Saturday, November 26, 2011
NY Times Editorial: Legal Education Reform
American legal education is in crisis. The economic downturn has left many recent law graduates saddled with crushing student loans and bleak job prospects. The law schools have been targets of lawsuits by students and scrutiny from the United States Senate for alleged false advertising about potential jobs. Yet, at the same time, more and more Americans find that they cannot afford any kind of legal help.
Addressing these issues requires changing legal education and how the profession sees its responsibility to serve the public interest as well as clients. Some schools are moving in promising directions. The majority are still stuck in an outdated instructional and business model. ...
Instead of a curriculum taught largely through professors’ grilling of students about appellate cases, some schools are offering more apprentice-style learning in legal clinics and more courses that train students for their multiple future roles as advocates and counselors, negotiators and deal-shapers, and problem-solvers. ...
In American law schools, the choice is not between teaching legal theory or practice; the task is to teach useful legal ideas and skills in more effective ways. The case method has been the foundation of legal education for 140 years. Its premise was that students would learn legal reasoning by studying appellate rulings. That approach treated law as a form of science and as a source of truth.
That vision was dated by the 1920s. It was a relic by the 1960s. Law is now regarded as a means rather than an end, a tool for solving problems. In reforming themselves, law schools have the chance to help reinvigorate the legal profession and rebuild public confidence in what lawyers can provide.
- Paul Campos (Colorado), Brave New World
- Marc DeGirolami (St. John's), Instrumentalism?
- Brian Leiter (Chicago), The NY Times Jumps the Shark...
- Sandy Levinson (Texas), Reforming Legal Education
- Jason Mazzone (Brooklyn), An Invitation to the Editorial Board of The New York Times
- Larry Ribstein (Illinois), The NYT on Legal Education Again
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2011/11/ny-times--1.html
Nah. Mostly they just overcharge. A big library is expensive, but not that expensive. Law professors shouldn't be all that expensive, either. There's no expensive laboratory equipment, nor original researdch going on. Class sizes can be and usually are, relatively large. They need to charge tuition closer to cost, not what the market will bear.
They also chronically neglect clinical education. Its relatively expensive and plebian. Its also what makes law students lawyers.
Posted by: jim harper | Nov 27, 2011 6:13:05 PM