Liz Ryan Cole
Faculty Directory

Liz Ryan Cole

Titles

  • Professor of Law Emerita

Degrees

  • JD, Boston University, 1973
  • BA, Oberlin College, 1968

Contact

Phone: 802-831-1240

Biography

Professor Liz Ryan Cole spent 37 years at Vermont Law specializing in clinical legal education and legal ethics. As founding director of the ground-breaking Semester in Practice, she designed the field placement course and taught and supervised full and part-time clinical externships all over the world. She is passionate about teaching professional responsibility using clinical methodology and actively supports adopters of her problem-based course book, Legal Ethics in the Practice of Law Legal Ethics in the Practice of Law, 5th ed. Zitrin, Casey and Cole.

Professor Cole studied at Oberlin College, (BA 1968), Boston University (JD 1973), Yale’s School of Organization and Management, and the National Training Labs (Bethel, Maine). She practiced law in San Jose, California from 1974 to 1977, both with Community Legal Services and as a partner in the firm of Katz, Cole and Beam; was the Legal Services Training and Advocacy Project’s training coordinator in New Haven, Connecticut, from 1978 to 1980, and the Legal Services Corporation Region II training coordinator from 1980 to 1983.

Professor Cole joined Vermont’s faculty in 1984 as both director of the Semester in Practice program and director of the Office of Career Services, but after seeing the conflict between the two positions, moved to the teaching side, both with the Semester in Practice and in the classroom. She also conducted workshops for lawyers and judges on improving their ability to give and receive feedback. She has been a trustee of Vermont Legal Aid and served on several committees for the Vermont Bar Association. She is particularly proud to have been a founder and first president of the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) and in 2002 received CLEA’s Outstanding Advocate for Clinical Legal Education Award. She is a member of the Global Alliance for Justice Education (GAJE) and pursues her interest in international collaboration across legal cultures whenever possible. She writes and speaks on legal education, including comparative and clinical legal education, legal ethics, and the training and supervision of law students and lawyers. Professor Cole is qualified to administer the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator© and uses this instrument often with students and lawyers as they improve their understanding of how they make decisions.

Since leaving teaching at Vermont in 2018, she has devoted herself full time to cohousing and other approaches to less expensive, sustainable housing in community. She is one of the owner/developers of Loch Lyme Lodge, Inc a cabin-based hospitality business which is the future home of Pinnacle Cohousing, a member of the Board of The Cohousing Association of the United States, and a member of Thetford, Vermont’s Planning Commission.

Expertise

  • Legal Education

Courses Taught

  • Independent Research Project
  • Interviewing and Counseling
  • Legal Profession