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Michael Madison

Legal Education: Vision and Values

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

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.Read More »Legal Education: Vision and Values

Legal Education: On Building a Vision

[Continuing my now-weekly series on new directions for legal education.  The first two posts are here and here.]

My two posts about a law school of the future were labeled “visions,” but they were blueprints rather than visions.  Visions — organizational, institutional visions — aren’t so detailed, and if there is any hope for a vision becoming reality, then it can’t be mandated from above.  Visions don’t come on stone tablets, and they don’t get carried down from the mountain top.  As much wiser people than I have written, visions get built, and they are built around values, purposes, and big themes and goals.

In those senses, I don’t have a vision of legal education.  Not yet, anyway.  I do, however, have a set of intuitions about what I’d like to do with my students, things that are rarely captured in conventional conversations about law school pedagogy and exam writing (and techniques), about faculty identity (“classroom” faculty, “clinical” faculty, “legal writing” faculty), about the types of jobs that students should aspire to securing within nine months of graduating.  Those things are important to many, many people. In their usual form, at least, they’re not that important to me.

I want to arm law students — all law students — with a sense of overarching personal capability and self-confidence that in some fundamental way can pull them through the troughs, valleys, and crises that are too often associated with not remembering the black-letter rule, not knowing how to draft a discovery plan, and other, similar nuts-and-bolts issues.  Here is why:Read More »Legal Education: On Building a Vision

Legal Education: Refining and Extending the Vision

Last week’s post on the future of legal education – “One Vision of the Future” – in many ways didn’t go far enough. So here is a refinement and extension. I like “things,” and here I am designing a “thing.” Version 2.0, if you will.

As with Version 1.0, the point of this exercise is not only to engage in some science fiction regarding what we do. It’s to see if the science fiction leads to recognizing some things that we might do today that would help our students and the profession.Read More »Legal Education: Refining and Extending the Vision

Legal Education: One Vision of the Future

What should legal education become?

Back in August, my preview of coming activities for the year included this sketch of my role as chair of a University of Pittsburgh School of Law task force on innovation in legal education.  Figure out the future.  That’s our charge.

Our little band has done a lot of reading and reviewing and listening and talking, and one of the things that we tasked ourselves with was independently coming up with our own respective visions of the future.  If we were to remove a variety of real-world limitations, such as compliance with accreditation requirements, the need to get changes approved by our faculty colleagues, and the cost of putting things in place, what could, would, and should law school look like?

Since this is a blog that talks in part about innovation and innovation processes, I thought that readers might be interested in what I and I alone am responsible for so far as my vision of innovation in legal education.  Call what follows “My Law School,” or “MadisonLaw,” version 1.0, meaning that I have undoubtedly missed things, mischaracterized others, and added in unnecessary stuff.  Much of what follows owes its inspiration to colleagues near and far, both in space and in some cases in time; I will not cite to them or otherwise annotate this sketch, even though the provenance of many of these ideas will be reasonably clear to many.  As a last preliminary note, it will quickly become clear that this is almost entirely infeasible as an actual working model of any existing law school. It is what I would build and what I would do, if I had all the time and the resources in the world.  Give me $200 million (substantially less than all the resources in the world, but still a lot of money), and (as Jackie Gleason once said) away we go.Read More »Legal Education: One Vision of the Future