Over a century ago influential members of the public began to worry about the social order. In the face of large numbers of immigrants with no cultural connection to English social and political values (Morton 1984; Condliffe Langemann 1992), and significant class distinctions arising as a consequence of the great revolution in American business and industry (Mink 1986), all sorts of groups arose to help “fix” the problems that might have been viewed as threatening the Republic. (Garland 1994; Kleppner 1979). This was the age of the Progressive Party and a new sort of Enlightenment progressivism in the United States—things could be fixed and made better, the application of “scientific” or “rational” principles could solve all problems. (Howland 1921).
Among the more pressing issues of the early 20th century was the training of lawyers. The late 19th century saw a revolution in the legitimacy of methods for the training of lawyers. Abandoning the traditional customary system of training in customary (common) law as primitive, the new scientific age successfully gave rise to a new science of law and legal training to be based in the University—not the law office. (LaPiana 1994). By the early 21st century the law school stood triumphant atop a system of certification for entry into legal practice in the United States. But that triumph has not gone without a certain amount of criticism. On the one hand, some critics have suggested the present system may not be up to reflecting the changes—actual or hoped for—within American society. (Lynn 1999). Others have suggested the need for a more rigorously academic turn. (Watson 2005). Still others have suggested the need to reform the legal profession rather than its system of training. (Rhode 2000). Professor Rhode explained: “This mismatch between what law schools supply and what law practice requires argues for a different approach. The diversity in America's legal needs demands corresponding diversity in its legal education. Accreditation frameworks should recognize in form what is true in fact. Legal practice is becoming increasingly specialized. It makes little sense to require the same training for the Wall Street securities specialist and the small town matrimonial lawyer.” (Id., at 190).
Yet another persistent group of influential groups, starting almost from the inception of the turn to academic legal education, have suggested a certain danger in the increasingly academic character of legal education. Among the most persistent, and most influential of this group has been the Carnegie Foundation. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was founded in “905 and chartered in 1906 by an act of Congress, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is an independent policy and research center with a primary mission "to do and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of the teacher and the cause of higher education." (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, The Carnegie Foundation).
Over the course of the last century, it has fought a losing battle to reform American legal education. It has sought to recognize the class divisions in American legal practice by a corresponding diversity in the forms of legal education offered. (Reed 1921). Additional studies of legal education, important in their time, were produced in the 1970s and 1990s. (Packer and Ehrlich 1972; Boyer 1990; Condliffe Langemann 1999).
The Carnegie Foundation has now published the results of a study of legal education in the United States. That study “involved a comprehensive look at teaching and learning in American and Canadian law schools today. Intensive field work was conducted at a cross-section of 16 law schools during the 1999-2000 academic year.” (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Program Areas, Legal Education Study). Published in book form as Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (Sullivan 2007 [hereafter Educating Lawyers]), the study is bound to have serious impact, though whether that impact will be successful or permanent remains to be seen. Educating Lawyers is supposed to provide “an opportunity to rethink "thinking like a lawyer"—the paramount educational construct currently employed, which affords students powerful intellectual tools while also shaping education and professional practice in subsequent years in significant, yet often unrecognized, ways.” (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Program Areas, Legal Education Study). The principal thesis is that academic law is losing touch with both its roots in the practice of law and its mission—to educate lawyers for practice. However, through practical application of the techniques offered, grounded in a change in fundamental conception of the nature of the legal education enterprise, legal education can be appropriately redirected. What is new is the suggestion that the ends of legal education ought not to be confined to the teaching of legal doctrine and analysis, but also include an equal dose of “the several facets of practice included under the rubric of lawyering” (Educating Lawyers, at 194), and a broad “emphasis on inculcation of the identity, values, and dispositions consonant with the fundamental purpose of the legal profession,” (Id.) a purpose left substantially undefined.
This short essay starts with a critical review of Educating Lawyers. The focus is on the basic assumptions about legal education underlying the suggestions for the changes proposed. These assumptions both frame and may limit the suggestions for change. And it is the nature of the limitations inherent in the foundational assumptions of the study that must be understood to extract the most value from Educating Lawyers. The attitude changes proposed in its Introduction, and Chapter One are elaborated as practice models in the remaining chapters of the work. The essay suggests that, for all of its theoretical insights, the reality of the practical suggestions made will have little effect on the drift of legal academic education away from its roots. This is inevitable in the context of great changes in American law itself, as it drifts further from its common law rotts and embraces in theory and fact a different framework for understanding law and the relation ship between law and lawyers.
Educating Lawyers is meant to respond to a crisis of professionalism. (Educating Lawyers, at 29-33). “For professional education, the question is how to provide a powerful experience of what it means to take up a profession.” (Educating Lawyers, at 30). And that question is the core problem taken up by the study. For the providers of legal education have lost touch with the profession whose educational objectives are ethical. “Ethics in a professional curriculum ought to provide a context in which students and faculty alike can grasp and discuss, as well as practice, the core commitments that define the profession.” (Educating Lawyers, at 31). That conclusion, in turn, is grounded in a set of core assumptions about the relationship between academic legal education and its stakeholders. Educating Lawyers starts with a presumption—that the principal stakeholder of legal education is the bar, and that the bar has assumed a critical role in the functioning of the American state. “Thus, the focus of this book is on the preparation of lawyers, more particularly on their preparation in law school—the crucial portal to the practice of law.” (Educating Lawyers, at 1). It interrogates this function through what it describes as “an unusual angle of vision” (Educating Lawyers, at 1) that focuses “on the daily practices of teaching and learning through which future legal professionals are formed.” (Educating Lawyers, at 2-3).
