Via Tim Armstrong at Info/Law, I learned today that the Harvard Law School faculty voted to create an online open access repository of their scholarship.
To me, the vastly more interesting and provocative part of Tim’s post is a news item that I missed 10 days ago:  Berkman Center Executive Director John Palfrey will become the new […]

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Personally, I bought the hard copy (I like bound books more than stacks of copy paper), but kudos go out to Jon Zittrain for putting his brand new hot-off-the-press book on SSRN. I’ve made the point before that many authors like reaching the public as much as making money- and often these aren’t mutually […]

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As many people know, there is an election brewing in Pennsylvania.  As fewer people know, that election involves the annual awards known as “The Webbies,” sometimes known — semi-seriously at least, and undoubtedly without the blessing of AMPAS — as the Oscars of the Internet.
My colleague Bernard Hibbitts is the Editor in Chief and publisher […]

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The Madisionian Mobblog comes to a partial end today. The blog will now return to a mix of pieces on law, technology, and society. Nonetheless, there may be additonal posts on the topic so stay tuned for those.
In addition, I want to take a moment and thank all involved with this event. I had a […]

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In reading the posts in this mobblog one thing comes through: right now many factors push on law and legal education. One could say the game is over. One could say stay the course. One could say radical change is required. Whether such positions are accurate or apply to all depends on the facts. Nonetheless, […]

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Perhaps appropriately on the last day of this fascinating stream of mobbloging, I thought I would try and offer a partial defense of the-way-things-are-right now on the law review front:

Don’t romanticize the alternative: When one begins to publish in the peer-reviewed world, the whole romantic notion of blind review becomes somewhat tainted — in all […]

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The conversation here at Madisonian about law schools and “what kind of institution” they should be has been fascinating.  I regret coming in so late. 
I have probably spent more time thinking about what kind of institution my law school — Notre Dame Law School, a Catholic law school — should be than about what kind […]

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Today is the last day of Madisonian’s full-time attention to the future of legal education, and Jim Chen has energized the mobblog with a sweeping, challenging post about focus.  Again, I want to broaden and narrow the conversation, all at once.
No Tags

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Several posts have grappled with the basic structure of law schools. Al evokes the idea of a mini-university. Nancy has offered that a required pre-law curriculum would improve law schools as students would have better interdisciplinary training and better writing skills. Mike has asked “Why not offer undergraduate and graduate legal education programs in […]

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The prompt for this mobblog is “What kind of institution do we want a law school to be?,” and most of the posts have focused on content and method — what and how do law schools teach, what and how do law faculties study, how many law schools do we need, and where?
Dan Filler’s post […]

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Ok. So Michael’s gone to the heart of this business: what’s going to happen with the legal profession and how will that affect law schools? (I was going to write how will law schools respond, but I think that implies more agency on our part than we’ll have. The profession is going […]

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The idea of what is the social vision of law schools has permeated many of the posts here. These views remind me of a class I took in high school called Individual Humanities. We read The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, St. Joan, Don Juan, Faust, Don Quixote, Man and Superman, and Huckleberry Finn. We also […]

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I’m not endorsing this post from a theory-loving prof outside of law schools, but I think it provides some good warnings about exactly how far we want to go in standardizing educational experiences:
These days, one of the more frustrating and tedious aspects of working in an institutional setting such as a secondary school, a […]

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Now that both Mike and I have broached the possibility that economic change could radically affect the demand for attorneys in the future, let me say a little about the relationship between the law school and the market.
Optimistically, we might praise “market discipline” for law schools. Law firms want to reduce clients’ expenses; governments […]

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Consider the existing law school as an institution, or as kind of community, and as faculty we are touched with the warm fuzzies.  I share many of those fuzzy thoughts, but my contrarian streak will out.  Law professors cannot construct or reconstruct legal education without accounting for its place in law and justice generally.  Do […]

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There are many jaw-dropping statistics about globalization, but this estimate by a renowned economist may be the most worrisome for U.S. attorneys:
Practically all kinds of employment that do not require physical presence can now be offshored. According to Alan Blinder, this amounts to 22–29 percent of all US jobs. [C]ontinued retraining and improvements […]

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Thanks to Deven all of us are thinking this week about an issue that we should indeed always be reflecting upon: realities and ideals of law schools. A law school is a multitude of things and has different meanings and consequences for different people. Law schools are workplaces, learning centers, research institutes, communities, and sometimes […]

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I’ve had the experience of serving on four different law school faculties, although my experience at Nebraska and Houston was skewed a bit, because being the dean of a school is quite different from being a typical faculty member.  People treat you differently when you’re the dean, and you’re privy both to more information (from […]

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Here are some questions that I’ve been pondering, and the mobblog gives me an opportunity to ask them — and hope that one or more people will jump in with their thoughts:
Does legal education today offer any distinct value to students and society aside from its function as a signaling and sorting device? Why […]

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Erwin Chemerinsky and Mike Madison have already gotten the ball rolling with two very thoughtful posts (here and here, respectively).  I want to add my own two cents by questioning the assumption that every law school should change in the same way.  Part of the problem with the condition of law schools today is the […]

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