Over at Madisonian, a blog where the mere mortals of the practical blawgosphere are rarely invited, the best of academia are hard at work.  They are engaged in a “mobblog”, which is yet another new webword to me, on the subject of the future of legal education.

“Hey, I graduated law school. What do I care?”  That’s right.  There are no clients to be had, nor money to be made, by reading any further.  That leaves maybe three readers for the balance of this post, but I’m interested so I’m going to continue writing anyway.  Don’t say it, Gideon.

My knee-jerk assumption would be that the lawprofs would have a fine go at creating the law school of their dreams.  One that was long on luxurious days of pondering deep thoughts, where the only good use of law students was to take dictation and make pages of well-foot-noted brilliance appear on the computer screen. 

I would have been wrong.  Dead wrong, in fact.  Reading through some of the mobposts (I just made that word up, so feel free to add it to the blog lexicon at will), I was shocked to find some lawprofs and deans flying some fairly radical ideas up the academic flagpole.

There’s Mike Madison  floating the notion that we have too many law schools.  Of course, he immediately undercuts his own question by flipping to the “wrong kind of law schools” because the notion of fewer lawprof jobs is utter blasphemy.

There’s radical law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky coming out for experiential education, the sort of thing that Washington & Lee is trying which those of us not bound by the rigors of scholarly jargon might call “practical education,” but only because we are not licensed to use words like pedagogy.

Alfred Borphy is  big on the idea of making law schools into “mini-universities,” meaning that law schools would stop isolating themselves from the rest of the world and start incorporating other disciplines into their programs.  This is often discussed as the interdisciplinary approach, which used more letter and hence has greater academic panache.  The flip side, of course, is that law schools generally exist within universities already, and why not make universities “mini-law-schools?”  Instead of lawprofs allowing other profs in, they could always take a walk around the campus on their own, like common undergraduate professors. Ewwww.

One of the  most interesting proposals comes from Nate Oman, raising the time-honored concept of “indentured servitude.”  Nate questions whether the cost to law firms of training new lawyers how to be real lawyers should be shifted onto the backs of law students (notably not the law schools, but let’s not quibble) by requiring them to suffer the indignity of some form of practicing lawyer boot camp, like the military, and then repaying the debt by owing a period of employment to their benefactors.

Granted, Nate’s idea as presented presumes that all lawyers come out of law school and then find some law firm somewhere to get a job, where they hone their craft and then move on to higher paying work.  True for some, not for all.  But that doesn’t mean he’s not on to something.

Doctors go through internship and residency after they get their degree.  Law students graduate and, once they pass the bar, can hang out a shingle like they have a clue how to prepare a motion.  Sure, they will eventually learn, and may even get it sufficiently close that they don’t burn their first 27 clients, but is this the best approach.  Lawyer boot camp in the real world of lawyering hardly seems such a crazy idea, though why it doesn’t occur to Nate that the right place to erect the barracks might be the mini-university quad.  This is where a little input from the real world might make an idea fly.

And then, of course, there is the mob that wants law school to be all about luxurious days of pondering deep thoughts. 

It’s quite surprising to find that not everyone in the Ivory Tower is obsessed with reinventing law school in such a way as to eliminate teaching students altogether.  If you have any interest in the future of the profession (either of the two of you still reading this post), go check out  Madisonian and see what the finest minds can come up with.  But whatever you do, don’t post any comments or let them know you’re looking.  If they find out I sent you, I’ll never get a link from the lawprofs again.