But law schools and the legal profession no longer work as a harmonious whole—a whole focused on the same set of norms, tasks, goals, and incentives. When lawyer and law instructor were fungible and interchangeable, the common culture that bound them, in terms of objectives, frames of reference, professional incentives and the like, served to ensure that law instructors served the interests of the bench and bar, as then constituted. But for the last hundred years or so, it seems, the legal academy has been falling under the sway of a model that may not serve the interests of the profession as well as it serves its own interests. (Educating Lawyers, at 4-7). The authors of Educating Lawyers somewhat charitably describe this split as producing a “hybrid institution.” This hybrid blends two distinct and not necessarily complementary communities—that of the ancient traditions of the common law bar, and that of the so-called modern research university. (Educating Lawyers, at 4). But what should have been a happy union has gone bad—“as American law schools have developed, their academic genes have become dominant.” (Educating Lawyers, at 4). Thus the overall goal of Educating Lawyers is to bring balance back to this arrangement. (Educating Lawyers, at 12-15). And for that purpose, Educating Lawyers proposes a unitary framework for education within which the doctrinal, practice and ethical elements of practice can be integrated (Educating Lawyers, at 194-197) within the normative context of a university environment in the form of a set of three related apprenticeships of professional education. (Educating Lawyers, at 27-29).
Yet, for all that, it remains unclear whether thus sort of hybrid unity is possible within the context of an enterprise (university sourced professional education) that is neither fish nor fowl. Part of the problem, well identified by the authors, is described by them as a set of powerful “external factors.” (Educating Lawyers, at 33-34). But what the authors characterize as external factors are in really a set of internal factors—internal, that is, to the values and practices of the academic community within which law schools operate. These include the disciplinary mechanisms of the rankings by outsiders (Educating Lawyers, at 33), and the costs of providing the sort of education that students are willing to pay for. (Id.). Though it is hard to see how those factors are external to the university as such. Whatever their demerits, the disclosure standards used represent in large measure the decision taken both by industry leaders (the so-called top schools), and the consumers of those services (the bar and potential students). They serve as a significant disciplinary tool for the organization of academic communities as such and affect decisions with respect to the allocation of resources and the competition for faculty in ways that are internal to legal education as part of a university community. “Within academic circles, legitimacy and respectability accrued to whatever could be assimilated to the model of formal, science like discourse.” (Educating Lawyers, at 6).
At least of the factors identified are arguably “external.” Teaching to the test (the bar examination) can be viewed as external to the law school. (Educating Lawyers, at 6). But that analysis fails if we adhere to the initial assumption of law schools as a hybrid institution. The bar examination may be external to the law school as an academic institution, but it is hardly external to the law school in its role as part of the community of the bar. The bar examination, in that sense, is no more external to the law school, than an examination in any course offered within the institutional framework of the university. Likewise, the hiring practices of the leading law firms are hardly external to the institution grounded in its principal relationship with the bar. (Id.). Decisions of the legal academy’s principal stakeholder (as identified in Educating Lawyers) here serves appropriate disciplinary role, but one internal to the institution itself. Hybridity, in this context, makes for complexity. In this case, the external may be far smaller, and contain internal contradictions, than that in non-hybrid systems.
But the greater problem is normative and may be insurmountable. The authors spend a bit of time identifying, and then ignoring, the crucial dilemma of legal education: the nature of law and the function of the legal profession within it. Since the mid 19th century there has been a contest in the United States for the “soul” of law. (Backer 2007). The progressive nature of American culture began to see the customary law as increasingly obsolete, or at best an impediment to progress. Scientific principles that began to infest all of the social sciences eventually found form in the science of law. Of course, the authors of Educating Lawyers put it a bit less provocatively. (Educating Lawyers, at 5). Whichever way one chooses to “hear” the insight, that science, founded on a need to make sense and give order (in the sense understood in the great codification efforts of the European (and especially German) civil law) to law produced a great movement toward positivism that has to some great extent overcome the ancient foundations of the self conception of the bench and bar, and the understanding of its mission within the American legal framework. (Id.). “All this spelled the eclipse of traditional forms of practitioner-directed apprenticeship by academic instruction given by scholar teachers.” (Id.). And so the authors of Educating Lawyers can state with some confidence that “Law entered the American University at a time when attempts to blend academic and practitioner traditions of legal training resulted in what was, in some respects, less a reciprocal enrichment than a protracted hostile takeover.” (Id.).
The problem then, is not merely methodological—the basis of the proposals in Educating Lawyers—but part of a complex contest for the control of the production of knowledge, and especially for control of the understanding of law in the United States. The contest between the bar and the university represents in symbolic form, a larger contest between the customary law origins and culture of the early American Republic, with the needs and aspirations of a positive law state into which the United States is evolving. But this contest, now over a century old, has been decided for all practical purposes—and the traditional bench and bar, as guardians of the customary law, have lost. Indeed, the authors of Educating Lawyers suggest this in their reminder of the century long struggle of the Carnegie Foundation against the tide of the reconstruction of legal education in the face of the imperatives of membership in university communities and in the contest for reshaping the meaning of law and the place of lawyers within American society. (Id., at 18-20) . “Thanks in part to the development of legal scholarship, the law schools of the leading universities no longer fear being dishonored as ‘mere trade schools.’” (Id., at 7).
