Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
- John Steinbeck
Recently, the Yale Law School Sterling Professors wrote a letter to the ABA in response to the proposed requirement for fifteen hours of experiential learning in the law school curriculum. The arguments for and against this are pretty clear, and the point of this post is not to debate those issues again.
No, this post is about the letter itself and its authors, a microcosm of the wider problems with legal education. Aside from the obvious “we must be right because we’re more prestigious than you” tone of the entire document, highlighting the title “Sterling Professors” (which even they have to explain at the bottom of the last page - it’s evidently the endowed chair for the most distinguished professors, far too prestigious to be wrong they imply), yet another example of law professors and their incessant reliance on credentials rather than merits when determining who to listen to – the letter is little more than the legal education one percent trying to convince the “poor” low-ranked schools that they too can be prestigious if only they refuse to teach law in a practical manner.
Much of what is wrong with the entire legal education system in the US is the inexplicable desire for prestige; the rankings, the fudged stats, the huge expenditures on bigger libraries and fancier wood-paneled hallways, the art collections, the hiring of professors based on their prestige rather than skills as educators, listening to only the most prestigious voices etc. The list goes on and on. If Harvard and Yale do it, then every law school wants to do it. If Harvard and Yale students need it, then every law school thinks they also need it. Law schools never look down; they always look up, right at the shining sun that is Yale. And they’re becoming blind.
For example, one unfortunate consequence of looking up is that every law school still follows the “case method” of teaching law. Developed at Harvard by Christopher Columbus Langdell, students learn the law through a combination of reading judicial opinions and Socratic questioning from a wise professor. And for smart kids, this works well. Once upon a time, law students were generally a smart bunch. These days, it’s generally only those at the top schools who are truly intellectually gifted. For today’s average law school, trying to act like Harvard and Yale is bad news for the students; it’s an ineffective, expensive, inefficient way of developing the kind of legal mind and skillset needed for the average law student.
But the Sterling Professors are right: “Law students have varied talents, interests, and professional goals. It is true that the majority of law students become practicing attorneys, but many graduates prefer to use their legal education for work in business, government, or academia. No one curriculum could possibly prepare students equally well for all these different paths.” And they are right in that other classes would have to be dropped in order to make room in the curriculum for the fifteen hours of experiential learning: “Which of our enrichment courses should be slighted – jurisprudence, legal history, comparative law, our range of constitutional law seminars?” They are absolutely right that any forced experiential learning would harm their students. But they are right only for those students at Yale, Harvard, and a handful of other top law schools where the students are smart enough to write well by default, bright enough to pick up the ins and outs of practice quickly and independently, privileged enough to never really need to get dirty in a street-level legal practice, and who generally don’t have to have their hands held through the most basic academic tasks.
And therein lies the problem. The top law schools are so used to having every one of the other couple of hundred law schools in the US blindly follow their lead in a never-ending chase for a share of the prestige pie that they forget that law schools like Yale and Harvard are exceptions, a very small minority of schools, yet they speak as if they know what is best for all law students. Harvard and Yale are, mathematically, just one percent of all law schools.
If the Sterling Professors – and all law professors who purport to speak on behalf of the legal education establishment – would bother to look down at what’s actually happening in the legal profession as a whole, they’d see the terrible mess that is the bottom hundred law schools with their dismal employment prospects, unprepared grads, huge student debt burdens, and utter failure as institutions of higher education. The Sterling Professors would instead be asking for thirty hours of experiential learning, and I suspect they’d also call for the closure, or at the very least the disaccreditation, of the bottom fifty law schools.
But don’t worry; the Sterling Professors don’t look down. They don’t want to dirty their eyes with such a sight. And the low-ranked law schools are too busy trying to become little Yales that they’ll do whatever the Sterling Professors ask them to do, whether or not it actually benefits their own students.
A challenge to professors at any of the bottom hundred law schools: go into the library, walk up to any of your vast and expensive collection of bound journals, and pull out a random copy. Look carefully at it. Has it ever been opened? Ever? I didn’t think so. Try another one. Same result? (Yes.) Now stroll over to some of your expensive tax books and see how pristine they are too. The securities section will yield the same result, as will the court reporters. Then try the state code of a state other than your own. Now go and ask the dean how much the library budget was that year. Shocking, huh?
At Yale, all of those books might show some wear and tear. That’s their style: research, reading, writing, a more cerebral approach to law, because that suits their students. Your style isn’t anything close; your students aren’t going to be federal judges or partners at DC firms that have bona fide constitutional law practices. Your students aren’t going to be heads of departments in the DOJ, and they aren’t going to be professors or writers or academics. Your students are going to be divorce lawyers, residential real estate lawyers, immigration lawyers, lawyers who actually practice law, who get their hands dirty with real clients and real life issues. Your students are going to write wills for old people with no assets, represent college kids in traffic tickets and DUIs, and handle minor drug possession charges for the local stoners. So stop allowing Yale to determine how you should best teach your students. Stand up, speak out, and tell the Sterling Professors that they have absolutely no idea what is best for anyone in the real world of law.
Yale might need a huge library, but you don't. Yale might need expensive and prestigious facilities, but you don't. Yale might have professors who are scholars first and teachers second, but your students don't. Your students need cost-effective, practical education, not the McYales that most modern law schools have become.
Sterling Professors, here’s a suggestion for you too. Instead of imposing your own elite standards on the rest of the legal education establishment – all of whom have little use for your courses in jurisprudence, legal history, comparative law, and your range of constitutional law seminars, and who could use fifteen hours of learning to write wills, deal with traffic tickets, and handle uncontested divorces – perhaps you could just choose to not pursue ABA accreditation anymore? Let the ABA set common-sense standards for the other one hundred ninety lesser law schools, and if those standards are too pedestrian for you, too lowly, to practical, then don’t follow them. I expect there would be no danger of your graduates being unable to practice law – the bar admission standards in NY, DC and CA would be changed in a blink of an eye to accommodate your exceptional prestige, seeing as the elite schools set the rules for the profession in general. But stop trying to convince the vast majority of schools that what is best for Yale is also best for them.
Effective legal education never took root in America because the low-ranked schools see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed Yales.
- Charles Cooper
Charles Cooper is the author, along with Thane Messinger, of “Con Law: Avoiding...or Beating...the Scam of the Century (The Real Student's Guide to Law School and the Legal Profession)”, in addition to being the moderator at Nontradlaw.net and the author of “Later in Life Lawyers”. He can be contacted atcharlescooperauthor@gmail.com. Seriously, contact him. He doesn't bite!
