This probably falls under the category of “self-promotion,” but maybe it also explains why I’ve been quiet on Madisonian for the past few months.  I spent the last year working on an intensive empirical research project funded by the National Science Foundation.  I was leading a team of law students to examine the copyright implications of a variety of user-generated content platforms. Our motivation for the research was what we perceived as a gap in the literature. There have been numerous discussions of the phenomenon of UGC, but most legal accounts have been premised on hand-picked examples. There’s nothing wrong with anecdotes, but we thought it would be better to have a statistical sense of UGC. The main question we asked was simply: “What are people actually doing?” Continue reading →

[Continuing my series on new directions for legal education. The first three posts are:

• Legal Education: One Vision of the Future
• Legal Education: Refining and Extending the Vision
• Legal Education: On Building a Vision]

This series of posts on the future of legal education has proceeded back-to-front:  I described a vision, then refined that vision, then retreated a bit to argue that a vision should be grounded in values.  Properly done, a vision gets built; a vision doesn’t get announced.  But I haven’t put my own values stakes in the ground.  That process starts with this post.

When I think about the future of legal education — when I think about the future of higher education in general — I don’t start with premises about changing job markets or changing technologies or changing interests and talents of Generation Y.  I don’t start by looking at the impact of disruptive innovation on the legal profession.  I start with premises about who our present and future students are, who they want to be, and who they will be.  I also start with premises about who we are as educators, and who we want to be.  Why do we do what we do?  My initial post prioritized market realities out of a sense of necessity.  Here, I want to recapture at least some of what I deferred.  It will become obvious as I go on that what follows represents my own, perhaps idiosyncratic view of law and legal education.  None of this reflects what may be happening at my law school.  This is the world as I wish it to be.

Any vision of the future of law schools can’t succeed over the long run — can’t be effective and durable with respect to whatever aspirations its creators set for themselves — unless it is grounded in shared values.  Some people will disagree with that; to many, the point is a sound business plan.  But I’m going to stick to my guns.  Today’s American law school is essentially a Langdellian law school, with some clinical bells and whistles appended.  The Langdellian law school has endured not because it represents a sound business plan; the purposes and “business” conditions that grounded Langdell and Harvard’s then-president, Charles Eliot, have long since changed dramatically, many times over. Bringing law (and medicine) fully into a modern research university was the goal, and that ship sailed and landed long ago. But the values of the Langdellian model – idealizing law as an “objective” discipline that could be synthesized from experiments, known as cases, teaching a mode of analysis that would span all fields of legal practice – have endured. Continue reading →