A few rants have (ahem) somehow found their way to the front page here about how law schools fail to teach students to be lawyers.  Naturally, I pin the blame on the schools and the lawprofs.  Could I be wrong?

From Susan Cartier Liebel at Build A Solo Practice, a comment from lawyer Edward Weist has turned the argument upside down.  Susan has taken the comment and presented it as a “guest blogger” post because it presents such a wealth of information about the how and why of law school direction.  Apparently, the genesis isn’t geriatric inertia as one would assume, but none other than the famed Beauty Pageant promoter, the American Bar Association.

Weist, who practices in Massachusetts, provides a detailed explanation of the constraints placed on law schools (and hence, law students):

ABA rules governing the accreditation of law schools—and, effectively, their graduates’ ability to sit for the bar on a nationwide basis—effectively mandate separation between the legal academy and the real world of practice.  Point your browser to the ABA’s published standards for law schools.  Standard 402 and interpretation 402-4 strongly discourage the use of even full-time faculty with significant outside practices (e.g., ongoing real-world contact).  Standard 304(f) provides for the adoption of rules limiting full-time students’ compensated part-time work (presumably for paying clients) during the academic year to 20 hours per week.

That sucks.  So law schools can’t use practicing lawyers to teach and won’t let students learn outside the classroom.  The old double-whammy.  I really wish I knew that when I was in law school, working a 60 hour week for a lawyer (and you can bet I expected to be paid).  I was bad.  I broke the rule.  Ignorance is no excuse, you know.  I’m so ashamed.  But I’m not giving the $3.25 an hour back.

Of course, this isn’t a complete absolution for law schools.  It doesn’t explain why actual legal experience is the kiss of death for a lawprof position, if the purpose of a lawprof is to teach law students.  If it’s to produce a steady stream of scholarly articles for obscure student-edited law reviews that bear no rational nexus to the practice of law, then the absence of real-world experienced lawprofs makes more sense.

On the flip-side, if law schools are aware of these accreditation rules (and I must believe they are), then what have they been doing to correct or update those pieces that fail to serve the interests of students in preparing them to join the ranks of attorneys?  I’ve heard no law school cry for an ABA summit to change the rules.  The silence tells me that the schools really aren’t looking for a way to alter the status quo.  Things must be just fine the way they are.

Frankly, in the grand scheme of issues to be confronted by law schools and the legal community, the lack of preparedness of law students isn’t my top issue.  Given the situation in the current legal community (and bearing in mind that I’m an avid reader of  Above the Law so I know when I’m in the presence of a judicial “superhottie”), the foremost problem is that law schools are churning out far more new lawyers than society and the legal community need or can absorb. 

Even the ones that will get to spend their first few months at Biglaw, enjoying the in-house nail salons and other critical perks, will soon learn this truth.  And all the legal experience in the world isn’t going to bring comfort in an environment this competitive.  Hey, when Biglaw partners are being de-equitized for non-production, you know that no one is safe.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t fix what we can.  Maybe it’s time for an ABA summit to reconsider the limits placed on schools and students to address changing times, needs and views.  I’m game.  Any law schools interested?

Susan Cartier Liebel comments to my lament about the law schools obsession with ranking:

This will change. It has to because the paying customer, yes, the student, will demand it. The holdouts, the committee members, those tenured professors who have not been engaged in the practice of law since tuition was affordable, hold the publication criteria out like a necklace of garlic to keep the ‘practicing’ attorneys outside the hallowed halls. But it will change.

Will this change?  Susan’s post makes perfect sense in a rational world, where the consumer (in this case the law student) drives the market.  But is it really the stodgy old tenured professors who are the stalwarts of the old ways?

From everything I’ve seen, the young turks are far more protective of the new elitism than anyone else.  They have come to the job for a different purpose than the Prof. Kingsfields; they are scholars.  They have gone through the law professor meat market, or beauty pageant (whichever analogy better suits you), where their law school pedigree got them past the first cut.

