David Binder ’56

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“Professor Binder set for us the very highest standards, both in terms of ethics and in terms of legal scholarship… He also stressed the importance of ascertaining and evaluating the client's real needs… I still use his client-centered approach to legal interviewing and counseling and have found it invaluable in my sole practice of law,” writes an accomplished family lawyer.

Over the years, students have described Binder's courses as the best in the law school. A truly innovative teacher, he has inspired many of his students to excel in legal careers calling directly upon the models he has developed to help them evaluate and critique their own work as lawyers. A former colleague observes, “In any fair account of the history of legal education, David Binder will be described as one of the four or five most influential law teachers of his generation.”

Binder's contributions in the area of teaching are four-fold: first, he has created an entirely new set of courses and a new methodology for law teaching; second, he implements that model in an extraordinarily effective manner for his students; third, he has had a significant impact both on the development of a corps of clinical law teachers and on educational policy decisions on a national level; and fourth, the amount of effort he devotes to teaching is truly extraordinary.

One of Binder's first year students observes, following class review of written assignments, "Professor Binder schedules a review session for each student on his or her own paper. Often, he suggests a rewrite followed by another individual review session. His office door is always open and before final exams, Binder announces week-long office hours to make himself available and helpful for any student questions."

The dean of the School of Law speaks to Binder's place among “many truly outstanding teachers on this extraordinarily strong teaching faculty.” He states that “None combines powerful innovation with the care for the individual student that David Binder has displayed throughout his near quarter of a century on the UCLA law faculty.”