- John Steinbeck
Recently, the Yale Law School Sterling Professors wrote a letter to the ABA in response to the proposed requirement for fifteen hours of experiential learning in the law school curriculum. The arguments for and against this are pretty clear, and the point of this post is not to debate those issues again.
No, this post is about the letter itself and its authors, a microcosm of the wider problems with legal education. Aside from the obvious “we must be right because we’re more prestigious than you” tone of the entire document, highlighting the title “Sterling Professors” (which even they have to explain at the bottom of the last page - it’s evidently the endowed chair for the most distinguished professors, far too prestigious to be wrong they imply), yet another example of law professors and their incessant reliance on credentials rather than merits when determining who to listen to – the letter is little more than the legal education one percent trying to convince the “poor” low-ranked schools that they too can be prestigious if only they refuse to teach law in a practical manner.
Much of what is wrong with the entire legal education system in the US is the inexplicable desire for prestige; the rankings, the fudged stats, the huge expenditures on bigger libraries and fancier wood-paneled hallways, the art collections, the hiring of professors based on their prestige rather than skills as educators, listening to only the most prestigious voices etc. The list goes on and on. If Harvard and Yale do it, then every law school wants to do it. If Harvard and Yale students need it, then every law school thinks they also need it. Law schools never look down; they always look up, right at the shining sun that is Yale. And they’re becoming blind.
For example, one unfortunate consequence of looking up is that every law school still follows the “case method” of teaching law. Developed at Harvard by Christopher Columbus Langdell, students learn the law through a combination of reading judicial opinions and Socratic questioning from a wise professor. And for smart kids, this works well. Once upon a time, law students were generally a smart bunch. These days, it’s generally only those at the top schools who are truly intellectually gifted. For today’s average law school, trying to act like Harvard and Yale is bad news for the students; it’s an ineffective, expensive, inefficient way of developing the kind of legal mind and skillset needed for the average law student.
But the Sterling Professors are right: “Law students have varied talents, interests, and professional goals. It is true that the majority of law students become practicing attorneys, but many graduates prefer to use their legal education for work in business, government, or academia. No one curriculum could possibly prepare students equally well for all these different paths.” And they are right in that other classes would have to be dropped in order to make room in the curriculum for the fifteen hours of experiential learning: “Which of our enrichment courses should be slighted – jurisprudence, legal history, comparative law, our range of constitutional law seminars?” They are absolutely right that any forced experiential learning would harm their students. But they are right only for those students at Yale, Harvard, and a handful of other top law schools where the students are smart enough to write well by default, bright enough to pick up the ins and outs of practice quickly and independently, privileged enough to never really need to get dirty in a street-level legal practice, and who generally don’t have to have their hands held through the most basic academic tasks.
And therein lies the problem. The top law schools are so used to having every one of the other couple of hundred law schools in the US blindly follow their lead in a never-ending chase for a share of the prestige pie that they forget that law schools like Yale and Harvard are exceptions, a very small minority of schools, yet they speak as if they know what is best for all law students. Harvard and Yale are, mathematically, just one percent of all law schools.
If the Sterling Professors – and all law professors who purport to speak on behalf of the legal education establishment – would bother to look down at what’s actually happening in the legal profession as a whole, they’d see the terrible mess that is the bottom hundred law schools with their dismal employment prospects, unprepared grads, huge student debt burdens, and utter failure as institutions of higher education. The Sterling Professors would instead be asking for thirty hours of experiential learning, and I suspect they’d also call for the closure, or at the very least the disaccreditation, of the bottom fifty law schools.
But don’t worry; the Sterling Professors don’t look down. They don’t want to dirty their eyes with such a sight. And the low-ranked law schools are too busy trying to become little Yales that they’ll do whatever the Sterling Professors ask them to do, whether or not it actually benefits their own students.
A challenge to professors at any of the bottom hundred law schools: go into the library, walk up to any of your vast and expensive collection of bound journals, and pull out a random copy. Look carefully at it. Has it ever been opened? Ever? I didn’t think so. Try another one. Same result? (Yes.) Now stroll over to some of your expensive tax books and see how pristine they are too. The securities section will yield the same result, as will the court reporters. Then try the state code of a state other than your own. Now go and ask the dean how much the library budget was that year. Shocking, huh?
At Yale, all of those books might show some wear and tear. That’s their style: research, reading, writing, a more cerebral approach to law, because that suits their students. Your style isn’t anything close; your students aren’t going to be federal judges or partners at DC firms that have bona fide constitutional law practices. Your students aren’t going to be heads of departments in the DOJ, and they aren’t going to be professors or writers or academics. Your students are going to be divorce lawyers, residential real estate lawyers, immigration lawyers, lawyers who actually practice law, who get their hands dirty with real clients and real life issues. Your students are going to write wills for old people with no assets, represent college kids in traffic tickets and DUIs, and handle minor drug possession charges for the local stoners. So stop allowing Yale to determine how you should best teach your students. Stand up, speak out, and tell the Sterling Professors that they have absolutely no idea what is best for anyone in the real world of law.
Yale might need a huge library, but you don't. Yale might need expensive and prestigious facilities, but you don't. Yale might have professors who are scholars first and teachers second, but your students don't. Your students need cost-effective, practical education, not the McYales that most modern law schools have become.
Sterling Professors, here’s a suggestion for you too. Instead of imposing your own elite standards on the rest of the legal education establishment – all of whom have little use for your courses in jurisprudence, legal history, comparative law, and your range of constitutional law seminars, and who could use fifteen hours of learning to write wills, deal with traffic tickets, and handle uncontested divorces – perhaps you could just choose to not pursue ABA accreditation anymore? Let the ABA set common-sense standards for the other one hundred ninety lesser law schools, and if those standards are too pedestrian for you, too lowly, to practical, then don’t follow them. I expect there would be no danger of your graduates being unable to practice law – the bar admission standards in NY, DC and CA would be changed in a blink of an eye to accommodate your exceptional prestige, seeing as the elite schools set the rules for the profession in general. But stop trying to convince the vast majority of schools that what is best for Yale is also best for them.
Effective legal education never took root in America because the low-ranked schools see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed Yales.
- Charles Cooper
Charles Cooper is the author, along with Thane Messinger, of “Con Law: Avoiding...or Beating...the Scam of the Century (The Real Student's Guide to Law School and the Legal Profession)”, in addition to being the moderator at Nontradlaw.net and the author of “Later in Life Lawyers”. He can be contacted atcharlescooperauthor@gmail.com. Seriously, contact him. He doesn't bite!
Truth be told, while I am a faithful supporter of the scamblog movement I think they have a point.
ReplyDeleteYes, they do have a point. It's one that benefits Yale though.
