Race to the Top

In the last few years, there’s been a fair amount of talk in the legal academy about how legal education ought to change, in part in response to the 2007 Carnegie Foundation report. Many assume that the report is a repeat of the familiar “law school should be more practical,” and to a certain extent that’s true. But it’s more nuanced than that.

One way to get the gist is to head to the website of the new law school at UC-Irvine, founded by noted constitutional law scholar Erwin Chemerinsky. The site summarizes its curriculum this way: “A cutting-edge, strongly interdisciplinary curriculum will prepare UC Irvine School of Law graduates not only to think like a lawyer but also to actually practice law.” UCI’s website also includes a key quote from the Carnegie report: “Most law schools give only casual attention to teaching students how to use legal thinking in the complexity of actual law practice. Unlike other professional education, most notably medical school, legal education typically pays relatively little attention to direct training in professional practice. The result is to prolong and reinforce the habits of thinking like a student rather than an apprentice practitioner, conveying the impression that lawyers are more like competitive scholars than attorneys engaged with the problems of clients.”

You can also read the executive summary of the Carnegie report here, but the highlights are: » Read the rest of this entry «

With the beginning of a new school year, and a new law professor hiring season, one might want to know the answer to this question. Specifically, I can imagine law-professor job candidates being asked the question: “Are you familiar with the Carnegie report on legal education, and how would it affect your approach to teaching?”  So I’d recommend you at least read the executive summary. Over at Concurring Opinions, Kathleen Boozang says that the report was greeted by a “big yawn” by most law professors, but she speculates that the collapse of the legal market could change that.

A recent National Law Journal article quotes Rod Smolla, the dean of Washington and Lee and architect of its new Carnegie-esque third-year curriculum, as saying “we are at a moment of historical change in legal education…When we look back at this period in five to 10 years, we will mark it as the time when the whole mission of law schools made a fundamental turn.”  In W and L’s third year, students learn “substantive” areas like family law or employment law through real and simulated cases where students act as lawyers and try to solve problems, not by reading appellate opinions, taking notes in class, and mushing it all into an outline at the end for a 3-hour typing race. More students opted into the new curriculum than expected, and applications there were up 33% this past year, with a survey indicating that the new curriculum played a role in many students’ decisions to go there.

Meanwhile, Martha Minow, the new dean of Harvard Law School, where the Langdellian method of teaching from appellate opinions was developed, has called for “another case method” closer to the one used in business and public-policy schools, and consistent with W and L’s approach and Carnegie. » Read the rest of this entry «

In this op-ed for the National Law Journal last year, “Legal Education Must Look Beyond the First Year,” UCLA Dean Michael Schill, soon to move to University of Chicago, talks about a theme I agree with: the consistency of schools doing sophisticated interdisciplinary research, and training lawyers in a rigorous way. He says:

For the first 20 years of my career as a legal academic, the pendulum of legal education swung strongly away from the “trade school” model of legal education toward interdisciplinary education and theory. The Carnegie Report suggests that, perhaps in our embrace of abstract theory, many law schools have neglected their principal obligation — teaching our students to be lawyers. As schools adjust their curricula, UCLA’s experience suggests that we be careful not to overreact. Deep interdisciplinary knowledge and mastery of theory can co-exist very well with increased specialization and practical skills development. Indeed, both sets of skills training reinforce each other, and only by embracing both will we produce the best possible legal professionals.

He and his team also made a terrific case for the strength of UCLA in educating lawyers in a piece, “How UCLA Law Trains Lawyers,” you can find here.

I have no reason to believe this orientation had much of anything to do with his hiring or his plans at U of C, but think it’s interesting that a school with a great reputation in interdisciplinary work (at least with one discipline), but less of one in clinical and skills education, has hired a dean who embraces both.

Sometimes I feel like it’s Bill Henderson’s world, and I’m just living in it and trying to help connect the dots. So when John McCain talks about “spreading the wealth,” I start thinking about distributive justice, specifically who gets what in the law schools that employ some of us, collect tuition from others, and ask still others for money every once in a while.

Our current system of no competition on educational quality among law schools, which I’m trying to help address with the Race to the Top project (download the Guide to the U.S. News survey), has serious consequences for distributive justice in law schools.

The first is how we allocate the scarce resources of admission slots and financial aid. I talked a bit about this yesterday, but the basic answer is LSAT scores, as Henderson recently demonstrated. Financial aid and fundraising priorities goes to buying LSAT scores to move up in the rankings, when it could be going to expanding loan repayment programs for public interest or government jobs, or any number of other priorities.

Now, competing for the best students through merit-based aid doesn’t sound so bad — a bit of a waste of money from a public-good perspective — but not terrible. Until you think about how merit is defined: test-taking speed, which is what the LSAT is about in large part. » Read the rest of this entry «