But consider the problem of following the logic of this argument to its end. In this respect, Educating Lawyers, fails before its starts, at least with respect to the grand vision of restoring balance between the bar and university communities represented in legal academic education. The bar is now necessarily a junior partner in the enterprise. So the critical mission now becomes much more modest: to preserve some sort of role for the bar within an academic enterprise that serves the interests of a positivist legal order in which lawyers have a more pervasive but much more diminished role.
“In the world of legal theory, this new spirit was exemplified in the efforts of legal positivists, who viewed law as an instrument of rational policymaking—a set of rules and techniques rather than a craft of interpretation and adaptation embedded in the common law.” (Educating Lawyers, at 5). Nothing has changed. And though Educating Lawyers may lament this passage of power from the bar to the legislator and the academic, it does not propose revolution. And so, the bulk of the study reduces itself to an intense review of micro concerns—methodology for the most part. “The focus of such attention falls on teaching practices that enable learners to take part in the basic features of the professional practice itself.” (Educating Lawyers, at 9). The focus is on urging the university to incorporate a broader methodology that nods in the direction of the bar, without seeking to undo the shift in power over law. The law school is now to focus not only on the development of conceptual knowledge, but also on skills and ethics. (Educating Lawyers, at 12-14). The purpose is to socialize the law students to the realities of law, today, but it is not to shift power back to the bar or to turn back the clock on the primacy of the common law. The academy has won, in this sense, and the only object left is to ensure that they find of way of training lawyers to function within the new realities more effectively. (Educating Lawyers, at 23-24). This perhaps explains the focus on the emphasis on signature pedagogies as a method of specialization. (Id. at 23). These are understood in the manner of disciplinary techniques elaborated in Continental theory to which the authors of Educating Lawyers appear to allude. (Foucault 1977, at 195-228; Bourdieu 1987, 837-39).
In a sense, then, the roles of the bar and the university have been flipped from their relationship a hundred years ago. “”Law school scan help the profession become smarter and more reflective about strengthening its slipping legitimacy by finding new ways to advance its enduring commitments.” (Educating Lawyers, at 128). The forms of the old partnership are to be maintained—thus the emphasis on the apprenticeship models as metaphors for the methodological suggestions in Educating Lawyers (Educating Lawyers, at 25-29), but the focus is now on the construction of a lawyer better suited for the times. (Educating Lawyers, at 31-32).
Yet methodology can be important, and sometimes even acquire a normative dimension. (Backer 2007a). Educating Lawyers first focuses on the Socratic method as the core of legal education’s signature pedagogy and its utility to the goals of extending the law school teaching objectives to skills and ethics. (Educating Lawyers, at 47-86). The authors write that “[i]n this chapter we attempt to unlock the secret of the learning process in the case-dialogue method and place it within the overall process of preparing legal professionals.” (Id., at 47). It then explores the skills aspect itself. (Educating Lawyers, at 87-125). The authors tell us that in “this chapter we look at some current promising experiments in the preparation of students for legal practice. In doing so, we hope to call attention to the largely unrealized potential that these models offer for addressing many criticisms of today’s law schools, those of the profession and the public.” (Id., at 88-89). It then focuses on the place of law school as a site for professional formation. (Educating Lawyers, at 126-161). Here the authors seek to “show how virtually all forms of the teaching tat tales place in law schools, . . . are pedagogies that can be used to shape professional identity.” (Id., at 128). It ends with a set of implementation recommendations (Educating Lawyers, at 162-184), in which the authors “look closely at assessment in legal education—how it is done, how it might be done.” Id., at 164).
And methodology may play a critically important role in the naturalization of new areas of legal study within the American academy—for example international and transnational law and legal study. In this sense, Educating Lawyers, provides a powerful framework for understanding a basis for the incorporation of new practice areas that will maximize their utility to the bench and bar, while satisfying the institutional needs of the university, and remaining connected to their own sources. It is with this in mind that I briefly review the implementation proposals set forth in chapters 2-5 of Educating Lawyers.
The methodological focus of Educating Lawyers is on socialization. What law schools do well is teach doctrine. What law schools must do better is to teach the individual to “think like a lawyer.” (Educating Lawyers, at 47). That involves more than the transmission of doctrine, even the transmission in a peculiar way. It involves the socialization of the individual into the mores and habits of a community, and in doing so more consciously take up the role once reserved to the bar and bound up in its transmission of the “craft, judgment, and public responsibility” of lawyers. (Educating Lawyers, at 4). That socialization focuses on the case dialogue method of instruction.
While the authors of Educating Lawyers place much positive value on the case dialogue method as the signature pedagogy of legal education, they suggest the possibility of broader application. While the case dialogue method as classically developed is a superb instrument of socialization within a core mission to inculcate doctrinal knowledge, it is missing a piece. That piece is values. (Educating Lawyers, at 56-58). This is value understood as both ethics and a direction toward the “right” result. There is a need to form the lawyer, through this power agency, as both a legal technician and moral agent. (Educating Lawyers, at 84). This points to the need for education beyond doctrine.