DeleteNow if, instead, their point was, "Yes, 15 hours of experiential learning should not be done in law school, so let's cut law school down by a year and then liaise with the ABA to have a one-year pre-licensure experience requirement," then I'd be absolutely in favor. Their point ended up being, "We think a course in international business law or one of twenty constitutional law seminars is more valuable to all law students than experience," which is really not the case.
What is good for Yale actually ends up being rather problematic for the majority of law schools which are not educating future Supreme Court justices, but instead educating the future 'back of the Yellow Pages" lawyers.
Legal education is not one-size-fits-all. If any size should be used as a template for all law schools today, it should be that which fits the average law student. If Yale wants to go all cerebral, then perhaps they would be better suited to running a school that churns out SJDs?
Today's average law student is unsuitable for law and never should have been admitted to law school anywhere.
DeleteSo...
ReplyDeleteI know you weren't really arguing the merits of requiring more experiential learning credits, but you sort of hinted at your position. Honestly, this "experiential learning" schtick that's floating around legal academia is complete BS. It's a band-aid on a gaping wound. I've had one of the "experiential-type-learning" courses and it was a complete and utter waste of time. I would much rather take my law-and-penguins seminar, because at least I can write a paper on a topic of my choosing and develop my writing skills. This is just yet another way for the deans to hide-the-ball, and to pretend that they're addressing systemic issues, which they in fact, are not. The problem, as I think you would probably agree, is that there are too many law schools, tuition is far too high, there aren't enough jobs, and there are too many graduating students each year (54ish% get full-time lawyer jobs post-graduation... that is NUTS for any profession... honestly it's embarrassing for the legal profession as a whole, and the ABA)
However, what you're getting at is something that is REALLY IMPORTANT. I've heard this on ATL and other places, but yes, there should ABSOLUTELY be some sort of bifurcation in the legal training world. We're not all training to be F&*^ing supreme court justices, or law professors. There should be divisions and tracks for certain levels of legal work so that you don't have to go through the same packaged, standard, three years of law school that as we know, really only works for T14 students, and that isn't even a sure thing anymore (also keep in mind that law only requires a bachelor's degree in most other countries...)!!!
In other countries there are different certifications and tracks depending on the legal services you will be providing. For people who aren't going to be in BIGLAW or fed. agency, or whatever else has traditionally been considered the big time, there should really be a shorter legal education program with apprenticeships for a year afterward.
It just doesn't make sense that all law students pay the same amount of money when it is a FACT that the vast majority won't be making *ANYWHERE NEAR* $160,000/year (and people making that amount of money are miserable anyway).
So, yes, bifurcation or some other division of legal education would be useful to save money, get people certified more quickly, and actually allow for more specialization. Another problem is the standard State licensing requirements which are also ridiculous. Unless you're practicing primarily state law it's literally a huge waste of time and money (bar fees, prep course, tehe... not to mention the market that's been created around preparing for the bar, wow $3,000 for a prep course, awesome... that's yet another issue for another time)..
What we SHOULDN'T SEE is the bifurcation in salaries, but that's a whole 'nother issue. If you look at salary distribution it's a nice downward facing curve (most people make around $50,000 and as salary increases, % of people receiving such salaries decrease) until you hit the BIG LEAGUES, and all of a sudden there's a spike, and a high percentage of people making BIGLAW money. That's why the average/median salaries for lawyers look HIGHER than they actually are... Believe me most lawyers are making like $50,000 (after paying $100-200,000 for a legal education, that's absolutely CRAZY).
Agreed. Law should, realistically, be an undergrad major with a two-year pre-licensure requirement. Minimum damage to students in terms of cost and time, and it still produces lawyers. For the higher academic study of law, there's no reason why Yale could not run a larger LLM or SJD program for those who really want to get that more intense academic experience.
DeleteI'm still torn on the experience requirement, to be honest. It would be difficult and expensive to implement in law schools (so Yale is right, but for the wrong reasons). The entire legal education system needs an overhaul. We need one bright state to say, "You know what? We'll make our state colleges teach law as an undergrad major, then we'll make our state bar accept grads of those programs who have undergone some kind of post-grad training in the practice of law." Problem solved. Other state would follow. In reality, how mobile are lawyers anyway? Most work in the state where they are educated.
Problem solved? Who is going to provide the training? Private employers? Already there are far too few jobs to go around, and they tend to go to the rich and well connected.
DeleteI'm OP 5:10am
DeleteYeah I'm with you with regard to experiential training. The thing is, if a program, such as you have suggested, is developed and implemented, the experiential training is taken care of in apprenticeship/internship.
And really, I learned what I know about lawyering from my summer internships... Everything else is theory, and concepts; useful of course, but there also tends to be a lot of fluff material professors "teach." Don't even get me started on the socratic method, and the abject failure that is American legal pedagogy. In the UK they have lecture-style classes, followed of course by required apprenticeship... Bar prep courses use lectures and conventional learning methods as well. Why is this NOT happening in law school. It's become a trial-by-fire, hazing extravaganza. People want to say Oh I survived law school... Those people are incredibly annoying. I digress...
It's gotta be a courageous school, most likely a state school, that can afford to say F everyone else, people will still come to our school to practice in this state, so we're going to try a different model. I think state schools would have to lead the way on destroying the JD and doing a 4 year Bachelor of Laws, where the first year maybe is general, whatever-you-want college courses, followed by 2 or 3 years of law-related "stuff." This then leads into the required internship/residency/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. Hopefully, the state legal market would then develop infrastructure around that and it'd be a nice example for other states to follow.
A school's ability "to try a different model" is limited by the ABA's requirements. By the way, it's also the ABA that requires La Toilette Law Skule of Bumblefuck, Delaware, to stock Montana's legislation in its library.
Delete9:44am, yes, private employers, government agencies, anywhere that employs lawyers.
DeleteIt's how it works in other countries.
The training isn't actually training. It's experience. Just like first and second year associates get now; in fact, almost exactly the same thing. All that happens is the pre-licensure associate must be supervised - again, basically what happens already - and at the end of the pre-license period the supervising attorney certifies that the trainee has performed x hours of supervised legal work in y areas of law. It is that simple.
Benefits: law school is reduced in length, training is done in the workplace (which it is already), and law firms should be all over this as they could pay the trainees half of what they pay them already. It would also put an end to the ridiculous shingle-hanging that many law grads engage in.
Don't fall into the trap of making the perfect be the enemy of the good. We need change. The current system is broken. The only unacceptable option is sticking with what we've got.
If the ABA pigs gave a damn about students or the general public, then they would permit or encourage law schools to hire adjunct professors. The men and women with actual legal practices on the side know what the hell they are talking about in their areas of law. They also have the best insights, and have a practical understanding of trends. Of course, in legal academia, these practictioners are relegated to the sidelines. After all, they are not real "scholars."