Today’s law professors, more so than years ago, see their role as authors of learned writings. They  would prefer that the “school” part be eliminated completely.  Intellectual curiosity is vaulted as the primary value to be sought in a new law professor.  But unmentioned is the absolute belief that one’s intellect is unworthy if it was unable to get the Beauty from Idaho into Harvard.  What strikes me time and again is the absence of any mention of interest or ability to train young men and women to be lawyers.  They  argue against students going to classes.

What do law students  have to say about this?  They no longer want to go to classes.  They find classes worthless, professors boring and disengaged.  Law school is viewed as a pointless obligation on the path to Biglaw salaries.  They are not interested in learning how to practice law, but how to  get a job with an obscenely high salary. 

The elitism propagated by the lawprofs is reflected in the attitudes of the students.  Neither sees much point in the other, except as a means to an end.  For the lawprofs, it’s publication to bring their school to the top tier of the rankings, or keep it there while the others are nipping at your heels.  For the students, it is to get Biglaw to hire them so they too can make the $190,000 first year salaries.

Where are the young public defenders, environmental lawyers, consumer-rights lawyers?  Who cares, because they are just the losers in the law school game of upping the rankings and making the big money that proves self-worth. 

The same rational system that would put the consumers in charge would similar value the services of lawyers who provide the greatest social utility highest.  As the incredible popularity of blawgs like  Above the Law makes abundantly clear, winners and losers in the law school game are based on whether they get the big bonus.  There’s no mention of ability or service or purpose, but there’s post after post about how much money they will make if they come from a Tier 1 school and get a Biglaw job.

So will the consumers of law schools demand that lawprofs put down their law reviews and start giving a damn about their classes, their students and what type of inchoate lawyers they are turning loose on the world?  Not if the young turk professors have anything to say about it, and not if the students think that their profs efforts in elevating their school’s ranking has the potential to land them a Biglaw job. 

In fairness, there is a contrarian point of view promoted by MoneyLaw, where they aspire to end the Beauty Pageant and elitism for its own sake.  But even there, the internal struggle between hope and reality is clear and disappointing.  While disavowing that the Tier 1 pedigree is a first cut necessity for anyone desiring to become a law professor, the stats show that the interest at the meat market is still for those with only the best law schools in their background.  But not because of the law school name; because they lack any other viable criteria to determine who has the most intellectual curiosity.  And the little detail about who has something to offer students remains unmentioned.

As Louisville Law School Dean  Jim Chen warms the cockles of my heart by  suggesting there is intelligent life in law schools, along comes some  Harvard dilettante to break it in two.  This guy, Daryl Levinson (no, the other brother Daryl), has this to say in “The Record,” the independent Harvard Law School newspaper, about who gets to be a law professor:

Even practical legal experience is not a good predictor of scholarly ability, and, Levinson noted, “is pretty nearly disqualifying.” Levinson pointed out that today’s younger professors have no significant practical experience, and that if they tried to become involved in the world, “the world would probably recoil in horror.”

Yes, you read that right.  We don’t want no stinkin’ lawyers teaching kids to be lawyers.  We want scholars.  In fact, if some professor shows up at your jail cell to offer assistance, scream for the guards to take this mutt away.  Unless her name is Jennifer, in which case you can chat her up a bit.

Did I miss something in the “law porn” (don’t ask, it’s way too controversial) brochure that neglected to mention what they think they’re doing at that fancy Tier 1.729 law school?  Seriously, guys, is there anything law schools can possibly do to further disconnect from their mission? 

It has become painfully clear that law schools do not want to be law schools.  They do everything in their power to not be law schools.  How long will it take before the top law schools in the country figure out that they would do far better in their scholarly endeavors if they could just convince the students to stay home, mail in their checks and home-study their way to the bar exam, assuming the students feel compelled to take it. 

Though I write this post with some attempt at humor, I am in reality sickened by this misguided, pompous approach to “teaching” the law.  I put “teaching” in quotations because the lawprofs are not only not ashamed of their base failure, but proud of their disdain, their contempt, their open and notorious rejection, of teaching.  They are above teaching.  They are . . . scholars.