Education beyond doctrine serves as a bridges to practice that is of critical importance to the authors of Educating Lawyers. Here the authors confront the realities of the class hierarchies that are inevitable within the normative structures of university culture. This the authors refer to as the “problematic legitimacy” of clinical legal education. (Educating Lawyers, at 89). “The standard is so securely established that there are few leverage points from which to effect change to the model.” (Educating Lawyers, at 90). Certainly such change is impossible if inconsistent within the values structure of university organization. The authors, drawing on earlier reforming efforts (Educating Lawyers, at 91-95), propose to change the dynamic indirectly, by changing the way in which clinical education is valued, and then integrating this segment of legal education within the doctrinal mainstream. (Id., at 100-111). The core of that argument is based on an argument that privileges teaching case theory (Id., at 124-125), that is “the lawyer’s task of understanding the client’s needs and constructing a strategy to address those needs.” (Id., at 122).
The last building block of an integrated approach to legal education focuses on issues of professional identity and purpose. Lawyers are demoralized and their reputation is diminishing. The author’s ascribe this to a disconnection with morals and values on which the profession was and ought to continue to be grounded. (Educating Lawyers, at 126-131). But it is also possible that the demoralization arises as a consequence of the instability in the self-identification of a profession that no longer serves, as in Coke’s day, as the guardian of the common law against both the state and the individual. Instead, as agents of a state which has increasingly absorbed lawmaking power, the lawyer finds herself between professions. In a sense, Educating Lawyers acknowledges both this transitional dilemma and the ultimate new source of equilibrium—grounded in the mission of the university law school to retool the lawyers it produces for their new role in society. (Educating Lawyers, at 131-132). This requires a dialogue between the moral and the legal, for which the authors provide an example from contracts law. (Educating Lawyers, at 142-144). Uniting cognitive, practical and ethical-social development requires a broad range of courses that take students from a passive role as the imbibers of doctrine to externship courses that permit them to try out what they have learned. (Id., at 147). The relationship between these integrative approaches based on both the infusion of ordinary classes with social and ethical issues and the development of more ethically charged courses radiating from out of the traditional course in professional responsibility is also explored. (Id., at 151-158).
Lastly, Educating Lawyers tackles issues of measurement. There is a bit of irony here. For it is measurement, in part, that has brought the profession (and by that I mean the profession of legal education) to this impasse and the tensions with its traditional principal professional stakeholder—the bar. The slew of private rankings—and the important real life effect of these private efforts—evidences a pervasive academic culture of ranking. Hierarchy, subordination, judgment are key features of academic culture. It is no wonder that they carry over to the pedagogy offered to train students. Without reform in the way in which law schools create their own hierarchies, and subordinate, there can be little real hope for change in the way law schools assess their own work products. Still, Educating Lawyers makes a case against single end of semester examinations (Id., at 167), and grading on the curve. (Id., at 168-170). Drawing from related professions, Educating Lawyers makes a case for change. (Id., at 171-179). They favor what they call institutional intentionality: “linking feedback to students with feedback from students about how well they are achieving the learning goals for the course.” (Id., at 180).
Putting this all together, the authors of Educating Lawyers warn against treating their suggestions as an additional component to be added to the curriculum of legal education. They warn that the point is to avoid both the segregation of professionalism and ethical components in legal education. (Id., at 190-191). But there is tension here between the elegance of conclusions demanded by following theory to its end and the realities of an academy unlikely to want to change very much in ways that negatively affect theior individual or collective interests. Thus, the authors make a case for clinical legal education is also made (Id., at 120-122), yet make clear their preference for an integration model is preferred. They put it this way: “we endorse a different strategy, which we call integrative rather than additive. . . . The core insight behind the integrative strategy is that effective educational efforts must be understood in holistic rather than atomistic terms.” They warn that “[l]egal scholarship has generated a succession of bold, even radical, new ways of understanding the law, but this kind of scholarly innovation has proved entirely compatible with a stable, even conservative orientation toward educational practice and is part and parcel of an orientation that privileges the cognitive apprenticeship in its present, stand alone configuration.” (Id., at 192). For this purpose, “the common core of legal education needs to be expanded in qualitative terms to encompass substantial experience with practice, as well as opportunities to wrestle with the issues of professionalism.” (Id., at 195). In that context, educational climate matters. “The goal should be to create a campus culture that is a positive force.” (Id., at 183). It is clear that this can be done. But again there is cognitive dissonance. Law schools will have to pay much attention to reforming the climate among faculty and between faculty and administration, if they mean to be successful in changing the educational climate generally. Faculties are likely to reproduce for their students the academic climate in which they operate. What seems like an innocuous and separable component, thus suggests complexities untouched by the authors of Educating Lawyers.
But integration is costly. The authors of Educating Lawyers tacitly acknowledge the power of the university model in describing the skill sets necessary to effect the integrative model they propose. (Id., at 202). A principal effect of the move to a university norm set has been to denigrate the practice experience of applicants for teaching positions. In many cases, too much experience is sometimes deemed to poison the candidate for a successful academic career. The idea, roughly, is that people too long in practice have too deeply imbued the values and norms of the bar and will not be able to successfully transition to the norm structure of the university—requiring a focus on doctrine and writing. And thus, “Faculty development programs that consciously aim to increase the mutual understanding of doctrinal and lawyering faculty of each other’s work are likely to improve students’ efforts to make integrated sense of their developing legal competence.” (Id., at 196). All must come to accept a common educational purpose and bend their efforts to that objective. Faculty with different strengths must “work in a complementary relationship.” (Id., at 197).