ReplyDeleteAnother solution that is so easy and cost-effective that I just don't understand why on earth it hasn't been implemented. I'm seriously not joking when I say that given a single day, anyone who has been following the law school scam over the past few years could solve the majority of the problems in a way that saves everyone money and which produces better lawyers. The barrier? Professors...
DeleteI learned more about the law and the practice of law as a law clerk in the year before law school, than I did during my three years in the institution. This was over 20 years ago, and I was lucky to be at a firm that hired college graduates (who intended to go to law school) as clerks and was truly interested in mentoring. These were old-old-old school attorneys who took professional responsibility seriously.
DeleteBased on my experience, I believe that rather than having adjuncts who are realistically limited to telling "war stories" the profession needs to seriously think about returning to a mentorship model (abolish law schools as professional finishing schools and create a PhD in law as a purely academic pursuit). Yeah, it's completely unrealistic but it would tend to limit the production of lawyers to what is necessary to service the needs of the public.
Over-production of lawyers, I believe, is the most pressing concern of the bar at this time. Having too many underemployed attorneys causes routine matters to be excessively litigated and allows inexperienced practitioners to provide substandard product. Creating a two-tier system exacerbates the problem.
For the good of the profession, standards (barriers to entry) need to be increased. So, I sort of agree with the "Sterling Professors" - make legal curriculum more rigorous and raise minimum qualifications for acceptance into the profession. If half or more of the law schools shutter, so be it. The ABA should be concerned with the quality of the profession, and its service to the public rather than the insular interests of its membership. There is a reason law is a profession, rather than merely a business.
"McYales."
ReplyDeleteOh snap!
I want mine with Harvardi cheese and Stanfries.
DeleteA: There are too many law students graduating every year. The market is horribly flooded.
ReplyDeleteB: Then, they need to be trained well.
Good point. I have no problem with people learning about the law - let's do it at the undergrad level though as a major. Then if half the grads don't get law jobs, no harm done. They're on the same playing field as every other humanities grad (and perhaps better positioned than many). They won't have wasted three important years of their early twenties, nor a couple of hundred grand of student loan money.
DeleteBy all means flood the market, but not with JD grads. BA grads would be a huge improvement.
Why "By all means flood the market..."? We need to encourage young people to acquire useful, marketable skills. Having young people get B.A. degrees in "Legal Studies" or some such thing is not a good solution to the law school problem. A useless B.A. does not do as much damage as a useless J.D., but it's still useless.
DeletePoor choice of words, but you figured out my point: a BA costs far less in money and time than a JD, so it's an immediate improvement.
DeleteBased on past performance, the market will always be flooded - that's the American Way. I'd love to see supply limited to demand, but that will never happen. We're a nation of dreamers. We can't stop people jumping off the cliff, but we can make sure they land in water rather than on the rocks.
I'd love for young people to pursue marketable skills too. It goes without saying that the best choice right now is to avoid law school altogether.
Excellent Post.
ReplyDeleteLaw schools are ill-equiped to provide any decent experiential courses without the ABA making monumental amendements to the current accreditation standards (not only the curriculum). The problem that law students are now facing is that all of the skills that previously were acquired in summer clerkship are no longer acquired by the overwhelming majority of students who failed to obtain clerkships. The ABA and law schools are attempting to fill this vacuum by offering more legal cliincs and now the proposed experiential learning courses. Clinics and experiential courses do not come close to the experience of working with seasoned, practicing attorneys in a legal office setting. It's fairly obvious that seasoned, experienced attorneys are needed in the classroom to teach these courses and until tenure requirements are dropped or amended to allow for non-tenure track and half-time adjuncts, it's not going to happen.
The other elephant in the room is that in the US unlike other countries, there is a complete disconnect between the bar and legal education. In almost every other country, in order to graduate from law school or to get a law license, you have to serve an internship with practicing attorneys. The stduents are paid little or nothing during these internships. It is a fundamental responsibility of a licensed professional to ensure that students entering the profession are properly trained by training at least some of them. While law schools are obviously graduating too many students who have debt that cannot in any way be justified by the legal market, in my opinion the scamblog movement lets off firms and practicing attorneys too lightly.
The Sterling Professors are fools. There are plenty of unemployed Yale law students who need the skills that are least addressed in the experiential courses. This is especially true as the academic market for Yale graduates will probably decline within the next 5 to 10 years since the new hires for most law schools will almost certainly have to have more practical experience than the current crop.
Have you ever practiced law? Do you even begin to grasp the risks that you would be running to take in a law student intern on anything other than your own terms? What good is an intern if you have to check all their work to make sure your Royal Canadian Ass isn't going to wind up in a malpractice suit? How will you get paid for the time you did that. I once took in a free (paid by the VA) intern. Her work product was worthless and in court she started chatting up one of an opponent's clients about the substance of the case. I'm doing this to make a living, not to make friends.
Delete9:09, many law firms hire interns over summer already. I don't think it would be a huge jump from summer internship to year-long internship. While the ABA and law schools would undoubtedly fight to make the requirements so difficult to understand and comply with that it would end up being impractical (because that makes financial sense for the ABA and the law schools), I can't see how a simple certification of substantive work completed during an internship year would be problematic.
Delete9:09, I'm 7:42. I'm also a US lawyer and have practiced for 30 years.
DeleteIdeally, a student would serve an internship for a semester. Practically, for the attorney, there should be no difference between a clerk and an intern. At Biglaw, firms pay law clerks far above their worth and the firms' attempts to pass this on to clients have been rejected. the firms' solution is to cut clerking poistions, largely because these firms consider every component of the firm as revenue producing. Again, I believe that attorneys have an obligation to engage in some training for the next generation of attorneys. Campos and others have labeled law as "tournament guild" but it really is more of a munera sine missione rather than any kind of guild as even in a tournament guild, those who made it would offer tutilage to those coming up in the ranks.
Charles Cooper is right though. Requiring an internship as part of legal education would never be possible in the current system as (1) it means law schools would go without a semester of tuition, and (2) it means that alw schools would be pressured to limit classes to the approximate number of internships available.
And as to the issue you raised about the risks of taking a "law student intern on anything other than your own terms," since this internship would be a requirement to graduate from law school and to sit for a bar exam, I think you would have the student's attention.
9:09 here, Charles and 9:59. I was once a summer associate and then went back to the firm after graduation. Summer associates are not about helping the next generation,they are a means of reducing risk in hiring by being able to evaluate potential associates over a summer. The firm gets a huge economic value out of summer associates by vetting them but would gain nothing from mentoring random law students. It would thus be a quantum leap to go to an internship program. 9:59, I don't know what you mean by "clerk" but small firms and solos cannot afford to give up seasoned staff in favor a new face once a year who has to be brought up to speed. If you can afford to do that then God be with you, but I got my own summer associate position on merit and proved myself worth hiring on merit. I realize things are different now, thirty years later, but it was the law schools and not I who made this mess. Let them clean it up.
