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.Read More »Crunch Time
With apologies to Larry Lessig, whose classic law review article title I am snagging and translating quite faithlessly, and with… Read More »Fidelity in translation
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 the same school?†Christine has challenged the liberal arts idea behind law school and suggested that schools could become specialist or generalist schools. Orly has argued that a split between the training of future professionals and future educators would better serve and reflect what law schools do. Frank has asked whether the market has shifted such that schools need to focus on higher-level critical skills.
One idea might lurk within these views: is the undergraduate system failing such that many law students have aptitude but did not receive the training they may have received in years past?
Read More »Education Gap
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 on single-sex education flagged an important and otherwise under-discussed theme: The “who” of legal education. Who applies, who gets admitted, who attends, and who graduates? Who teaches, and who administers?Read More »Gender and Race in Legal Education
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 to dictate to us what we’ll do.) As the profession becomes more stratified and there is relaxation of rules about practice by non-lawyers, how will that affect the economics of legal education? Are those changes already upon us?
Read More »The Economics of It All (with some funny numbers)