In the Chronicle of Higher Education, UC-Irvine Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky speaks of the future of legal education:

One reason schools are sticking with a familiar playbook: “It’s a cost-effective method of education,” Mr. Chemerinsky said. “Putting one professor in front of a large group of students is very efficient.” Clinical classes and simulations, which require low student-to-faculty ratios, cost more, he said.

Because his own law school wasn’t bound by decades of tradition, Mr. Chemerinsky said, he and the founding faculty members were able to do some things differently, like stressing hands-on, interdisciplinary study across all three years.

I’ve got no clue what “hands-on, interdisciplinary study” means, but Chemerinsky offers one clue:

“It starts with having to charge ridiculous levels of tuition.”

Repackage law school as “new and improved,” and you know someone will pay more for it.  That they were pumping out some awfully good lawyers ever since Harvard’s Christopher Columbus Langdell thought it was good pedagogy is old news.  Now it’s just tradition.  We hate tradition, because it,s well, traditional.

Wisconsin public employee  Ann Althouse isn’t impressed.

By the way, what is “hands-on, interdisciplinary study”? Do we get to fondle a sociologist? 

That wasn’t the image I got from the description (more like a psychotherapist rubbing the kids’ tummies, whispering, “it will be all right), but to each his/her own.  More importantly:

You know what I would love in a new school — one that “wasn’t bound by decades of tradition”? A deliberate decision to embrace tradition. Let’s get a bunch of tough Socratic lawprofs in front of a classroom of students. And that’s it. Perfectly cost-effective. You can save money on admissions too by going old-school. Make it an old-fashioned GPA/LSAT meritocracy (and flunk them out if they don’t perform).

Finally, a lawprof recognizes that the use of the Socratic Method in law school isn’t a matter of mere tradition, but effective teaching.  And the will to flunk out tuition paying students if they demonstrate no aptitude to practice law.  Now that’s new and improved.

Most law students despise the Socratic Method.  It’s hard. It’s high pressure. It requires preparation.  It can be humiliating if one is unprepared.  It can be humiliating if one is fully prepared but incapable of quick rational thought.  What professional endeavor would seem to be similar, would require such a skillset to perform competently?

As a by-product of this method, most law students don’t feel a closeness, a warm and trusting camaraderie, with professors who do this.  And these would be the same students who fill out evaluations at the end of a course that are considered in tenure decisions.

Then there’s our genetic predisposition to invention.  We want to find a better way, a better mousetrap, to do things. And perhaps there is a newer, better way to teach law, but that doesn’t mean that every new way is better, or that the way we’re doing it now isn’t better than what’s new.  Oh, the grass is always greener until we get to the other side of the fence and find out it’s just green-painted asphalt.

And the fact that a law school can provide a less expensive, more effective, legal education by not offering a “hands-on, interdisciplinary” approach, isn’t a bad thing.  Even law school has a cost-benefit decision to make.  Law students certainly do.

But the bottom line isn’t the price of the ticket, provided a law student makes it that far, but whether law school produces a budding lawyer capable of providing competent, if not excellent, legal services.  If only young lawyers standing in the well for the first time were embraced by a caring, hands-on, interdisciplinary judge.

Not to put words in Erwin’s mouth, but my guess is that the nouvelle law approach would embrace a paradigmatic shift in the law as well.  Much as  some women lawyers embrace the “collaborative” approach to law,

Women’s natural intuition, compassion and empathetic natures can help clients reach peaceful, creative, and satisfying solutions as well.

Other women lawyers call out their gender for hiding behind comfortable passivity.

No well-behaved woman ever made history. Nor did she end the international slave trade in little girls.

Ready to misbehave yet?

Who would you prefer to have next to you in a brawl?  It shouldn’t be a brawl?  Maybe not, but when the hugging stops and the punching begins, nobody wants a lawyer who can’t land a left hook.

The dreaded pedagogy of the Socratic Method isn the cause of litigation, but the response.  It’s used because it develops the skills that lawyers use and need.  It’s unpleasant, if not downright miserable, for law students, unlike everything they’ve experienced up to that point, where teachers, parents, professors spent their days telling them how wonderful they are, how smart and cute, how the only thing they need to do to be successful and worthy is try their best.  What a load of crap.  Trying your best is fine for a second grader, but trying a case is what a law student needs to learn.

That it happens to now be traditional is just a matter of stumbling on an effective method of teaching early on.  The fact that UC-Irvine wants to do it differently, and at a much higher tuition, may be part rejection of tradition, but its also the abdication of responsibility to teach law students how to be lawyers.

When courts are replaced by therapy groups, Erwin Chemerinsky will be cutting edge. Until then, let’s show a little respect for tradition.  Not because it’s traditional, but because it works.