examined cost and enrollment trends. Turns out pricier schools are more popular, on the whole.

Law schools in the Carolinas closed up for much of last week amid Hurricane Florence. Some reopened today. The California bar exam will be studied yet again. AccessLex Institute has giventhe State Bar of California $515,000 to examine the skills lawyers use on the job and weigh how bar exam tests those skills.

Washington University in St. Louis School of Law is launching an institute on ethics, medicine and law in partnership with the university's medical school, thanks to a $5 million donation from alumni Joseph and Yvonne Cordell.

Thanks for reading Ahead of the Curve. I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]