The study ends with a suggestion of law school steps in the right direction. The models proffered include that of New York University and CCNY, which, in different ways seek “to bring the three aspects of legal apprenticeship into active relation.” (Id., at 197). One alternative seeks to leverage the de facto division of talent (doctrinal faculty who are not lawyers, and lawyers who are in charge of clinical courses) within the university to construct webs of courses that are linked in a way that privilege the three areas of legal training. (Id.). The programs at N.Y.U. are also described in some detail elsewhere. (Id., at 38-43). That approach works for large law schools with substantial resources and an institutional framework that permits an adequate administration of programs of this sort of complexity. Cost is certainly an obstacle. (Id., at 198). And this sort of leverage is necessitated by the privileging of the normative structure of the university that tends to privilege “a distinguished well published faculty that includes leaders of the field.” (Id., at 38). Of course, the field no longer necessarily includes the bench and bar, but the community of academic scholars. (Backer 2002). Another alternative involved a greater investment in integration within the curriculum. That required less attention to leveraging differences in talents and more on more broadly changing the focus of the curriculum. (Id., at 197). The programs at CCNY are described earlier. (Id.,, at 34-38). Yale is cited for its decision to reduce the number of doctrinal courses “and encouraging students to elect an introductory clinical course in their second semester.” (Id., at 197). This is said to point to an intermediate strategy, “a course of study that encourage students to shift their focus between doctrine and practical experience not once but several times, so as to gradually develop more competence in each area while, it is hoped, making more linkages between tem.” (Id.). The programs at Southwestern law School are also identified as failing in this category—these involve some curricular changes. (Id., at 198).
Reduced to its essence, then, Educating Lawyers, as a theoretical exercise, seeks to find a space within university centered and positivism focused academic law for the resulting new realities of law and the responsibilities of the profession. More importantly, as methodology, Educating Lawyers seeks to privilege certain specific principles of legal education. Foremost among them is the integrative principle of education over an additive or compartmentalized approach to legal education. Also important is the tacit acceptance of significant class divisions within legal education—what may be appropriate for “top tier” schools may be beyond the abilities, or even the ambitions, of lower ranked schools. To each class of law school belongs a different level of acceptable approaches to integration. In the language of Educating Lawyers, for every New York University, there is a CCNY, for every Yale Law School there is a Southwestern Law School. For those who still cling to the principle of equality among law schools—of horizontal rather than vertical professional organization, this might be disquieting, but only makes explicit what has been implicit for years. As a consequence, there is a bit of flexibility. But it is grounded in academic reputation and resources. Lastly, Educating Lawyers acknowledges that law schools are incapable of great changes in short order—they can act only incrementally. (Id., at 189-191). Changes have to be adapted to that reality, but ought not to settle for incrementalism as a goal in itself. Partial changes must lead to an holistic objective. (Id., at 191).
Yet at the same time, Educating Lawyers is about nothing if not about both incrementalism and the additive principle of changes to legal education. Faculties will read this work. They will debate its propositions. They will dissect the arguments—at least the micro arguments relating to technique. But the larger issues raised at the beginning of the work will be ignored; and for good reason. There is little that can be done about tectonic changes beyond the control of any one individual or any one institution. And so we are reduced not only to method, but also to formalism. We have become creatures of gesture—as Nietzsche once mocked. And so Educating Lawyers will generate tremendous smoke. But it will produce little fire. The dynamics of institutional change within the academy has been liberated from the bar. That is the great insight from Educating Lawyers. Patches will keep the relationship alive for a while longer, at least until there arise in the United States formal bar sanctioned training schools for lawyers. At that point academic law will become as free from the practice of law, as law making in the United States has become free from its “primitive” common law past.
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Among the more pressing issues of the early 20th century was the training of lawyers. The late 19th century saw a revolution in the legitimacy of methods for the training of lawyers. Abandoning the traditional customary system of training in customary (common) law as primitive, the new scientific age successfully gave rise to a new science of law and legal training to be based in the University—not the law office. (LaPiana 1994). By the early 21st century the law school stood triumphant atop a system of certification for entry into legal practice in the United States. But that triumph has not gone without a certain amount of criticism. On the one hand, some critics have suggested the present system may not be up to reflecting the changes—actual or hoped for—within American society. (Lynn 1999). Others have suggested the need for a more rigorously academic turn. (Watson 2005). Still others have suggested the need to reform the legal profession rather than its system of training. (Rhode 2000). Professor Rhode explained: “This mismatch between what law schools supply and what law practice requires argues for a different approach. The diversity in America's legal needs demands corresponding diversity in its legal education. Accreditation frameworks should recognize in form what is true in fact. Legal practice is becoming increasingly specialized. It makes little sense to require the same training for the Wall Street securities specialist and the small town matrimonial lawyer.” (Id., at 190).
Yet another persistent group of influential groups, starting almost from the inception of the turn to academic legal education, have suggested a certain danger in the increasingly academic character of legal education. Among the most persistent, and most influential of this group has been the Carnegie Foundation. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching was founded in “905 and chartered in 1906 by an act of Congress, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is an independent policy and research center with a primary mission "to do and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of the teacher and the cause of higher education." (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, The Carnegie Foundation).
Over the course of the last century, it has fought a losing battle to reform American legal education. It has sought to recognize the class divisions in American legal practice by a corresponding diversity in the forms of legal education offered. (Reed 1921). Additional studies of legal education, important in their time, were produced in the 1970s and 1990s. (Packer and Ehrlich 1972; Boyer 1990; Condliffe Langemann 1999).
