Future Law Works

This is the last in a five-post series about how to advance a large-scale, integrated conversation about the future of legal education, as a foundational project that links up with equivalent questions about law and the legal profession. [Part I, here] [Part II, here] [Part III, here] [Part IV, here]

The previous posts have raised questions about the urgency of the project, about the identities of potential participants, and about the character of the topics to include. This post concludes the series.

This series of posts concerns the future of law, the legal profession, and legal education. [Part I, here] [Part II, here] [Part III, here] It emphasizes the relevance and significance of independent conversations on the topic among legal educators; the need comprehensively to integrate several siloed conversations; and the role of individual law faculty and others in this project, in addition to the usual list of deans and other professional leaders.

The intuition driving the posts is this. If done well, imaginatively and carefully, then extending, distilling, and combining conversations in each of those five domains described in the last post should lead not only to conceptual frameworks for action but also to actionable guidance itself, drawn from multiple perspectives and looking to multiple audiences. A new constitution for legal education should be more than values and aspirations. It should be something closer to a strategic plan for future strategic planning at the local level. What do institutions and strategies and practices — plural, not singular — actually look like, and to whom?

Consider a possible constitutional (small c) convention about the future of law and the legal profession, and legal education in particular. The first two posts have described the case for such a conversation. [Part I, here] [Part II, here] This post concerns the subject matter. A later post will consider the coalition of potentially interested participants.

In the first post in this series [Part I, here], I tried to suggest — briefly — the case for urgency as the foundation for a change-management inspired conversation about the future of legal education.

Based on that case, my suggestion is the following. It’s the second part of the invitation promised at the start of that post, which highlighted the time sequence of innovation in US legal institutions.

Modern law schools were invented before modern law practice emerged.

I mean that statement as the first part of an invitation, rather than as the first part of an argument. The invitation, below and in several posts to follow, is to participate in conversations about the future of legal education in ways that integrate rather than distinguish several threads of concern and revision that have emerged over the last decade.