Legal education should have an end. This is it.

My last post in this series on law schools talked about shared values and about how shared values should drive a vision of a particular law school’s program. I identified one value that is particularly important to me – service – and promised more. I’ll wrap up that conversation and this series with this post.

A close friend of mine received an award recently, recognizing him for substantial contributions to public service going back over 35 years. He stepped into first major, global leadership role when he was a senior in high school. That’s an extraordinary thing. Here is something less extraordinary: My friend made a point in his acceptance speech not only of thanking a wide range of people who helped and influenced him but also of highlighting something that is directly relevant, I think, to the essence of my thinking about what I do as a law professor.

He said that he was blessed to have been shown when he was quite young how he could have an impact on other people. On the world around him.

If I reduce to a single proposition my thinking about what I do, what I wish to do, and what I wish my peers and colleagues would do – a single statement of values, a single statement that could inspire both us, and our students, our alumni, and the broader community – that proposition is this:

I want to show my students and teach my students how they can have an impact on other people. On the world around them. My job is to inspire my students so that they can inspire change – for the better, if possible — in others. For many years after I left law practice and started teaching law, I didn’t think of myself and my students in that way. I do now.

Different people can, will, and should, if they wish, translate such a high-level statement and put it into practice in different ways. “Inspiring students” means not only “giving” students knowledge and other tools, but also inspiring them to find and develop those tools for themselves. Substantive legal knowledge, skills, and competencies may be taught in a lot of different arrangements. What is different in those arrangements should not obscure what I think should be shared. My own sense of the current stresses about legal education – economic stresses about its cost and the returns, cultural stresses about its value and importance – is that those stresses owe their origins in large part to the absence of a collective understanding about the values that bind us together. Choose my value; choose some other value. What really matters, as it were, isn’t just the raw economics of the thing; what really matters is why we’re doing what we’re doing.

From the start, I’ve been writing about my own vision of the world. Follow the links below to see how I would put my vision into practice.

In my view, this is the end. Comments of all sorts are welcome.

[This is part of a five-post series. In all, the posts are:

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

Next: back to this blog’s regularly scheduled information law and theory programming.

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 →