Delete"Once upon a time, law students were generally a smart bunch."
ReplyDeleteThis statement says so much. May I make a slight amendation? "Once upon a time, law students were generally a smart bunch until the law school cartel decided selective standards were costing them millions in student loan dollars."
They lowered standards to the vanishing point while nonetheless continuing to promulgate the myth that law students are generally a smart bunch.
DeleteRare is the law school that will present itself as anything but a McYale. Indiana Tech Law Skule & Hot-Dog Stand perhaps came the closest when its scam-dean disparaged law schools' tendency to ape Harvard, thereby tacitly admitting that his toilet of a law skule was certainly no Harvard. But, really, can we expect a law school to advertise itself as a place where local practitioners in greasy overalls teach the nuts and bolts of writing wills (not really writing so much as adapting a template) and defending against traffic tickets? The law-school scam works by doing just the opposite: leading prospective students to believe that they are brilliant intellectuals destined for prominence and wealth.
DeleteAfter they do a multi-team expansion in a professional sports league you tend to see a dilution of talent as they have to redistribute the existing top players and bring in players who would never previously have made it to the big leagues. Eventually the population increases and the pool of talent from feeder systems like colleges and Canadian junior hockey gets big enough to provide a higher average ability again but the law schools expanded far faster than any sports league would ever consider prudent from a business standpoint.
DeleteFollowing 9:02, I would say that to really understand the law school scam, you would need an LLM in sports law. It's too bad that first-year students come in without the knowledge and reasoning ability that only an LLM can provide.
DeleteThe worst part of the entire debate at the ABA was the pretentious we're-the-best-of-the-best attitude of the Sterling Professors™.
ReplyDeleteAgreed. It reminded me of many other well-known law professors who like to wave their diplomas in front of their audience to cover up the utter lack of substance in what they have to offer.
DeleteHalfway through law school, I stopped using the title "Professor"; I switched to "Ms" and "Mr". I probably should have used first names instead, since most of Their Majesties did that to me (even though I was older than some of them).
DeleteI'm curious. If starting salaries for a Yale grad with no experience begins at $160,000/year (as is the notion), with yearly raises to, say, $350,000/year by Senior Associate rank five years later, is it a bad deal to spend $$$$ on "comparative law"? Especially if all this is followed by compensation package of partnership 8 years afterwards, ranging anywhere from $900k to $1.5MM (profit sharing and all). Seriously, on the whole, I agree with this assessment. Great article. I remember graduating, passing bar, first day on job thinking, "I have no idea what the F is going on... I spent three years in law school and nobody told me nothing..."
ReplyDeleteNo, it's no problem at all. For Yale.
DeleteThe problem arises when Yale tries to make the ABA do what is good for Yale students, and the other two hundred law schools follow suit and end up screwing their own students in the process.
It's the tail wagging the dog.
"Yale or fail."
ReplyDeleteWhether law school is 0% or 100% "experiential" education half the graduates will still not have jobs and few will ever make enough to pay off $160,000.00 in student loans. An older lawyer who was with a title company (after having been in biglaw) once said to me that based upon his observations of firms he had worked with over the decades I should consider myself lucky because no one was any longer getting the kind of training I got at firms in the 80's and 90's. The market had gotten so tough that in-depth training of associates was simply not possible if profitability was to be maintained. And among solos/small offices the old-timers would have some spare time to mentor newbies without fearing them as rivals. Eliminate the glut of lawyers and all would be well, but that won't happen anytime soon.
ReplyDeleteAgreed. I think the experiential learning requirement is window dressing. If it was important (which I think it is), then make law school an undergrad degree, or a two-year program at least, and make there be a pre-licensure experience requirement. This will go a long way to minimizing the losses for those grads who will never end up being lawyers.
DeleteIn my part of the country at vocational high schools they rotate freshmen through 80% - 100% of the shops for two weeks each and at the end of the year they pick one. Always seemed to me a tenuous basis on which to select a career but then there is probably no better way to do it. Similarly, if in a fifteen week semester you had to exposed to criminal litigation, civil litigation, real estate practice, bankruptcy, divorce, intellectual property, probate, anti-trust, tax law, estate planning, workers' comp, etc. you would get only a very cursory exposure to each. I just don't see it having much value. Just another manifestation of the "practice ready" gimmick to lure in more lemmings.
ReplyDeleteThe truth is that the lower ranked law schools chase HYS because it gets them a lot of prestige. A dean who moves up in the rankings gets rewarded by his school and by options to jump to new, higher paying jobs as Dean or President of UG schools. A professor wants to jump to higher ranked schools, get published in better journals. There's all sorts of justifications for this, but it really comes down to the fact that a lot of these people are by nature prestige whores.
ReplyDeleteIt isn't law schools that are at fault....other than for producing WAY too many graduates. Transforming or alternating the curriculum won't address the gross maket imbalance.
ReplyDeleteThere's no real need for any more lawyers, even if they are all educated at Harvard-level schools that require years of pre licensure internships
This is so true. Rearrange the deck chairs all you like, the name of the boat is still "Titanic".
DeleteImportant point, and I'm glad you brought it up.
DeleteThe absolute best option, far better than any curriculum reform or training requirements, is to shut half the current law schools. That insane imbalance between grads and jobs has to be addressed.
Of course, the Sterling Professors (and everyone other law professor) will never, ever admit this. Their jobs depend on them hiding this clear fact.
Absolutely...
DeleteThis idea that we need 200 law schools is absolutely ridiculous...
When 55 or 56% of graduates get full-time jobs that require bar passage 9 months after graduation, SCHOOLS NEED TO BE CLOSED.
The argument sometimes is that well, there are underserved areas, so even though they aren't getting jobs, they could be if they weren't so lazy and were willing to move to underserved areas.
So many problems with this... First of all, people in those areas probably don't have the money to pay for legal services. Second, graduates have the kind of debt that requires... GETTING PAID. Thus, there is no incentive or real capability to pick up and move to an "underserved" i.e., middle of nowhere, country town to provide legal services when you're $200,000 in debt, and there's no chance of making any money!
The fact is half of graduates don't get jobs.
Law schools need to close. It's really that simple.
ABA needs to say, X schools at the very bottom, hhmm, your placement numbers are horrible, we're taking away your accreditation. POOF! Problem solved.