The Carnegie Foundation has now published the results of a study of legal education in the United States. That study “involved a comprehensive look at teaching and learning in American and Canadian law schools today. Intensive field work was conducted at a cross-section of 16 law schools during the 1999-2000 academic year.” (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Program Areas, Legal Education Study). Published in book form as Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (Sullivan 2007 [hereafter Educating Lawyers]), the study is bound to have serious impact, though whether that impact will be successful or permanent remains to be seen. Educating Lawyers is supposed to provide “an opportunity to rethink "thinking like a lawyer"—the paramount educational construct currently employed, which affords students powerful intellectual tools while also shaping education and professional practice in subsequent years in significant, yet often unrecognized, ways.” (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Program Areas, Legal Education Study). The principal thesis is that academic law is losing touch with both its roots in the practice of law and its mission—to educate lawyers for practice. However, through practical application of the techniques offered, grounded in a change in fundamental conception of the nature of the legal education enterprise, legal education can be appropriately redirected. What is new is the suggestion that the ends of legal education ought not to be confined to the teaching of legal doctrine and analysis, but also include an equal dose of “the several facets of practice included under the rubric of lawyering” (Educating Lawyers, at 194), and a broad “emphasis on inculcation of the identity, values, and dispositions consonant with the fundamental purpose of the legal profession,” (Id.) a purpose left substantially undefined.
This short essay starts with a critical review of Educating Lawyers. The focus is on the basic assumptions about legal education underlying the suggestions for the changes proposed. These assumptions both frame and may limit the suggestions for change. And it is the nature of the limitations inherent in the foundational assumptions of the study that must be understood to extract the most value from Educating Lawyers. The attitude changes proposed in its Introduction, and Chapter One are elaborated as practice models in the remaining chapters of the work. The essay suggests that, for all of its theoretical insights, the reality of the practical suggestions made will have little effect on the drift of legal academic education away from its roots. This is inevitable in the context of great changes in American law itself, as it drifts further from its common law rotts and embraces in theory and fact a different framework for understanding law and the relation ship between law and lawyers.
Educating Lawyers is meant to respond to a crisis of professionalism. (Educating Lawyers, at 29-33). “For professional education, the question is how to provide a powerful experience of what it means to take up a profession.” (Educating Lawyers, at 30). And that question is the core problem taken up by the study. For the providers of legal education have lost touch with the profession whose educational objectives are ethical. “Ethics in a professional curriculum ought to provide a context in which students and faculty alike can grasp and discuss, as well as practice, the core commitments that define the profession.” (Educating Lawyers, at 31). That conclusion, in turn, is grounded in a set of core assumptions about the relationship between academic legal education and its stakeholders. Educating Lawyers starts with a presumption—that the principal stakeholder of legal education is the bar, and that the bar has assumed a critical role in the functioning of the American state. “Thus, the focus of this book is on the preparation of lawyers, more particularly on their preparation in law school—the crucial portal to the practice of law.” (Educating Lawyers, at 1). It interrogates this function through what it describes as “an unusual angle of vision” (Educating Lawyers, at 1) that focuses “on the daily practices of teaching and learning through which future legal professionals are formed.” (Educating Lawyers, at 2-3).
But law schools and the legal profession no longer work as a harmonious whole—a whole focused on the same set of norms, tasks, goals, and incentives. When lawyer and law instructor were fungible and interchangeable, the common culture that bound them, in terms of objectives, frames of reference, professional incentives and the like, served to ensure that law instructors served the interests of the bench and bar, as then constituted. But for the last hundred years or so, it seems, the legal academy has been falling under the sway of a model that may not serve the interests of the profession as well as it serves its own interests. (Educating Lawyers, at 4-7). The authors of Educating Lawyers somewhat charitably describe this split as producing a “hybrid institution.” This hybrid blends two distinct and not necessarily complementary communities—that of the ancient traditions of the common law bar, and that of the so-called modern research university. (Educating Lawyers, at 4). But what should have been a happy union has gone bad—“as American law schools have developed, their academic genes have become dominant.” (Educating Lawyers, at 4). Thus the overall goal of Educating Lawyers is to bring balance back to this arrangement. (Educating Lawyers, at 12-15). And for that purpose, Educating Lawyers proposes a unitary framework for education within which the doctrinal, practice and ethical elements of practice can be integrated (Educating Lawyers, at 194-197) within the normative context of a university environment in the form of a set of three related apprenticeships of professional education. (Educating Lawyers, at 27-29).
Yet, for all that, it remains unclear whether thus sort of hybrid unity is possible within the context of an enterprise (university sourced professional education) that is neither fish nor fowl. Part of the problem, well identified by the authors, is described by them as a set of powerful “external factors.” (Educating Lawyers, at 33-34). But what the authors characterize as external factors are in really a set of internal factors—internal, that is, to the values and practices of the academic community within which law schools operate. These include the disciplinary mechanisms of the rankings by outsiders (Educating Lawyers, at 33), and the costs of providing the sort of education that students are willing to pay for. (Id.). Though it is hard to see how those factors are external to the university as such. Whatever their demerits, the disclosure standards used represent in large measure the decision taken both by industry leaders (the so-called top schools), and the consumers of those services (the bar and potential students). They serve as a significant disciplinary tool for the organization of academic communities as such and affect decisions with respect to the allocation of resources and the competition for faculty in ways that are internal to legal education as part of a university community. “Within academic circles, legitimacy and respectability accrued to whatever could be assimilated to the model of formal, science like discourse.” (Educating Lawyers, at 6).
