A Split of Authority

In furtherance of its expose of law schools, the New York Times’  Room for Debate offers a diversity of views on the question, The Case Against Law School, Should the standard three years of law school, followed by the bar exam, be the only path to a legal career?

The cast of characters:



Debaters



Yes, that’s our  David Lat in there, looking like he’s about to do his haftorah.

I would like to tell you how fascinating the debate is.  I really would, but I can’t.  It’s the same old argument, with lawprofs certain of their merit of their paychecks, while anyone not looking to publish in law reviews believing that law schools are (1) a massive waste of money, (2) ineffective at training students to become lawyers, and (3) uncontrollable. 

Bryan Garner, the editor in chief of Black’s Law Dictionary, says this:



Reforming legal education – an urgent societal need – is a glacial process. And the glacier has been flowing the wrong way. Entrenched pedagogical mediocrity infects even the best law schools, and almost all the schools simply mimic the anemic methods of the schools just above them in the rankings. But the key to better health has little to do with changing the time requirement: three years is about right.




The problem is not that students are spending too much time in law school. It’s that they are not mastering essential skills.

The biggest failure at most law schools is the dearth of seriously good skills courses, especially training in legal writing. Law schools generally reward scholarship, not teaching excellence, and there is a built-in bias against one-on-one teacher-student time. Too often the only feedback a student gets from a professor is a single letter grade after the final exam. Now add this: of all law-school courses, legal writing is both the single most time-intensive subject and the least respected.


If Bryan, something of a hybrid between the scholar and lawyer, says law schools fail, that’s an indictment.

Lat, on the other hand,  opines that the answer is to get out of Dodge and bring back apprenticeships:



The core of the legal curriculum is covered in the first year of law school. One could easily imagine law school, in terms of formal classroom instruction, lasting two years instead of three and costing two-thirds as much.


After two years, graduates could start working as apprentices for practicing lawyers and being paid, albeit modestly, perhaps like paralegals or medical residents. The bar exam could be administered at the end of an apprenticeship, or in multiple parts at different points in the process, like the medical board exam. Successful completion of an apprenticeship and passage of the bar exam would qualify an individual as a lawyer.


Of course, the question remains whether under an apprenticeship regime, Lat would have ever become a lawyer, since obsessions with the undergarments of Article III judges doesn’t fit well with most practice niches.  On the other hand, given Lat’s enormous popularity (not to mention credibility, as the Times ask him to debate and didn’t even give me a jingle), maybe far more people are fascinated by judicial hotties than I am.

On the flip side, consider the position taken by Linda Greene, the Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.



My own decision to attend law school was based in part upon my perception, still shared by those who rush our doors, that a legal education provides an unparalleled opportunity to understand the intersection of private and public power, to explore the rationale for the organization of human society and to participate more knowledgeably and effectively in every aspect of human endeavor. A fine legal education provides an opportunity both to grasp the current arrangement of our legal order and to understand laws’ limitations and shortcomings.


That education also deals with the relationship between law and society as well as the manner in which law is both used and transformed in action. Whether the questions involve constitutional protection for undocumented children or cloning or climate measures or the parameters of humanitarian intervention or the ownership of the resources beyond our gravitational field, the best in legal education prepares its graduates to participate in the discourse and arrangements necessary to such complex concerns. It is true that the cost of this quality education, all in, may exceed $200,000. The value of a new generation of law graduates prepared to take on these challenges: Priceless.


Now doesn’t that sound wonderful?  If only it meant you could actually practice law for your $200,000. 

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