I believe law schools have many noble missions, including the education and preparation of students as future legal professionals, contributing to the marketplace of ideas and the evolution of law and policy through scholarship and other forms of intellectual endeavor, serving the public through pro bono activity, public service, and civic engagement, and contributing to [...]

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Thanks for the invitation and the opportunity to muse about the future of law schools.  I am currently on our dean search committee, so I’ve been in a lot of conversations lately about delivering quality legal education.  Reading these posts, I’m also uncomfortable with the idea that all law schools should aspire to the same [...]

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Ann Bartow has one solution to the obsessive focus on placement of articles: have faculty publish in their schools’ law journals. Pretty interesting idea–and that’s sort of the way things used to be, where the a review published the work of the school’s faculty and students (and some others, too). Reviews from the [...]

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Some posts in this series have suggested that business school models or integration with some business schools would make sense for a law school. That seems like specialist training. One could make an argument that intellectual property, health law, and other certificate programs try to offer ways for a student to graduate with greater depth [...]

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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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What if faculty members published their articles exclusively in their “home” journals? That would eliminate the focus on the “placement” of a piece, hopefully with increased attention to actual content as a result, and motivate both students and faculty to do more high quality work, I’d suspect. Bias against scholarly subject areas would be reduced, [...]

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Thanks to Deven for getting this excellent discussion started.
I agree with the proposition that experiential learning is very valuable and should probably occupy a more significant place in the legal education than it presently does, particularly on the transactional side. However, experiential learning is often extremely expensive. By necessity, student-faculty ratios must be low in [...]

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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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Yesterday, Mike asked the following question about legal education and the profession:
As I read these, they take as premise the proposition not merely that law schools should change how they teach because practice-based teaching is more effective, but that law schools need to fill a training gap created by the growing unwillingness of many law [...]

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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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Thanks to Michael and Devan and the rest of the crew here for inviting me to join the conversation on “What kind of institution do we want a law school to be?”
The institution I’d like is, well, perhaps pretty close to the ones we already have–something like a mini university, or maybe it’s better analogized [...]

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Law schools, we are told, are failing to properly train lawyers for the profession. Most of the criticism comes from those who insist that legal education is too impractical, focusing on abstract questions with little relevance to legal practice and failing to provide the concrete skills in interviewing, drafting, etc. that are an attorney’s [...]

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Thanks to Deven Desai for pulling together an exciting group of mobbloggers for this very timely and provocative topic.
I want to expand and focus the topic a bit, all in one fell swoop. 
Here’s the expansion:  As I think about what law schools should be, I inevitably think about what the legal profession should be.  Law [...]

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The Law School of the Future
Erwin Chemerinsky
Alston & Bird Professor of Law and Political Science, Duke University
Founding Dean, University of California, Irvine, School of Law (This is based on an article I wrote for the Daily Journal)
What will law school be like in 25 years? If the past predicts the future, there is little [...]

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Langdell, MacCrate, U.S. News, Carnegie, these names and more influence the structure of and debates about legal education. Recent attention to legal education has been strong. Schools are starting to experiment with different approaches to teaching law. Yet, as a professor who also has an interest in institution building, it occurred to me that legal [...]

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In my few years as a professor I have been fortunate to have mentors who allow me to chew their ears and then offer their views on the many aspects of being a law professor. Although the issues and insights vary, one topic “What Kind of Institution Do We Want A Law School To Be?” [...]

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