At least of the factors identified are arguably “external.” Teaching to the test (the bar examination) can be viewed as external to the law school. (Educating Lawyers, at 6). But that analysis fails if we adhere to the initial assumption of law schools as a hybrid institution. The bar examination may be external to the law school as an academic institution, but it is hardly external to the law school in its role as part of the community of the bar. The bar examination, in that sense, is no more external to the law school, than an examination in any course offered within the institutional framework of the university. Likewise, the hiring practices of the leading law firms are hardly external to the institution grounded in its principal relationship with the bar. (Id.). Decisions of the legal academy’s principal stakeholder (as identified in Educating Lawyers) here serves appropriate disciplinary role, but one internal to the institution itself. Hybridity, in this context, makes for complexity. In this case, the external may be far smaller, and contain internal contradictions, than that in non-hybrid systems.
But the greater problem is normative and may be insurmountable. The authors spend a bit of time identifying, and then ignoring, the crucial dilemma of legal education: the nature of law and the function of the legal profession within it. Since the mid 19th century there has been a contest in the United States for the “soul” of law. (Backer 2007). The progressive nature of American culture began to see the customary law as increasingly obsolete, or at best an impediment to progress. Scientific principles that began to infest all of the social sciences eventually found form in the science of law. Of course, the authors of Educating Lawyers put it a bit less provocatively. (Educating Lawyers, at 5). Whichever way one chooses to “hear” the insight, that science, founded on a need to make sense and give order (in the sense understood in the great codification efforts of the European (and especially German) civil law) to law produced a great movement toward positivism that has to some great extent overcome the ancient foundations of the self conception of the bench and bar, and the understanding of its mission within the American legal framework. (Id.). “All this spelled the eclipse of traditional forms of practitioner-directed apprenticeship by academic instruction given by scholar teachers.” (Id.). And so the authors of Educating Lawyers can state with some confidence that “Law entered the American University at a time when attempts to blend academic and practitioner traditions of legal training resulted in what was, in some respects, less a reciprocal enrichment than a protracted hostile takeover.” (Id.).
The problem then, is not merely methodological—the basis of the proposals in Educating Lawyers—but part of a complex contest for the control of the production of knowledge, and especially for control of the understanding of law in the United States. The contest between the bar and the university represents in symbolic form, a larger contest between the customary law origins and culture of the early American Republic, with the needs and aspirations of a positive law state into which the United States is evolving. But this contest, now over a century old, has been decided for all practical purposes—and the traditional bench and bar, as guardians of the customary law, have lost. Indeed, the authors of Educating Lawyers suggest this in their reminder of the century long struggle of the Carnegie Foundation against the tide of the reconstruction of legal education in the face of the imperatives of membership in university communities and in the contest for reshaping the meaning of law and the place of lawyers within American society. (Id., at 18-20) . “Thanks in part to the development of legal scholarship, the law schools of the leading universities no longer fear being dishonored as ‘mere trade schools.’” (Id., at 7).
But consider the problem of following the logic of this argument to its end. In this respect, Educating Lawyers, fails before its starts, at least with respect to the grand vision of restoring balance between the bar and university communities represented in legal academic education. The bar is now necessarily a junior partner in the enterprise. So the critical mission now becomes much more modest: to preserve some sort of role for the bar within an academic enterprise that serves the interests of a positivist legal order in which lawyers have a more pervasive but much more diminished role.
“In the world of legal theory, this new spirit was exemplified in the efforts of legal positivists, who viewed law as an instrument of rational policymaking—a set of rules and techniques rather than a craft of interpretation and adaptation embedded in the common law.” (Educating Lawyers, at 5). Nothing has changed. And though Educating Lawyers may lament this passage of power from the bar to the legislator and the academic, it does not propose revolution. And so, the bulk of the study reduces itself to an intense review of micro concerns—methodology for the most part. “The focus of such attention falls on teaching practices that enable learners to take part in the basic features of the professional practice itself.” (Educating Lawyers, at 9). The focus is on urging the university to incorporate a broader methodology that nods in the direction of the bar, without seeking to undo the shift in power over law. The law school is now to focus not only on the development of conceptual knowledge, but also on skills and ethics. (Educating Lawyers, at 12-14). The purpose is to socialize the law students to the realities of law, today, but it is not to shift power back to the bar or to turn back the clock on the primacy of the common law. The academy has won, in this sense, and the only object left is to ensure that they find of way of training lawyers to function within the new realities more effectively. (Educating Lawyers, at 23-24). This perhaps explains the focus on the emphasis on signature pedagogies as a method of specialization. (Id. at 23). These are understood in the manner of disciplinary techniques elaborated in Continental theory to which the authors of Educating Lawyers appear to allude. (Foucault 1977, at 195-228; Bourdieu 1987, 837-39).
In a sense, then, the roles of the bar and the university have been flipped from their relationship a hundred years ago. “”Law school scan help the profession become smarter and more reflective about strengthening its slipping legitimacy by finding new ways to advance its enduring commitments.” (Educating Lawyers, at 128). The forms of the old partnership are to be maintained—thus the emphasis on the apprenticeship models as metaphors for the methodological suggestions in Educating Lawyers (Educating Lawyers, at 25-29), but the focus is now on the construction of a lawyer better suited for the times. (Educating Lawyers, at 31-32).
