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Todd Peterson

Barbara Glesner FInes, Daisy Floyd, David Grenardo, Erika Pont, Jerome Organ, Neil Hamilton, Patrick Longan, Timothy Floyd, Todd Peterson

By the Numbers: The Holloran Center

By Barbara Glesner Fines, Rubey M. Hulen Professor of Law, Dean Emerita of UMKC School of Law

The occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Holloran Center provides an opportunity to review the Center’s twenty years by the numbers.

First, let’s just count heads at Holloran:

One. Neil Hamilton, whose interest and concern for professionalism and the development of ethical leaders has been the centerpiece of his work since the beginning of his career. A prodigious, thoughtful, humble, and generous scholar, his humility, wisdom, and collaborative spirit set the Center up for success from day one.

Two. Jerry Organ, with Neil, a founding member of the University of St Thomas School of Law. Also an influential scholar, Jerry has brought an indefatigable energy and a brilliant talent at convening and communication that ensured that the Holloran Center would never be a best kept secret.

Three. A magical number, that magic came together when Tom Holloran gave his time, talent, and treasure to ensure that the Holloran Center would have strength, stability, and impact. His spirit continues to animate it.

Four. By joining the Holloran leadership team, David Grenardo has broadened the focus and reach of professional identity formation. His scholarship’s focus on inclusivity and civility (not to mention his kindness and good humor) not only makes faculty want to be part of the Holloran Center mission, but also lets them know that they are welcome.

Five. Felicia Bennett, and Brady King before her, are the extraordinary assistants who have lent their own unique perspectives and skills to make sure that the Center gets the work done.

What happens when you add together a team like this? Addition becomes multiplication.

Let’s just consider publications.

Neil and Jerry have published eight books (and counting) that focus on some aspect of professional identity formation (PIF). Since then, at least fifteen other faculty members have published ten textbooks that also focus on this theme.

Neil, Jerry, and David have published over 120 law review articles, book chapters, or other academic monographs, not to mention over 100 blog posts, focusing on PIF. The multiplication is evident from a Lexis search identifying over four hundred law review articles that discuss professional identity formation; 139 of those have PIF in the title.

Then there are the Holloran Center’s workshops, conferences, and programs. By my count, over 300 faculty have attended a Holloran Center workshop. The leadership team also takes PIF on the road, with over 30 presentations annually at an alphabet soup of national and international organizations from pre-law advisors to the practicing bar and everywhere in between.

The consequence? Over 100 law schools have first-year required courses or programs on professional formation. With the passage of ABA accreditation standard 303(b) more will come, and they will look to the Holloran Center for leadership and guidance.

Three of the earliest of these law school programs prove how much impact on students this can mean:

The University of St. Thomas School of Law has a 1L course entitled “Serving Clients Well”. The program introduces students to the profession and its values and gets the students started on the law school’s Mentor Externship program. Serving Clients Well was started in 2018 with over 150 students having completed it each year. Many of these graduates have gone on to serve as mentors to the next generation of students in the program.

Another early example of a first-year PIF course can be found at Mercer Law in their 1L “Legal Profession” course, developed by Daisy Hurst Floyd, University Professor of Law and Ethical Formation; Patrick Longan, William Augustus Bootle Chair in Professionalism and Ethics; and Timothy Floyd, Tommy Malone Distinguished Chair in Trial Advocacy and Director of Experiential Education. The course was established in 2004 and is taught using Professors Floyd, Longan, & Floyd’s text, The Formation of Professional Identity: The Path from Student to Lawyer, now in its second edition. Mercer’s 1L class size has stayed consistent at about 150 students a year over those twenty years since the course was founded. That means about 3,000 Mercer graduates began their law school journey immersed in virtue ethics and reflection on what it means to be a lawyer.

This year the Holloran Center recognized George Washington Law School for its signature PIF program. GW established its Fundamentals of Lawyering program in 2019. The required 1L course integrates PIF principles and is taught by a team of faculty members led by its Director, Professor Iselin Gambert, and by Associate Directors Professor Anita Singh and Associate Professor Erika Pont. The Fundamentals Program is part of a comprehensive program including the school’s Inns of Court and Foundations of Practice programs, directed by Carville Dickinson Benson Research Professor Todd D. Peterson. These programs were conceived and planned in part through GW faculty attendance at multiple Holloran Center workshops. With GW’s average annual matriculation of about 600 first-year students, that adds up to 3,000 graduates impacted by the program to date.

