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Friday, June 20, 2008

Law - Northwestern University School of Law plans to offer 2-year program [Updated]

Jodi S. Cohen of the Chicago Tribune reports today in a story that begins:

In a move that could shake up legal education, Northwestern University School of Law plans to announce Friday that it will begin offering students a chance to get a law degree in two years instead of the traditional three.

Becoming the first top-tier law school—and the third in the country—to offer an accelerated program is the latest change at a school that is departing from the traditional focus on legal reasoning and case-law analysis to also teach skills such as accounting, teamwork and project management.

From later in the lengthy story:
University of Chicago professor and former dean Geoffrey Stone called the two-year program "irresponsible" and said it risked producing inferior lawyers who haven't had time to develop intellectual and analytical skills.

"My sense is that compressing the educational process is likely to seriously derogate from the quality," he said. "What is lost is likely to be much more than anything that is gained by hustling the students through more quickly."

University of Illinois associate dean Lawrence Solum said students in a two-year program would have less time to explore career opportunities during the summer.

"Law school is already an extraordinarily intense experience and my gut instinct is that cramming it into fewer weeks and months is not likely to improve the quality of the education," he said. "If anything, law students already are doing too much in too few hours."

Van Zandt said he expected some criticism. "Any time you innovate, you are always going to have people who pooh-pooh it or look down their nose," he said. "Law and legal education is tremendously conservative."

[Updated] The WSJ Law Blog has now picked up this story and has details about the program - tuition, curriculum, etc.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on June 20, 2008 08:05 AM
Posted to General Law Related