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Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Law - Law schools look at reinventing their first (or third) years

A reader this afternoon pointed me to this entry in the Empirical Legal Studies Blog about plans at the IU-Bloomington School of Law. Some quotes:

A 4-Credit 1L Course on the Legal Profession

Yes, that is right. After a year of committee work and a few weeks of intense deliberations, the faculty at Indiana Law recently voted to revise our 1L curriculum to make room for a new 4-credit Legal Professions course.

Our strategic plan makes a commitment to “offer our students a continuously updated curriculum that meets the changing needs of the profession and professionalism." This new course attempts to actually deliver on those words. It also represents a large bet on the pedagogical value of socio-legal research on the profession.

The entry references the recent Carnegie Report, "Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (2007)."

As reported in this Jan. 26th ILB entry, the Carnegie Report was also referenced in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece - "Law schools rarely teach students how to be lawyers." A quote:

This month the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching issued a report criticizing the Socratic case method that dominates law-school teaching. According to the report, it does little to prepare lawyers to work with real clients or to resolve morally complex issues. Several months ago Harvard Law School announced a reform of its first-year curriculum to require classes in "problem solving," among other things. There appears to be an emerging consensus that although law schools may teach students how to "think like a lawyer," they don't really teach them how to be a lawyer.
As for Harvard Law, an Oct. 7, 2006 story in the Boston Globe by Sacha Pfeiffer reported:
The Harvard Law School faculty has voted unanimously to overhaul its first-year curriculum by focusing more on complex problem-solving, international law, and modern law-making by government bodies and administrative agencies, marking a significant departure from more than a century of traditional legal education.

The shift is a marked change from the so-called case method , which was developed at Harvard Law in the 1870s, became the basis of legal education nationwide, and remains the way most law students are taught . It relies on appellate court decisions to teach core legal principles, and does not address the huge body of contemporary law created by statutes and regulations rather than judicial opinions. * * *

The new curriculum, which will be phased in beginning with next year's entering class, will devote fewer hours to traditional courses like torts, property, and contracts, and place more emphasis on international and comparative law, since most aspects of modern legal practice have a global dimension. It also will introduce two first-year classes, one designed to teach students about the universe of laws created by entities other than courts, and one that will focus on complex problem-solving.

``We're very good at teaching first-year students how to read and analyze cases, make analogies and distinctions, and argue other sides of an issue," Kagan said. ``But we're less good at teaching people how to be creative, flexible, innovative problem-solvers, and this is an attempt to remedy that weakness." * * *

``Many people's picture of a lawyer is someone in a courtroom, but the fact of the matter is very few lawyers practice inside courtrooms," said professor Martha L. Minow, who chaired the curriculum committee. ``So we are making a strong statement that legal education ought to reflect the problem-solving, prospective, constructive, legislative, comparative, and international work that is central to law today."

An Oct. 24th, 2006 article in The National Law Journal about the Harvard changes concludes:
Although Northwestern University School of Law recently altered its first-year legal research and writing course to include a broader communications and legal-reasoning component, it does not plan to change markedly its 1L curriculum, said the school's dean, David Van Zandt.

"I'm not a big fan of what Harvard's done," he said.

Harvard's new course on legislation and regulation will focus on the separation of powers, the legislative process, statutory interpretation, administrative agency practice and more. For the global legal systems course, students will choose one of three classes: public international law, international economic law and comparative law.

Students will take the problems and theories course after they complete their first term. It will include solving problems from simulated case studies. Harvard will accommodate the changes by reducing the number of class hours in torts, contracts, civil procedure, criminal law and property, and by adding a new January term for first-year students for the problem-solving course. It will implement the changes over the next three years.

As often happens, as I was completing this entry, I ran across something that put it all in a different perspective. Today's WSJ has an article on p. B1 ($$$)by Amir Efrati about how the dean of a really obscure 4th tier law school, the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law, has some of the country's biggest law firms making offers to his students. A few quotes:
A first-time dean and Harvard Law grad, Mr. Gordon got his school on the radar of the top-tier firms by enlisting a stable of big-time private-practice lawyers to join an advisory board that's now some 60 members strong. His pitch: Help Detroit Mercy improve its third-year curriculum by creating a required set of courses that simulate real-life practice. * * *

The idea of focusing the curriculum on practice resonated with the lawyers. In fact, many have long complained that law school devotes too much attention to theory and leaves students unprepared to practice, even as the market demands that firms pay new hires high salaries from day one. Many students are also no fans of the third year of school, feeling it's a repeat of the same kind of work analyzing cases that they did in the first two years.

Students "arrive and they don't know where they fit in, how to draft an escrow, a merger agreement," says Jonathan J. Lerner, a corporate partner at Skadden Arps who is on the Detroit Mercy board.

The WSJ Blog picks up the story here.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on May 23, 2007 07:24 PM
Posted to General Law Related