Continuing Legal Education (ALI-ABA and ALI CLE)
The need to establish a permanent entity devoted to the continuing training of lawyers became apparent after the end of World War II, as young lawyers returning from years of military service overseas found that they needed refresher courses in the law. Furthermore, the huge complex of government regulations that had begun with the New Deal and had greatly expanded during the war years provided another impetus for the post-admission education of all lawyers, whether or not they were veterans. Therefore, in 1947, the American Bar Association (ABA) asked the American Law Institute (ALI) to undertake the first national program of post-admission continuing legal education (CLE) for practicing attorneys.
The governing bodies of ALI and ABA approved a Memorandum of Understanding in 1947 that created a "Committee on Continuing Education of the Bar of the American Law Institute Collaborating with the American Bar Association," comprising representatives from both organizations. Initial work focused on producing a series of CLE publications for a national audience and on encouraging and assisting state and local bar groups to establish and conduct their own programs of continuing legal education.
In the early years, ALI-ABA produced hundreds of live programs, and by 1958 brought CLE to communities in 44 states. ALI-ABA’s publications continued to flourish during this time and included the creation of handbooks spanning a range of subject areas. Ultimately, ALI-ABA became renowned for its extensive programming in practice areas including business/corporate, employee benefits, employment, environmental, estate planning, and real estate/land use law, as well as in ethics, skills, and law practice.
Over the years, ALI-ABA embraced new technologies and pioneered the delivery of CLE via satellite TV to a network of sites throughout the country hosted by state and local bar associations, law schools, and law firms. More recently, ALI-ABA added MP3 downloads to its delivery media that included live webcasts, online courses, on-demand electronic publications, DVDs, and telephone seminars. In addition to its national curriculum, ALI-ABA offered consulting, training, and accreditation assistance to law firms, corporate law departments, and government agencies for their in-house professional development programs. In 2010, ALI-ABA introduced the Knowledge Portal, a subscription-based, online legal content, research, and education resource designed to help attorneys balance their professional careers and become more efficient in their everyday practice.
On April 30, 2012, by mutual agreement, the American Bar Association and the American Law Institute chose to move forward separately in their CLE efforts, with the abundant intellectual content and cutting-edge technology of ALI-ABA being absorbed into the CLE group of ALI, now known as The American Law Institute Continuing Legal Education Group (ALI CLE.)
Today, the thousands of prominent lawyers, judges, and legal academics in the United States and abroad who taught and wrote for ALI-ABA continue to do so for ALI CLE.
Read more about this topic: American Law Institute
Famous quotes containing the words continuing, legal, education and/or ali:
“If the oarsmen of a fast-moving ship suddenly cease to row, the suspension of the driving force of the oars doesn’t prevent the vessel from continuing to move on its course. And with a speech it is much the same. After he has finished reciting the document, the speaker will still be able to maintain the same tone without a break, borrowing its momentum and impulse from the passage he has just read out.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn’t entirely conquer—he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.”
—Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1939)