It is really disgusting that the ABA hasn't simply addressed the issue of poor job placement in this most learned and wonderful, awesome, incredible and amazing profession. They're supposed to be protecting the prestige of the profession. How does it look when half your graduates can't find work and they're saddled with huge amounts of non-dischargable debt... How prestigious is that?
Oh I get it, it's not about being a responsible professional association, it's about saving face, and closing schools (pulling accreditation) would look bad. Oh ok. Wonderful.
" These days, it’s generally only those at the top schools who are truly intellectually gifted." A contradictory and mixed message. On the one hand, the argument is that the law school "rankings" have destroyed the profession because everybody is chasing "prestige", and yet you just insulted all but the students at the most prestigious institutions. Heck, if you are to be believed . . . then nobody should ever attend anything BUT the most prestigious lawschools, and law schools should do everything they can to be at the top of the heap. And your opinion about how only "smart" kids benefit from the Socratic method is completely nonsensical. Law is NOT rocket science. There is nothing in a case a reasonably intelligent person, i.e., most college graduates who go to law school . . should not be able to understand. Whether the Yalies are smarter than the rest of us has nothing to do with the rest of us NOT being able to benefit from the same methods of teaching. I read your book Charles. I went to an "average" law school, but I do not consider myself "average" by any means. I have yet to meet a lawyer from any school who I believe is superior in analyzing cases or making legal arguments. And why should I? None of us are performing brain surgery.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the comment needs more nuance. There are a few very intelligent people at some of the less prestigious law schools, and certainly there are many not-so-intelligent (even downright unintelligent) people at the prestigious law schools. But the comment is more accurate than not. Very intelligent people are exceptions at most law schools—and aren't all that common even at the most prestigious institutions. This fact deserves emphasis precisely because of the widespread equation of law school and brilliance—an equation that the law skules themselves are only too happy to promote.
DeleteThat said, I quite agree that only the most prestigious law schools these days are worth attending. Of course there are a few exceptions: by all means go to La Toilette if you are of independent means, for example, or if you just need to get any old JD in order to sail into a job at Daddy's law firm.
I have yet to meet a lawyer who considers himself "average."
DeleteI stand by what I wrote. If you're looking for truly smart people, you won't find them at a tier 2 law school. I went to one of those back in the day. I thought I was smart. Nah, turns out that I'm really not.
DeleteWay above average in terms of the general population perhaps, but for educated professionals? Average at best. Like almost every lawyer.
Insulting as that may be, most people grossly overestimate their own abilities.
That's not to say that average people can't make fine lawyers; law isn't rocket science. Hence the point of the post - we need to stop listening to people like the Sterling Professors who want to treat law like rocket science.
A more general point of my post was also that exceptions should never be used when making generalities. You may be a stellar grad of an average school, but let's not extrapolate that out to the odd conclusion that every average law school grad is smart and successful. That's the same problem as Yale defining what is best for all law schools.
As for attending only the top law schools? Absolutely! Nobody should willingly attend a law school ranked outside the top ten unless offered serious money, and attending a law school outside the top twenty-five is almost always a bad, bad idea.
Yes, indeed. Everyone and her goddamn goldfish deems herself brilliant these days. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.
DeleteAnd it's also true that law is not rocket science. (Indeed, even rocket science is not rocket science.) The exotic and sophisticated image of law that lawyers and others have cultivated is just more vanity.
I question the wisdom of attending even the "top" ten schools. Even Harvard and Yale are iffy choices.
"But they are right only for those students at Yale, Harvard, and a handful of other top law schools where the students are smart enough to write well by default, bright enough to pick up the ins and outs of practice quickly and independently, privileged enough to never really need to get dirty in a street-level legal practice, and who generally don’t have to have their hands held through the most basic academic tasks.". Something else Charles. Law Schools rely on LSATs and grades primarily for admission standards. So my cousin majored in basket weaving at a State School, got a 3.9 average, prepared for months for the LSAT got a respectable 160 plus LSAT and was admitted to a very top law school. So she is smarter than the B engineering student who did just as well on the LSAT with no preparation but ended up at a more average law school because his grades were not as good. You are simply too clueless to recognize you are insulting a whole bunch of people who don't deserve to be insulted and your message is likely therefore being ignored, except for the people who comment on these boards.
ReplyDeleteIt's not a question of insulting people. You are overreacting.
Deleteyou make a very good point, but, I think, even though the B-avg engineering student is in a lesser school, the fact of the matter is that Law is an incredibly prestige-fueled "profession." Regardless of his talent and ability (and lack of judgement shown in throwing away an ENG degree on a third tier law school), that ENG student will be funneled into a job that will benefit from the kind of thing Charles was talking about- Actual Practice, as opposed to training to be the next Thurgood Marshall. The message remains the same.
DeleteBut I bet that people in that situation do feel a bit insulted, as you say. I think that this really wasn't intentional on Charles' part and I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps because I agree w his message.
Claiming to train Thurgood Marshalls is exceedingly pretentious. Most law schools do not even train hack lawyers very effectively.
Delete12:56, the insult is intentional. In earlier drafts of this post, the insult was far more obvious and I toned it down for the final draft.
DeleteLaw schools are full of dummies. The guy with the 170 LSAT and the degree in basket weaving who gets admitted to Harvard (the Elle Woods) is smarter than the guy with the 160 LSAT and the degree in engineering if only for the simple fact that the engineer was too foolish to see how the game is played and as a result made a crazy choice to attend an average law school and throw away a career in engineering!
(For the record, the Elle Woodses of this world are few and far between. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that Harvard is full of basket weavers with high LSATs and average law schools are stuffed with engineers with lower LSATs.)
Anyone who attends a lower ranked law school today, unless their father is a partner in Biglaw or their mother is in charge of the family law firm, is an idiot. They might be book smart, but in no way can they claim to be smart by falling into the insane trap of the low ranked law schools.
Random, but, I had an engineering friend who was applying to law school the same time as me. I thought he was crazy, actually crazy. He had a stable job as an engineer with a good company, but he seemed to want something more...
DeleteAnyway, I went to law school, he didn't. Luckily I secured a job, only after applying non-stop 1L year for my unpaid summer internship (got 1 offer), and interviewing with every OCI employer I could remotely qualify for in Fall of 2l year (also, only got 1 job offer).
I'm a lucky one. Even then, I've lost 3 years of income, and since then he's been making money with his engineering gig.
All this to say, law might not be as awesome as you think... Don't leave a stable career for it. Once you're there, it's highly competitive and getting a job is a lot of work, really, quite a lot of work. It can be done, but definitely would NOT recommend it for someone with a promising career in another field who just wants some prestige which is ostensibly associated with the legal profession. I didn't have any career options so it sort of made sense for me.
