The article itself was exceptionally mediocre.  Its point, that law school doesn’t teach students how to be lawyers, is old news. Its examples, an article from some philosophy journal, students who couldn’t do a megamerger on day one of practice, completely missed the boat and hardly proved the point.

But put an article slamming law school on the front page of the  New York Times and everybody throws a hissy fit. 

Law schools know all about the tough conditions that await graduates, and many have added or expanded programs that provide practical training through legal clinics. But almost all the cachet in legal academia goes to professors who produce law review articles, which gobbles up huge amounts of time and tuition money. The essential how-tos of daily practice are a subject that many in the faculty know nothing about — by design.

The tapping on keyboards could be heard from campuses nationwide even before the ink was dry.  At PrawfsBlawg, Matt Bodie wrote a cutesy Thanksgiving recipe for ruining a scholar’s appetite, nitpicking the article.  Some of his commenters weren’t as terse, but other, anonymously (since no one in academia is allowed to say anything unpleasant)  blamed the scamblogs and attacked the writer, David Segal, as ugly and poorly dressed.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Kahn at  Concurring Opinions takes it slightly less personally:

Segal blasts legal education for failing to produce prêt-à-porter lawyers sized to fit the needs of everyone from Skadden Arps to solo practitioners.  Segal also denies the value of “pure” research — law review articles and other scholarly output that do not satisfy his requirements for immediate application to daily practice.  Gerard Magliocca and Alex Guerrero already commented on one of his examples.  As with Dick the Butcher’s suggestion in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2, Segal’s article is wrong on both teaching and research.

Most readers would immediately note Kahn’s resort to the trite Dick the Butcher quote, but I find his “prêt-à-porter lawyers” characterization far more revealing, denigrating the idea that new lawyers be competent off the rack.

It’s just that developing the skill set that Segal prioritizes (such as his opening example: filing a certificate of merger with a secretary of state) is not the sole, let alone primary, goal of legal education.  Those form-filling and filing skills are important, but best honed by firms that daily engage in those specialized, localized, and technical operations.  Law schools, in contrast, have the advantage in teaching the general skills and knowledge that firms of all sizes (as well as government agencies and corporations) have neither the time, inclination, nor resources to perfect.  But these organizations desperately need these things in the lawyers they hire: critical thinking, professional standards, ethical judgment, and historical perspective (to name a few).

He then launches into the “trade school” argument, that law schools don’t exist to train technicians, but legal philosophers. Notably, I have yet to see a single website by a law firm promoting that it may not know how to prepare papers, but it can argue legal philosophy all day long.

In the meantime, Orin Kerr at  Volokh Conspiracy risks the awful pain of butt splinters by straddling the fence noting

there’s an underlying point that I think is both important and correct: Law professors, at especially the “top” law schools, are becoming less connected to the legal profession. As a result, over time, they are less likely to know — and therefore less able to teach — the perspective an experienced lawyer would bring to legal problems.

And yet, he goes on to wiggle:

I don’t know what the right balance is, but I do think that students are best served when their classes are taught by professors with a mix of approaches.

Not quite the orthodoxy, but not quite a traitor to the Academy. Well played.  And lest you think that only scholars’ panties were in a bunch, so too were the  friends of fishwives who saw this as an attack on their business model of teaching skill-challenged new lawyers how to deceptively market themselves to effectively scam the public and accomplish their chief task coming out of law school, to make a buck at any cost.

To the extent that Segal’s article struck a chord (or cut one, as they case may be), it’s nothing that we haven’t known for a very long time.  It was a crappy article about a significant problem, leaving tons of reasons to criticize it, but one reason to embrace it.  It’s failing.  It’s failing to produce lawyers who leave with the knowledge and ability they’ve paid for. It’s failing to produce lawyers who can be entrusted with the lives of other people, despite their ability to recite Kant.

Segal’s article gave law professors the opportunity to circle the wagons and engage in group denial, and they seized it.  So the “chin-stroking” example of “A Future Foretold: Neo-Aristotelian Praise of Postmodern Legal Theory” was wrongly attributed to a law review than philosophy rag? Fair enough. So explain  Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy , 104 Mich. L.R. 1523 (2006)? So Segal used a bad example. That doesn’t mean he was wrong.

While the clients of Biglaw aren’t necessarily inclined to pay for the education of young’uns, the point that no every student emerges from school to warm a library chair in some megafirm can’t be summarily ignored.  This leaves them exposed to the schemes of the unscrupulous, who fill their heads with images of sugar plum marketing fairies while they wouldn’t know what a motion looks like if it slapped them upside the head.  Why not just pepper spray your students, or worse still, the poor clients they mislead with their vague representations of “passion” in lieu of competence. No excuses are going to serve as substitute for the ability to represent clients.

Here’s the bottom line, what judges, lawyers, students have been screaming at you but hasn’t managed to be heard by heads too filled with scholarly self-importance.  You aren’t producing lawyers.

And for my good buddy, Orin, with my deep concern for the pain he could suffer on his fence, let me offer a question that might help him figure out where to draw the line:

How long must a man’s legs be?