A View from the Flip Side: Using the Inverted Classroom to Enhance the Legal Information Literacy of the International LL.M. Student

Abstract

International students enrolled in LL.M. programs in U.S. law schools come to the programs with a wide variety of legal experience. As part of their introduction to U.S. law, students take a legal research course to prepare them to competently undertake the research necessary to complete a master’s thesis, and perform legal research in clinics, internships, externships, and U.S. law firms and legal departments. This article argues that the “flipped” classroom pedagogical model is a better model to use for developing legal information literacy in international LL.M. students than the traditional classroom model. In support of this, it presents the author's experiences in implementing the flipped classroom to teach legal research in an international graduate law program and offers offers guidance to others seeking to use the flipped classroom model to teach legal research.