Just these three courses, pioneered by leaders connected to the Holloran Center, have introduced over 7,500 students to the fundamental values of the profession and provided students opportunities for mentorship and reflection.

The Holloran Center’s broader impact shows that educational change does not happen because of one article or one speech. It happens when scholars name an important idea, develop it repeatedly, support it with evidence, build organizations and tools around it, bring other people into the work, and stay with it long enough for the idea to move from innovation to best practice. It happens when no one person owns an idea and early entrants are flexible enough to support and encourage the broadening of their ideas. It shows that real reform in legal education is not only intellectual. It is strategic, collaborative, and persistent.

The numbers make it clear that in twenty years of leadership, the Holloran Center has embodied the twin values of PIF: a continual striving for growth and excellence, and a deeply embedded value of service in ever widening circles.

Congratulations to the Holloran Center and to the hundreds of faculty, staff, students, attorneys, and judges who count themselves part of this extraordinary organization.

May 20, 2026 by hami3258

Felicia Bennett, Todd Peterson

Holloran Center Signature Program Award to be Presented to GW Law for their First Year PIF Experience

By Felicia Bennett

On April 25, 2026, at the First Annual Holloran Center Conference and Law Journal Symposium, the George Washington University Law School will be honored with the Holloran Center Professional Identity Formation Signature Program Award for their three-part 1L professional formation experience.

The upcoming conference will convene scholars, educators, and practitioners committed to advancing professional identity formation in legal education—and GW Law’s integrated first-year model has been selected as a leading example of that work in action.

The award recognizes GW Law’s comprehensive 1L professional identity formation programming, which is composed of three complementary initiatives:

Fundamentals of Lawyering: A required two-semester course which introduces legal analysis and writing, communication and interpersonal skills, and professionalism through the lens of PIF and using experiential learning opportunities.
The Inns of Court Program: Small, structured community groups that support connection, critical skills development, and individualized career exploration.
Foundations of Practice: A voluntary (and heavily attended) program that includes workshops, one-on-one conferences with different support areas, and informational interviews.

Together, these programs embed professional identity formation across the entire first year—placing students “in role” as client-centered advocates, surrounding them with faculty and practitioner mentors, and guiding them through structured reflection on values, professionalism, wellbeing, and career purpose. At GW Law, identity formation is woven into skills training, community building, and career development, ensuring students begin law school with a shared vocabulary and framework for ethical, intentional practice.

This work aligns closely with the Holloran Center’s mission to advance innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to forming law students and practicing lawyers into ethical leaders in their communities. As the Center continues to shape the national movement toward greater intentionality in professional formation, GW Law’s model demonstrates how a law school can take concrete, scalable steps to foster each student’s growth in competence, autonomy, integrity, and service. The April 25 conference and symposium will celebrate not only this achievement, but also the broader commitment across legal education to cultivating purposeful, reflective professionals for the future of the profession.

March 16, 2026 by hami3258

Todd Peterson

The George Washington University Inns of Court and Foundations of Practice Programs

By: Todd David Peterson, Professor of Law and Carville Dickinson Benson Research Professor, The George Washington University Law School

This blog provides an overview of the George Washington University Law School (GW Law) Inns of Court and Foundations of Practice programs, which form the voluntary half of our 1L professional identity curriculum.[1] First, I will provide some history on the programs, and then I will briefly describe the linked PDF [2] of the materials, which we provided to our Inn advisors this year. The Inn advisors’ material contains everything you might need to know about the program in general and how professional identity formation (PIF) is infused into the program.

The Inns of Court program, recipient of the 2018 E. Smythe Gambrell Professionalism Award presented by the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Professionalism, began in 2012 with five day-section Inns and one evening section Inn. In 2023 we added an Inn for LL.M students (which will not be covered in this post), and this year we added a sixth day-section Inn to reduce the size of the largest Inns. Each Inn corresponds to a teaching section, so the members of an Inn will have all their 1L classes with the others in their Inn. Each Inn has a set of advisors from virtually every part of the law school, including doctrinal faculty, Fundamentals of Lawyering faculty, clinical faculty, and representatives from the Dean of Students office, the Career Development Office, and the library. In addition, each Inn has 5-6 upper-level student advisors. The Inns meet once a week with all the advisors in attendance and participating as coaches in the interactive parts of the program.

