Clark D. Cunningham
W. Lee Burge Chair of Law and Ethics; Professor of Law Center for Access to Justice, Legal Analytics & Innovation Initiative, National Institute for Teaching Ethics and Professionalism- Education
A.B., summa cum laude, 1975, Dartmouth College; Senior Fellow, concentrations in English literature, medieval studies, and anthropology
J.D., summa cum laude, 1981, Wayne State University
- Specializations
Clinical & Experiential Education
Constitutional Law
Criminal Law & Procedure
- Biography
Clark D. Cunningham, professor of law and the inaugural holder of the W. Lee Burge Chair in Law & Ethics, is the director of the National Institute for Teaching Ethics & Professionalism, a consortium of ethics centers at six universities, and the co-editor of the International Forum on Teaching Legal Ethics & Professionalism. He is one of the world’s leading experts on teaching legal ethics and on reform in legal education.
He designed and teaches two innovative courses that provide an accelerated transition to practice by teaching fundamental knowledge, skills and values needed to begin a legal career in a wide variety of settings: Fundamentals of Law Practice and Transition to Practice. In both courses, students appear in Superior Court representing domestic violence victims in civil protection order proceedings and do fieldwork with a private attorney working in a practice area of interest to them. He also teaches The Client Relationship, which satisfies the professional responsibility requirement.
Cunningham has published more than 40 articles and book chapters, often drawing on interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives. His article in the Iowa Law Review, applying semantics to analyze the ways the meaning of "search" has evolved in U.S. constitutional law, won the national Scholarly Papers Competition sponsored by the Association of American Law Schools. "Plain Meaning and Hard Cases," published in the Yale Law Journal and co-written with three linguists, was cited by the Supreme Court in deciding several cases analyzed in the article and has been described by Justice Ruth Ginsburg as the kind of scholarship judges value. He has also published in the Harvard Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal and Michigan Law Review (1999 and 1989).
Cunningham is a member of the advisory board for the Academic and Professional Development Committee of the International Bar Association, having previously served as vice chair (research) for a two-year term. He is a founder and former convenor of the Global Alliance for Justice Education, an international organization of more than 700 law teachers, lawyers and leaders of nongovernmental organizations from more than 50 countries.
He is a member of the Chief Justice of Georgia's Commission on Professionalism, served on the Fulton County Criminal Justice Blue Ribbon Commission and was co-reporter to Georgia's Commission on Indigent Defense. He has served as an expert on legal ethics in a number of major cases and has been appointed as a special master by the Georgia Supreme Court to adjudicate lawyer discipline cases.
Cunningham has been an activist for social justice his entire career, beginning in 1975 as a community organizer in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Detroit, where he continued to live and work until 1987. After a career as a legal aid and civil rights lawyer, he began full time teaching at the University of Michigan Law School in 1987.
From 1989-2002, Cunningham taught at Washington University in St. Louis, where he directed the Urban Law Clinic and the Criminal Justice Clinic. He has litigated a number of federal class action law suits, argued before the Missouri Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and written friend-of-the-court briefs filed in the Michigan Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court.
- Publications
Book Chapters
Clark D. Cunningham, Learning Professional Responsibility, in Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World 280 (Deborah Maranville, et al., eds. 2015).
Clark D. Cunningham & Charlotte Alexander, Developing Professional Judgment: Law School Innovations in Response to the Carnegie Foundation's Critique of American Legal Education, in The Ethics Project in Legal Education (Routledge, 2011).
Clark D. Cunningham, The World’s Most Powerful Court: Finding the Roots of India’s Public Interest Litigation Revolution in the Hussainara Khatoon Prisoners Case, in Liberty, Equality and Justice: Struggles for a New Social Order (S.P Sathe ed., EBC Publishing, 2003).
Clark D. Cunningham, Affirmative Action: Comparative Policies and Controversies, in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Neil J. Smelser & Paul B. Baltes eds., Elsevier, 2002).
Clark D. Cunningham, Legal Ethics in a Gandhian Perspective, in The Gandhian Model of Development and World Peace (Rameshwar Prasad Misra ed., Concept Pub. Co., 1989).
Articles
Clark D. Cunningham & Ute Romer-Barron, Applied Corpus Linguistics and Legal Interpretation: A Rapidly Developing Field of Interdisciplinary Scholarship, 4 Applied Corpus Linguistics 100080 (2024).
Muriel J. Bebeau, Stephen J. Thoma, & Clark D. Cunningham, Educational Programs for Professional Identity Formation: The Role of Social Science Research, 68 Mercer L. Rev. 591 (2017).
Clark D. Cunningham, Supreme Court of Georgia Dramatically Expands Student Practice, Ga. B.J., Feb. 2016, at 50.
