Peter Friedman
Lawyer
Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity
Do you think law schools teach their students how to practice law?
I’m a law professor, but I’ve always been mystified by law school. For one thing, it strikes me as remarkably odd that my experience in full-time practice (nearly twelve years) is more (much more) than the vast majority of the professors on the faculties I’ve been part of. For another, what I learned in law school never made much sense to me until I actually began to practice. I always wondered why the knowledge I picked up in practice that “put it all together” for me hadn’t been there in law school in the first place. I suppose the opinion expressed here is a perfect illustration of why that is, but, still, what has always informed my teaching is my effort to bring into law school those pieces that were missing in my own legal education and that, if they had been there, would have made a world of difference.
In short, learning law cannot be separated from learning the practice of law. And law schools, for some reason, don’t seem to think their job is to teach their students the practice of law.
My views are clearly minority ones within law school academia, but they clearly are not so in the legal practice. As Above the Law reported last week: “United Technologies‘ General Counsel, Chester Paul Beach . . . stood up and told approximately 75 law school deans and legal educators from around the country:
We don’t allow first or second year associates to work on any of our matters without special permission, because they’re worthless.
And last week, at the Harvard Law School/New York Law School Future of Education Conference,
Vielka Holness, Director of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Pre Law Institute, . . . said that schools need to bridge the gap between legal theory and actual practice. . . . Most importantly, she said that you need to look further up the pipeline, so students go into law school with an idea of what they need to learn in order to be successful practitioners.
Gillian Hadfield, Professor of Law and Professor of Economics at USC, . . . said that law schools weren’t even very good at doing the things that they think they’re doing well. She had some great examples about how bad students are when asked to pick out the important information in the case, or even pick out the information that will be important to a client.
Elie Mystal, the author of the post, concludes, in response to Hadfield’s point:
It’s an important note. The kind of information regurgitation that will get an ‘A’ in torts and help you pass the bar will make your memo bleed red — if you’re lucky enough to find a mid-level that will even bother to read it.
August 25th, 2010 at 3:42 pm
[...] I’ve made plain my disdain for the ways law schools neglect what anyone outside law school faculties would presume is the central purpose of law schools — to train law students how to be lawyers. Among the ways this neglect manifests itself is the second class status accorded most clinicians and legal writing professors — those professors whose focus is on teaching practice — in most law schools. Now Brent E. Newton, an adjunct professor at Georgetown and the Deputy Staff Director of the U.S. Sentencing Commission) has written Preaching What They Don’t Practice: Why Law Faculties’ Preoccupation with Impractical Scholarship and Devaluation of Practical Competencies Obstruct Reform in the Legal Academy, 62 S.C. L. Rev. ___ (2010). Here’s a taste of Newton’s article: Especially at law schools in the upper echelons of the U.S. News & World Report rankings, the core of the faculties seem indifferent or even hostile to the concept of law school as a professional school with the primary mission of producing competent practitioners. … Regardless whether they possess a Ph.D., a vastly disproportionate number of new law professors graduated from so-called “elite” law schools, which not coincidentally employ the largest percentage of impractical faculty. “Law professors are a self-perpetuating elite, chosen in overwhelming part for a single skill: the ability to do well consistently on law school examinations, primarily those taken as 1L’s, and preferably ones taken at elite “national” law schools. Some critics contend this homogeneity in law school faculties has resulted in an ethos of perceived intellectual superiority and classism and has made full-time professors, at least those with tenure, jealous of their privileged positions. Other critics contend that many law professors are so absorbed in their scholarly pursuits that they are largely unconcerned with students’ needs – academic or otherwise. … [...]