The Foundations of Practice program began in 2016 to encourage participation in the Inns programs and other activities that are related to PIF and the development of important legal skills. This program provides a list of activities that are important to students’ professional development. Students who complete the Foundations requirements by the end of their 1L year receive the Dean’s Professional Development Award. Although this program is voluntary, at this point, a little over half of the 1L class typically earns the Dean’s Award.

We provide the materials in the PDF to all of our Inn advisors to prepare them to participate in the Inns program and assist our students with the weekly Inns sessions. Here are the individual components of the PDF:

(1) The first document is a two-page description of the Inns of Court program, which goes into a little more detail than my description above.

(2) The second document is a brief description of the learning objectives we have for the students who participate in the Inns program. This goes to all 1L students in addition to the Inn advisors.

(3) The third document is a description of the seals for each Inn of Court. GW Law is a very large law school, with over 500 students in the 1L class. The Inns program is designed, in part, to give them a smaller community within the law school. We designed the Inn seals to further that sense of identity and connection to their Inn’s community. We build on that by giving the students tee shirts, tote bags and other items with their Inn’s seal on them. Our students show a surprisingly strong connection to their Inn’s namesake and their Inn identity.

(4) The fourth document is a letter from the Dean that goes out to all 1L students at the beginning of the school year. In addition to informing the students about the Dean’s Award and encouraging them to participate, the letter also sets forth the specific requirements for the Dean’s Award. Students then log their completion of the program elements in an online app called FoundationsTrax, which also gives them a dashboard that shows what they have completed and what remains to be done to receive the Dean’s Award.

(5) The fifth document is a chart listing all our Inn advisors for this school year, along with their institutional role. Our goal, as noted above, is for each Inn to have advisors from all parts of the law school.

(6) The sixth document is a memorandum from me to all Inn advisors, which explains the concepts that form the core of the Inns program — professional identity formation and self-direction — and offers tips on how Inn advisors can support students with respect to these concepts. The attachments to the memo include Neil Hamilton’s (Co-Director of the Holloran Center at the University of St. Thomas School of Law) chart of the four stages of self-directed learning and a list of the questions that form our online self-directedness assessment, which students can use to determine how far along the development curve they are.

(7) The seventh document is a memorandum we provide to our upper-level student Inn advisors on how to be meaningful contributors to the Inns program. This document includes ideas about how to contribute to the individual sessions we have during the fall semester.

(8) The eighth document is a brief description of our fall Inns of Court sessions. At some point, I will do additional blog posts that go into these sessions in more detail.

(9) The ninth document is a memo for Inn advisors drafted by the former Director of the Fundamentals of Lawyering program about how to lead small group discussions.

(10) The tenth and final document is a description of the Inns Professional Development Advisory Council, which is made up of professional development experts at law firms, the government and public interest groups. The composition of the Council has changed over time as the members cycle on and off. This group advises the Inns leadership on how we can improve the Inns program and what new session topics would benefit our students. The members also lead some of the programs during the year.

If you have any questions or comments about our Inns program or this post, then please feel free to contact me at tpeter@law.gwu.edu.

[1] The other half of our 1L professional identity formation curriculum is a mandatory 1L course titled Fundamentals of Lawyering. This course was created in 2019 by adding a credit to each semester of the 1L legal research and writing class. The additional credit hours were used to focus on professional identity formation and create a client-centered environment in which to teach research and writing skills.
[2] Please note that you must click once on the link and then on the thumbnail to open the full PDF.

Todd Peterson is a Professor of Law and the Carville Dickinson Benson Research Professor at the George Washington University Law School. He teaches Civil Procedure, Law of Separation of Powers, and Professional Identity Formation. He is also the Director of the GW Law Inns of Court and Foundations of Practice programs, which focus on professional identity formation.

September 23, 2024 by hami3258