Tom Campbell, et al., Panel 2: "Finding a Better Way to Teach", 17 Chap. L. Rev. 173 (2013).
Clark D. Cunningham, What Do Clients Want From Their Lawyers?, 2013 J. Disp. Resol. 143 (2013).
Clark D. Cunningham, Should American Law Schools Continue to Graduate Lawyers Whom Clients Consider Worthless?, 70 Md. L. Rev. 499 (2011).
Clark D. Cunningham & Charlotte S. Alexander, The National Institute for Teaching Ethics & Professionalism, Ga. Bar J., Dec. 2009, at 68.
Clark D. Cunningham, "How Can We Give Up Our Child?" A Practice-Based Approach to Teaching Legal Ethics, 42 L. Tchr. 312 (2008).
Clark D. Cunningham, Karen Barton, Gregory Todd Jones & Paul Maharg, Valuing What Clients Think: Standardized Clients and the Assessment of Communicative Competence, 13 Clin. L. Rev. 1 (2006) , reprinted in New Currents of Law School Education 131 (Kwansei Gakuin University Press 2009).
Clark D. Cunningham, Book Review, 16 Law & Pol. Book Rev. 226 (2006) (reviewing Austin Sarat & Stuart Scheingold, The Worlds Cause Lawyers Make: Structure and Agency in Legal Practice (2005)).
Clark D. Cunningham, Rethinking the Licensing of New Attorneys: An Exploration of Alternatives to the Bar Exam, 20 Ga. St. U. L. Rev. xv (2003-2004).
Clark D. Cunningham & Brenda Sims Blackwell, Taking the Punishment Out of the Process: From Substantive Criminal Justice through Procedural Justice to Restorative Justice, 67 Law & Contemp. Probs. 59 (2004).
Clark D. Cunningham, How to Explain Confidentiality?, 9 Clin. L. Rev. 579 (2003).
Clark D. Cunningham, Lessons on Affirmative Action from India, 1 The Subcontinental: A J. S. Asian Am. Pol. Identity 51 (2003).
Clark D. Cunningham, But What is Their Story?, 52 Emory L.J. 1147 (2003).
Adrian Evans & Clark D. Cunningham, Specialty Certification as an Incentive for Increased Professionalism: Lessons from Other Disciplines and Countries, 54 S.C. L. Rev. 987 (2003) (reprinted in 9 N.C. St. B. J., Winter 2004, at 26).
Clark D. Cunningham, Glenn C. Loury & John David Skrentny, Passing Strict Scrutiny: Using Social Science to Design Affirmative Action Programs, 90 Georgetown L.J. 835 (2002).
Clark D. Cunningham & N. R. Madhava Menon, Race, Class, Caste...? Rethinking Affirmative Action, 97 Mich. L. Rev. 1296 (1999).
Clark D. Cunningham, Affirmative Action: India's Example, 4 C.R. J. 22 (1999).
Clark D. Cunningham, Rethinking Equality in the Global Society, 75 Wash. U. L.Q. 1561 (1997).
Clark D. Cunningham, Bringing Linguistics into Judicial Decision-Making, 2 Forensic Linguistics: Int'l J. Speech, Language, & L. 81 (1995).
Clark D. Cunningham, What is Meaning in a Legal Text?, 73 Wash. U. L.Q. 800 (1995).
Clark D. Cunningham, Learning From Law Students: A Socratic Approach to Law and Literature?, 63 U. Cinn. L. Rev. 195 (1994).
Clark D. Cunningham, Book Review, Plain Meaning and Hard Cases, 103 Yale L.J. 1561 (1994) (reviewing Lawrence M. Solan, the Language of Judges (1993)).
Clark D. Cunningham, Book Review, Sometimes You Can’t Make a Dent, But They Know You’ve Been There: The Lawyer as God’s Witness, 106 Harv. L. Rev. 1962 (1993) (reviewing Milner S. Ball, the Word and the Law (1993)).
Clark D. Cunningham, The Lawyer as Translator, Representation as Text: Towards an Ethnography of Legal Discourse, 77 Cornell L. Rev. 1298 (1992).
Clark D. Cunningham, Why American Lawyers Should Go to India: Retracing Galanter's Intellectual Odyssey, 16 L. & Soc. Inquiry 777 (1991).
Clark D. Cunningham, A Tale of Two Clients: Thinking About Law as Language, 87 Mich. L. Rev. 2459 (1989) , reprinted in Clinical Anthology: Readings for Live-Client Clinics 358 (2d ed., Alex J. Hurder, et al., eds. 2011)).
Clark D. Cunningham, Professional Responsibility, 34 Wayne L. Rev. 1005 (1988).
Clark D. Cunningham, Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court of India: A Study in Light of the American Experience, 29 J. Indian L. Inst. 494 (1987).
Popular Press
Unpublished Papers