Oh well, I just wish law schools would take law students' problems seriously and try to fix this mess...
From OP:
ReplyDelete"...go and ask the dean how much the library budget was that year. Shocking, huh?"
You know, other than study space or meeting space, why on Earth do we need massive stacks of physical books and the space to store them in this day and age?
All MOST law schools really need is some study or meeting space and a bunch of westlaw terminals! I mean sure there might be some obscure book that isn't in digital form but its pretty rare these days!
I wonder how many law students graduate without ever touching a book at the library.
DeleteBut why do these lesser-ranked schools still have these huge paper libraries, rather than switching to a mostly-digital or online format? Is this an ABA requirement forcing them to do this, is holding on to so many books seen as "prestigious", or some combination of the two?
ReplyDeleteYes, the ABA requires a large library, including (among other things) copies of all fifty states' codes.
DeleteWhy doesn't the ABA get rid of these antiquated requirements? Do they have some kind of secret deal with printing companies?
DeleteBecause of the McYale ideology. Students at Yale might well have occasion to look up statutes from Mississippi or Idaho; ergo, every McYale has to have those books on hand as well, since of course McYale's students are all brilliant (even those that didn't make the tenth percentile on the LSAT) and are likely to do appellate litigation and research into the law of distant jurisdictions and other things that happen at the real Yale.
DeleteI mean can't you get state law codes etc. on DVD-ROM, or online? Having to have so many physical books there seems unnecessary in this day and age.
DeleteLet me tell you about a McYale named Valparaiso. It commonly shortens its name to Valpo, no doubt because of the endearing similarity to the name of a brand of dog food.
ReplyDeleteSuppose that you were stupid enough to consider enrolling at Valpo and that you therefore wanted to assess your chances of admission. To check the median undergraduate GPA and the median LSAT score of the past entering class, you might try going to Valpo's Web site and clicking on "Prospective Students", then "Learn More about Valparaiso Law", then "2013 Entering Class Profile". You would find this self-aggrandising tripe:
http://www.valpo.edu/law/prospective-students/p-applying-to-valparaiso/p-whyvl/p-about-our-students/valparaiso-law-welcomes-the-class-of-2016
But no mention of GPAs or LSAT scores. For that information, you would have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the left-hand column and click on "ABA REQUIRED 509 DISCLOSURES". (Apparently they haven't yet heard of hyphens down at Valpo.) There you would read that "[t]he following consumer information has been identified by the American Bar Association as helpful to those considering a legal education at Valparaiso Law". There is a link to the "2013 Entering Class Profile" mentioned above. (Does the ABA really consider it helpful to prospective Valponians?) But the information that you seek is buried behind the uninviting link "2013 Standard 509 Report". Et voilà :
Median GPA: 3.00
Median LSAT score: 143
To understand just how bad 143 is, note that it is at the 20th percentile. Yes, the median Valponian is in the bottom fifth of all people who take the LSAT.
Oh, but who cares about a couple of silly numbers? Just sign these papers (you can use an X if necessary) and become a part of that precious little outpost of New Haven in northwestern Indiana.
(Thanks to Paul Campos for inspiring me to look these data up.)
That Valpo LSAT number is a disgrace. While we have (understandably) been focused on crashing enrollment numbers, I think another important story is the shocking decline in admissions standards at virtually all law schools outside of a few elite institutions. This trend should be setting off Def Con 1 alarm bells with the ABA given the implications it has for the future of the so called "profession." But the cowards say nothing.
DeleteTo put that Valpo median 143 LSAT score in perspective, at the punchline known as Indiana Tech Law School, the median LSAT for the 2013 entering class is 146. At Cooley, the number is 145. No wonder the bandits at Valpo tried to bury that number as deep as possible.
DeleteGood god, Indiana Tech Law Skule in its first year actually outdid another law skule in the same state, despite probably admitting every applicant or damn near.
DeleteI hereby demand a floor on LSAT scores for the purposes of admissions. No accredited (or even unaccredited) law school should be allowed to admit anyone below the 80th percentile (160) or, at the outside, the 70th percentile (157). That wouldn't solve every problem, of course, but it would be a start. Or accreditation could be made contingent upon a law school's maintaining a median LSAT score no lower than 160. Only 81 of the US's 202 or so law schools satisfy that criterion.
Reforming the law school cirriculum wholly misses the point. There are thousands and thousands of already experienced lawyers out there who are struggling to make a living.
ReplyDeleteEven if law school could give you a pill that could magically impart 10 years of experience, your ability to make a living (i.e., survive) in this market grows dimmer each passing year.
Law schools played a large part in creating this mess. Sadly, they are powerless to correct it in all but one way -- Close. Preferably before the end of this term.
One of the interesting things about the ABA accreditation changes is how they dodge the elephant in the room – employment. It is pretty clear that the ABA could make employment outcomes part of the accreditation standards it applies.
ReplyDeleteThe basic legislative authority for accreditation comes from 28 U.S.C. §1099b. One area addressed by section (5) of that statute is the evaluation criteria for accreditation,
(5) the standards for accreditation of the agency or association assess the institution's—
(A) success with respect to student achievement in relation to the institution's mission, which may include different standards for different institutions or programs, as established by the institution, including, as appropriate, consideration of State licensing examinations, consideration of course completion, and job placement rates;
All of this has been codified in the regulations at 34 CFR §602.16
§602.16 Accreditation and preaccreditation standards.
(a) The agency must demonstrate that it has standards for accreditation, and preaccreditation, if offered, that are sufficiently rigorous to ensure that the agency is a reliable authority regarding the quality of the education or training provided by the institutions or programs it accredits. The agency meets this requirement if-
(1) The agency's accreditation standards effectively address the quality of the institution or program in the following areas:
(i) Success with respect to student achievement in relation to the institution's mission, which may include different standards for different institutions or programs, as established by the institution, including, as appropriate, consideration of course completion, State licensing examination, and job placement rates.
Now this is pretty important because law schools keep raising antitrust as the reason why they cannot consider all sorts of issues in accreditation. But theNoerr-Penington doctrine provides that entities or individuals cannot be held liable for anticompetitive conduct that was required of them by law or regulation, even in a jurisdiction that did not impose the requirement. The doctrine finds its origin in two U.S. antitrust cases: Eastern R. Conf. v. Noerr Motors, 365 U.S. 127 (1961); and United Mine Workers v. Pennington, 381 U.S. 657 (1965).
What this means in practice is that the ABA could impose job placement standards on law schools – which would be catastrophic for many law schools, and it could make bar passage requirements very tough. Maybe it is time for everyone to start demanding that the ABA look at job placement as an accreditation criteria - and adopt a standard - say 80% Full Time Bar License Required after 9 months.
