1L
October 8th, 2006 at 19:54Behind closed doors this past Thursday, the faculty of Harvard Law School voted to majorly reform the first-year curriculum, a curriculum begun in the 1870s by HLS dean Christopher Columbus Langdell and that has been in place for over a century in damn near every U.S. law school. The way it was was Contracts, Torts, Property, Civil Procedure, and Criminal Law—first year law students (”1Ls”) would spend their whole first year on those areas, moving on to “statute classes” and other electives in their second and third years. Starting with the class of 2010, Harvard will augment the 130-year-old slate with courses in “Legislation and Regulation,” public international law, international economic law, comparative law, and a special “Problems and Theories” course to exclusively occupy a new January term at HLS.
Although this is a curricular and not a pedagogical reform, the nature of the new foundational courses—especially the “Problems and Theories” course—may signal a move away from another core law school custom: the case method. Under this method, which like the traditional curriculum is the way of things in nearly every American law school, law students learn the law by reading edited judicial opinions out of “casebooks” where the selected opinions are organized to form a tour of the book’s subject. Dean Langdell invented this, too. To teach in this special way, Langdell needed a special kind of professor, and so he promptly did away with a law faculty composed mainly of successful lawyers. He claimed, “what qualifies a person to teach law is not experience in the work of a lawyer’s office, and not experience in dealing with men, nor experience in the trial or argument of cases, not experience, in short, in using law, but experience in learning law.”
Thankfully for those of us who came to law school to work in lawyer’s offices, deal with men, argue cases, and actually use the law, John Saeger Bradway created the first law school clinic in 1928, and clinical education at law schools has grown and matured ever since. Plus, more and more folks with some influence are beginning to question the effectiveness of the case method in preparing useful lawyers. Gerry Spence, for instance, tells the story of a renowned Denver attorney who won’t hire new law graduates anymore, but instead hires nurses. “‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘They’ve been taught to ask intelligent questions of the patient and to listen to somebody who is hurt or frightened. They have been taught to care about the patient and write reports that others can rely on. They can get to the bottom of a case for me. Young lawyers just get in the way.’”
For me, although the 1L year provided a necessary foundation for understanding the law, when I began working on real problems—over the summers and then finally in a clinical program during my final year—I realized that the law school curriculum was not doing all it could for me. I hope that Harvard’s new approach is helpful to the next generation of law students. And if it isn’t, I hope American law schools will be daring enough to change it before waiting another 130 years.
October 9th, 2006 at 17:13
If you want to study the law as you would study refrigerator repair, that’s fine. Some of us went to law school for the academic pursuit, and bemoan the “practicalization” of law school
October 9th, 2006 at 21:53
And some of us are looking for some balance between the two.
October 10th, 2006 at 21:14
I originally read these comments this morning, and originally thought I, too, wanted balance between an academic approach and a practical, vocational approach.
During the day, I changed my mind, kind of. I mean, there has to be some balance, but I think we really need most of our law schools to strongly emphasize “refrigerator repair” legal education.
For sure, I enjoyed the academic aspects of law school. Probably more than almost everyone in the school during my stay. But
(1) although I’m not going to scour the web for stastical backup for this claim, my understanding is that most law students entered law school to go into practice afterwards;
(2) there are LL.M. programs that focus on academic, law-professor law, not to mention electives that emphasize that aspect of legal thought;
(3) far more importantly than anything else, there is a crisis in the provision and quality of legal services—to all economic classes—that hasn’t really gotten any better in a century or more.
In fact, it was just this kind of a crisis, I’m told, that led medical schools to reform their curricula and pedagogy toward a strong practical focus in the early 1900s. In that case, it was a public health crisis. I guess things like that are easier to notice, at least from the positions of privilege that postgraduate students and professional school faculties occupy, than the access to justice crisis.
Things like “articling” (mandatory apprenticeship under a lawyer after law school but before admission to the bar), which they have here in Canada, could be helpful. But frankly, after thinking even more about this, I think we need some substantial overhauling of the law school experience. Even if it does dumb the whole thing down in some ways.
October 13th, 2006 at 8:18
I agree with Ritchie, that there has to be some balance, but I think it is important to remember some of the things that is perhaps most useful about academic law. Issues such as rights for criminals, how to treat crimes that may be borne of necessity - such as killing a siamese twin who is morbidly ill in order to save the other one (not a hypothetical) and other questions that invoke philosophical discussion and other considerations.
I think the unique thing about law school (at least the one I am attending) is that it forces you to consider problems from a rigorous, multi-disciplinary approach. Thinking about the law seems to me to be essential, even to practicing lawyers who rarely work outside of a specific, technical area.
I have worked at a law firm for a summer, and (as a Canadian) will be articling there. I know from that experience that some more practical training would have been useful for me before working in the law. However, I will get much of that training at work, but it is also a place where I will never be asked to think about the question of whether tort law should be an economic idea that creates incentives for good behaviour, or about the relationship between two individuals, and about the wronged being made whole.
All this is not to say that clinical education is not valuable, and may be essential to training good lawyers. But, the things that law school can give us in terms of academic focus and equipping us to think about important questions is something that should be considered and accomplished while in school.
November 16th, 2006 at 18:53
[…] This post will not mark the first time I have questioned the American law school and bar admissions system. But today I got the latest issue of the ABA Journal and saw where a Richland, WA, lawyer had written in to complain about the Journal’s August cover story on minority women lawyers and how they’re generally not making partner at big firms. The Richland lawyer argued that just as many “young Euro-American men” are having the same experience and that the ABA should “start concentrating on real lawyer problems” like “the issue of mentoring and how lawyers right out of law school make the transition to practice, no matter what their sex or ethnicity.” […]
November 26th, 2006 at 18:20
[…] About a month ago, Harvard Law School decided to reform its first-year curriculum—a slate of courses in use for over a century by just about every American law school. People thought that was a big deal, but it’s nothing whatever compared to what’s about to happen in the United Kingdom. […]
December 13th, 2006 at 0:42
[…] At the time, I was in transit between one snowed-under Canadian metropolis to another deep-frozen one, and so maybe that’s how I missed this. But at the end of November the Stanford Law School announced that it would not be one-upped by Harvard’s plans to dramatically reform the long-standing American law school curriculum. The Stanford changes, like Harvard’s, are progressive and sweeping—and because both sets are coming from rarefiedest of the elitest (Stanford is #2 and Harvard #3, if you believe in rankings), they will be facile trendsetters. […]