Are Law Schools Relevant to the Future of Law?
Bill Henderson ponders whether law schools are preparing their students — or themselves — for the future. As with so much that Henderson writes, it's a must read for those concerned about legal education.
UPDATE: More from Blog Emperor Paul Caron here.
(I'm a computer science academic myself, and would hardly consider myself a major authority on the computer industry: what they do and what I do aren't really the same things at all.)
But outside of that, a bright person could take BAR/BRI and pass the bar exam without spending a day in law school.
There's no need to give up because perfection is unattainable, however. Updating Property and Contracts to be more realistic would be an excellent start, however. Civil Procedure and Torts are good models here-- I may never deal with those particular issues, but at least I learned some modern law and some of my classmates have. I sincerely doubt I even know any lawyers who have ever had to deal with a fee simple tail, or litigated the issue of whether a contract had consideration.
The schools would claim that the economy is exactly why tuition is going up. People are going back to school or staying in school rather than going out into the job market. Thus there is more competition for the available student slots and ability to pay is being used as one of the factors in deciding who to admit.
Makes perfect sense to me.
There is no need to change law school to be more relevent to the practice of law. It serves its purpose of being gate keepers quite well. Relevence is irrelevent.
The bill that will allow law students to have their loans forgiven will only make this worse. If the federal government conditioned loan forgiveness on partial reimbursement by law schools (ex. law schools must pay some of the loans if their students loans are to be forgiven), then the cost of tuition would stabilise and law schools would focus on ensuring that their students are employable and valuable to employees.
My alma mater, for all its faults, is at least attempting to address this issue head-on. Its practicum training (which I've never experienced except in small doses; I graduated before it was implemented) is designed to ensure that students learn not just to think like appellate judges, but to think like lawyers and to learn a bit about real-world lawyering.
On that note, anyone who has been through a science, engineering, or medical programme is aware that, although schools can hardly replicate the real world, they at least force their students to do things that prepare them for the work they will do when they graduate. While I know very little about other majors and schools, my guess is that even, say, a psychology major will be asked to run lab experiments and crunch numbers the way she would if she did research for a living. That law schools deem such basic training to be beneath them is inexcusable.
I agree with "Dave N" that learning to think like a lawyer was the most important part of law school in terms of relevance to practice. Two years of law school was more than enough for myself and most people I knew to pick up that skill. There were many courses that taught me practical legal skills as well as theoretical, but except for those that were relevant to my practice, the "practical" skills were just as impractical. In fairness the same thing could be said about some of the engineering courses I took for my first degree, even if I'd gone into practice what I learned in the nuclear engineering course would not have been to useful for most fields!
As an aside, as some here may not know, there are as I recall (from an ABA Journal article) 6 states that still allow someone to become a lawyer without having gone to law school (or doing only some law school, e.g. 1 year in New York) with the rest of the time spent studying under the supervision of a judge or lawyer. That includes New York and California. It's unusual, but some people do become lawyers that way and presumably do as good or bad a job as the average law school graduate...
I would certainly expect a doctorate in engineering or other hard science fields prepare the graduate to do something in the field.
BS level of course not so much, but that's not a fair comparison to a JD.
That idea seems to be making its way around legal circles these days.
Funny that you should say so. I think you've got it roughly backwards. In the sciences and engineering, a PhD prepares you to do research, not to practice as an engineer. In engineering, the BS is reasonably relevant towards a practical career: much of the coursework may be helpful for serving as a practitioner. The MS, even more so. But not the PhD. The PhD is most focused on preparing you to be a professor, or a researcher at an industry research lab, or equivalent. The PhD program places a lot of emphasis on teaching you how to do novel, publishable quality research. In the process, you may learn many saleable skills, but that's not the focus, and you'd be crazy to enter the PhD program if financials were your only consideration.
Cutting edge legal work is not something that can be taught in law school. It is done by people who are experts in their fields, not by law professors and novices. Law schools serve their function as they are currently set up. I haven't seen any new ideas adopted in legal education that were not just professors following the latest fad.
And as a litigator, I think the reason we see the issue so rarely is precisely because it's been hammered home in law school and the transactional lawyers don't make silly mistakes.
Other than that, the technology is the same as the 1960s. Why on earth has the cost gone up so much? Probably because the schools think they can get it, and up to now they could.
That's over, though, or at least it will be over when the dust settles.
There may come a time in my life when I have more money than sense and so give to my law school. I will be non compos mentis before my undergrad history or chemistry departments get a dime.
Then the theatre and music departments will have to raise money on their own. Whatever money I end up with, I'd rather give it to them anyway. Not women's studies, though, even though I am female.
1. There have been at least three recent and very expensive innovations: clinic, legal writing, and IT.
2. The bigger university generally drains much money away from law schools; if that were not done, there would be room for substantial tuition reduction (not that that would happen, of course).
3. The Socratic method is a wonderful way to teach large classes effectively. Unfortunately, it is under constant attack.
Capitalism? In a market economy, prices are set at what the market will bear, not at some pre-determined idea of what constitutes a "fair" markup above cost.
And I'm presuming more will be making that calculation on the basis of their own resources. In light of what has happened to retirement funds, I'm betting that fewer parents will be willing to pay private law school tuition for students who are technically adults.
Unlike medical schools, law schools seem to have room to make the product a lot cheaper if future legal salaries don't allow graduates to pay back big loans. And unlike the medical case, I doubt you'll get a public policy argument that we need to provide government funds to train more lawyers.
As someone who went to law school, I found the 3rd year to be a complete and expensive waste. Why don't they set the third year up more like med school - where you have rotations working for a judge, in a corporation, in a private firm, and maybe for a prosecutor or state defender's office? This would have to be set up through the law schools, and while each individual would have to interview to get specific jobs, everyone would graduate with some experience and contacts.
Also, don't get me started on the fact that career services offices in law schools have it backwards - they focus on getting the top 10% of the class jobs at big fancy firms, when the 10% will take care of itself. Career services need to devote more time and attention to the rest of the 90'% of the class, because those people will need to get good jobs too if the law school wants alumni donations to come back.
For some reason, I'm the exact opposite. It'll be a cold, cold day in Hades before my law school sees another dime out of me. Perhaps my mindset will change when I stop writing them a check every month, but I highly, highly doubt it.
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