It is absolutely essential that the ABA consider employment outcomes in the accreditation process, especially in this market (Half of law school graduates don't become lawyers). That's how you responsibly represent and regulate a profession. It's immoral that so many schools are allowed to stay open and to basically lie to prospective students to get them to enroll.
DeleteIt's so sad. Fifty schools should be gone right now.
Some of the worst offenders include New York Law School, University of Baltimore Law, among others... Both of these schools have built big shiny new buildings while their graduates take on gigantic debt loads and struggle to find work.
Pull the accreditation!
Right on, 6:38 am. An accreditation pull would be euthanasia. The ABA should be willing to promptly enthanize a couple of dozen life-ruining schools and thus actually save lives. Oh, yeah. And save the profession, too.
DeleteInstead, we have desparate law schools extending their marketing to youth in Asia.
The bottom law schools are now well-diseased institutions, suffering from shriveling innards and withering organs. Their health will not improve. It cannot.
Yet rather than follow the humane approach of institutional euthansia, the public sits around watching to see the first law school collapse and die a slow, painful death. And unlike the poor innocent giraffe that was euthanized, the rotting carcass is unfit for consumption by any other beast.
Euthanize a dozen law schools during Spring Break 2014. Two dozen more by summer recess. And four dozen more over the summer break.
There will still be a few schools left to die a slow death in the fall of 2014.
Don't expect the ABA to do anything. After all, every law skule is a glorious Eden of brilliant students and important professors. Shut them down? Out of the question! The ABA is too busy drawing up the documents for Indiana Tech's accreditation.
Delete6:38 poster here.
DeleteYeah you'd hope they would just pull accreditation... If they don't, these schools have every incentive to try and stay alive, to turn a PROFIT for their dean/university/professors... This leads to a slow death like you suggest... May take years, and in the mean time, who suffers???
STUDENTS TRICKED INTO GOING BASED ON FALSELY REPRESENTED EMPLOYMENT NUMBERS and SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE DISEASE...
This is actually a sub-category of Noerr-Pennington called the Midcal rule, which provides that private persons such as the ABA are immune when a government has deputized them to restrain trade, so long as the deputizing is (1) clearly articulated and affirmatively expressed as state policy; and (2) the policy is ‘actively supervised by the State.
ReplyDeleteThe interesting thing is that a huge proportion of Noerr-Pennington cases involved ABA accreditation standards and the ABA won on this point again and again and again (and a slightly different argument that it was the state bars that required ABA accreditation and they too hadNoerr-Pennington/Midcal immunity. The only time the ABA lost the argument inter alia was when the law professors tried to sue the accreditation standards to set professors pay (which readers will note is not in the statute or regs. Consider what else is not in the statute or regs - scholarship or tenure....)
I stand by what I said too. It may well be true that it is dumb to go to law school today, but yalies are not so much smarter than the rest of us that only they understand the nuances of case law.
ReplyDeleteSure. But that part of my post was not saying that average law students can't understand the material via the case method. I wrote: "it’s an ineffective, expensive, inefficient way of developing the kind of legal mind and skillset needed for the average law student."
DeleteFor the average law grad, who will never ever argue an appeal, nor need to rely on much more than black letter law, teaching for three years via the case method is such a waste of time. Would it not be more efficient to spend the first year (if that) developing those skills, then the final two years covering the actual law they'll use rather than more case method frivolity?
Example: could a contracts class for the average student not be made far more effective by using actual contracts as templates and going through them line explaining the provisions and why they are there? It'll touch on the important theories, but it'll impart actual legal knowledge. Corporations? Same thing - look at formation docs, the underlying statutes, look at real bylaws and suchlike? Surely more effective and efficient for the average law student who will be performing average legal tasks in a law firm?
Fine, but people trained in that way probably should not be eligible for a full license to practice law. Set up multiple grades of licenses, comparable to those for medical practitioners (physician, physician's assistant) and drivers (ordinary automobile, bus, eighteen-wheel truck).
DeleteOkay, I'll go with that. Those lawyers trained at the "practical" law schools, who will know five times as much law as those trained using the case method, can have the full licenses and undertake the full range of litigation and transactional matters. Those from Yale and the schools that stick to the case method can have limited licenses to practice only appellate work until they have undergone two years of practical on-the-job training to get their knowledge of law to where it needs to be.
DeleteI see your point, and I'm being deliberately stubborn about it in my paragraph above, but using your medical equivalence, I would see the practically-trained lawyers as the MDs, and the case method trained lawyers as being the PhDs. I know who I'd want cutting me open. Sure, for a complex (and rare) case, I'd want the PhDs involved with their cutting edge medical science, but for the average surgery or visit to the doctor, I'd want the guy or gal who had the practical training, not the theory.
Read some of today's ATL articles....
ReplyDelete.... BigLaw layoffs, a father of a recent law-school graduate offers to pay an employer 10% of his son's starting salary, if someone will just HIRE the boy .... more layoffs, and more still. There's a whole meme about the stock picture used by the blog to introduce layoffs, called "Layoff Lady."
Hundreds of experienced, practice-hardened veterans are being laid off. There's no need for these people and most won't ever be rehired at anything like their former jobs.
Yet law schools still ramble on about "practice ready" and experiental learning, etc.
Give it up, law schools. You brought down the profession. God damn you.
The only way law schools can possibly help the profession and their students' futures at this late juncture is by closing their doors. This month. Before the 15th.
Better to have students arrive to a padlocked academy on Friday morning than to start out in a profession where they are shown the door about the time they're getting married and starting a family.
Who's the top of the law school death watch?
ReplyDeleteAmong ABA schools I say Vermont. Two huge strikes against them. First, there is no parent university. Second, their potential recruiting base of commuter students (trad and non-trad) is at best negligible. The independent TTTs in major cities have millions of people within commuting distance from which they can recruit fresh waves of lemmings and whole blizzards of special snowflakes.
Delete"Whole blizzards of special snowflakes." lol
DeleteWith global warming being officially recognized, there are fewer blizzards than ever and the snowflakes are rapidly melting.
At the top? Definitely Indiana Tech.
DeleteBelow the top but still in desperate peril? Cooley, Thomas Jefferson, Ave Maria, Florida Coastal, Golden Gate, New England, Hamline, Vermont, Hofstra, Albany, Seton Hall, NYLS, Valparaiso, Drexel, Widener, Catholic U, La Verne, Western State, St. Louis, Arkansas, Capital, Willamette, Oklahoma City, can I stop now?
But, 6:26, Indiana Tech is a foregone conclusion. Who do you think will go down first among schools with full ABA accreditation?
Delete