My inclination here is to indulge in yet more snide, snarky and sarcastic commentary about the lost boys (and girls) who comprise the corps de philologus, but I could not possibly present a more demeaning explanation than Daryl Levinson (no, the other brother Daryl) does himself at the bottom of the article:

Question and Answer with Prof. Levinson

Q: So how easy is it to get a job as a law professor?

A: There are two ways to read the numbers. The discouraging interpretation is that out of 1,000 applications for teaching positions last year, 150 were hired. On the other hand, out of that 1,000 you can automatically throw out about half because they didn’t go to a top 20 law school (that’s just how the academic world works), and you can throw out another twenty-five percent because they didn’t attend this presentation and have no idea what it takes to be a law professor – maybe they think they like teaching, but not scholarship, or maybe they’ve been practicing for a long time and think it would be nice to retire into a professorship. So when you look at the pool of viable, serious candidates, and the students in that pool who graduated from Harvard Law, virtually all of those applicants got academic positions of some sort.

Q: What’s hardest: getting the entry-level job, getting the next job, or getting tenure?

A: Tenure is relatively easy – presumptively everyone gets it, and those who don’t are the exception, not the rule. In the schools with the strictest requirements, about one out of every four professors don’t get tenure. More important is getting the entry-level job, than to care about where that job is. There is plenty of mobility, and some of the lowest ranked schools have faculty indistinguishable from the faculty at Harvard or Yale. Chances are once you get your first job, you’ll be able to move someplace geographically preferable, or with a higher rank.

Q: What if you have geographical limitations? What are your chances then?

A: Levinson noted that there are about 200 law schools in the country, so it shouldn’t really be a problem unless your limitation means, for example, that you can only work in Idaho. April Stockfleet, the OCS advisor on careers in legal teaching, warned students against mentioning a geographical limitation on their AALS application, however. She said schools may interpret this as being too picky.

Q: How do you get a fellowship?

A: Fellowships require a “watered down” set of the same things law schools look for: a good reference from a professor, a well-developed idea, and other indicia of whether you can pull it off, including any papers you wrote during law school and other ways you spent your time as a student.

Q: What constitutes good legal scholarship?

A: Legal scholarship is very heterogeneous. There is less doctrinal scholarship these days, although there is still a fair amount of it. Increasingly there are policy papers and interdisciplinary papers. The tools that students are formally taught in law school tend to be inadequate, since students basically just learn case analysis. You likely need to do more than that, but you can only get a sense of what “that” is by reading scholarship. Most would say your best bet is to be interdisciplinary.

Q: If you are going to be a law professor, do you have to teach any 1L classes?

A: No. Usually it’s a good idea to be able to teach a class that lots of people want to take, or that most law schools offer, in addition to one covering your obscure research interest. Generally, professors teach at least one “meat and potatoes” class, but this doesn’t have to b a first year class – it could be an upper-level class near the area of your expertise.

Q: What should students do during their summers?

A: Whatever they want. The highest value experience is probably a summer writing fellowship, which can also be paired with another job. You can also do something non-academic to see what it’s like and make sure you wouldn’t be happier doing that, at least for a while.

Q: How important are clerkships?

A: Clerkships are important less as a credential, and more for the time and space they give you. The fact that you see so many professors with clerkships is probably more a result of correlation than causation.

Q: Do law schools care what firm you worked at?

A: Not at all. In fact, it might be better to go to a terrible firm than one like Cravath, because chances are you will have more time to write at the terrible firm. You’re going to get expertise in document review, but not much else. This won’t disqualify you, but it will just be a neutral fact about you.

Q: What’s the salary range for law professors, from the lowest-ranked school to the top school?

A: There isn’t very clear data on this. However, as a general rule, law professor salaries will track, or be slightly below, law firm associate salaries in the same market, but without the huge raise you get as a partner, of course. The salaries are much closer to those of associates even up to seventh and eighth-years, than to Arts & Sciences faculty salaries.

Q: What do you most dislike about being a professor?

A: It’s a bad job for people who don’t like a lack of structure. It’s also bad for people who like to make a difference in the real world. Increasingly, this is an ivory tower profession.

If you made it this far, you too can be a Harvard Law Professor, provided you lack any competency in any area remotely resembling the practice of law.