Yet methodology can be important, and sometimes even acquire a normative dimension. (Backer 2007a). Educating Lawyers first focuses on the Socratic method as the core of legal education’s signature pedagogy and its utility to the goals of extending the law school teaching objectives to skills and ethics. (Educating Lawyers, at 47-86). The authors write that “[i]n this chapter we attempt to unlock the secret of the learning process in the case-dialogue method and place it within the overall process of preparing legal professionals.” (Id., at 47). It then explores the skills aspect itself. (Educating Lawyers, at 87-125). The authors tell us that in “this chapter we look at some current promising experiments in the preparation of students for legal practice. In doing so, we hope to call attention to the largely unrealized potential that these models offer for addressing many criticisms of today’s law schools, those of the profession and the public.” (Id., at 88-89). It then focuses on the place of law school as a site for professional formation. (Educating Lawyers, at 126-161). Here the authors seek to “show how virtually all forms of the teaching tat tales place in law schools, . . . are pedagogies that can be used to shape professional identity.” (Id., at 128). It ends with a set of implementation recommendations (Educating Lawyers, at 162-184), in which the authors “look closely at assessment in legal education—how it is done, how it might be done.” Id., at 164).
And methodology may play a critically important role in the naturalization of new areas of legal study within the American academy—for example international and transnational law and legal study. In this sense, Educating Lawyers, provides a powerful framework for understanding a basis for the incorporation of new practice areas that will maximize their utility to the bench and bar, while satisfying the institutional needs of the university, and remaining connected to their own sources. It is with this in mind that I briefly review the implementation proposals set forth in chapters 2-5 of Educating Lawyers.
The methodological focus of Educating Lawyers is on socialization. What law schools do well is teach doctrine. What law schools must do better is to teach the individual to “think like a lawyer.” (Educating Lawyers, at 47). That involves more than the transmission of doctrine, even the transmission in a peculiar way. It involves the socialization of the individual into the mores and habits of a community, and in doing so more consciously take up the role once reserved to the bar and bound up in its transmission of the “craft, judgment, and public responsibility” of lawyers. (Educating Lawyers, at 4). That socialization focuses on the case dialogue method of instruction.
While the authors of Educating Lawyers place much positive value on the case dialogue method as the signature pedagogy of legal education, they suggest the possibility of broader application. While the case dialogue method as classically developed is a superb instrument of socialization within a core mission to inculcate doctrinal knowledge, it is missing a piece. That piece is values. (Educating Lawyers, at 56-58). This is value understood as both ethics and a direction toward the “right” result. There is a need to form the lawyer, through this power agency, as both a legal technician and moral agent. (Educating Lawyers, at 84). This points to the need for education beyond doctrine.
Education beyond doctrine serves as a bridges to practice that is of critical importance to the authors of Educating Lawyers. Here the authors confront the realities of the class hierarchies that are inevitable within the normative structures of university culture. This the authors refer to as the “problematic legitimacy” of clinical legal education. (Educating Lawyers, at 89). “The standard is so securely established that there are few leverage points from which to effect change to the model.” (Educating Lawyers, at 90). Certainly such change is impossible if inconsistent within the values structure of university organization. The authors, drawing on earlier reforming efforts (Educating Lawyers, at 91-95), propose to change the dynamic indirectly, by changing the way in which clinical education is valued, and then integrating this segment of legal education within the doctrinal mainstream. (Id., at 100-111). The core of that argument is based on an argument that privileges teaching case theory (Id., at 124-125), that is “the lawyer’s task of understanding the client’s needs and constructing a strategy to address those needs.” (Id., at 122).
The last building block of an integrated approach to legal education focuses on issues of professional identity and purpose. Lawyers are demoralized and their reputation is diminishing. The author’s ascribe this to a disconnection with morals and values on which the profession was and ought to continue to be grounded. (Educating Lawyers, at 126-131). But it is also possible that the demoralization arises as a consequence of the instability in the self-identification of a profession that no longer serves, as in Coke’s day, as the guardian of the common law against both the state and the individual. Instead, as agents of a state which has increasingly absorbed lawmaking power, the lawyer finds herself between professions. In a sense, Educating Lawyers acknowledges both this transitional dilemma and the ultimate new source of equilibrium—grounded in the mission of the university law school to retool the lawyers it produces for their new role in society. (Educating Lawyers, at 131-132). This requires a dialogue between the moral and the legal, for which the authors provide an example from contracts law. (Educating Lawyers, at 142-144). Uniting cognitive, practical and ethical-social development requires a broad range of courses that take students from a passive role as the imbibers of doctrine to externship courses that permit them to try out what they have learned. (Id., at 147). The relationship between these integrative approaches based on both the infusion of ordinary classes with social and ethical issues and the development of more ethically charged courses radiating from out of the traditional course in professional responsibility is also explored. (Id., at 151-158).
Lastly, Educating Lawyers tackles issues of measurement. There is a bit of irony here. For it is measurement, in part, that has brought the profession (and by that I mean the profession of legal education) to this impasse and the tensions with its traditional principal professional stakeholder—the bar. The slew of private rankings—and the important real life effect of these private efforts—evidences a pervasive academic culture of ranking. Hierarchy, subordination, judgment are key features of academic culture. It is no wonder that they carry over to the pedagogy offered to train students. Without reform in the way in which law schools create their own hierarchies, and subordinate, there can be little real hope for change in the way law schools assess their own work products. Still, Educating Lawyers makes a case against single end of semester examinations (Id., at 167), and grading on the curve. (Id., at 168-170). Drawing from related professions, Educating Lawyers makes a case for change. (Id., at 171-179). They favor what they call institutional intentionality: “linking feedback to students with feedback from students about how well they are achieving the learning goals for the course.” (Id., at 180).
Putting this all together, the authors of Educating Lawyers warn against treating their suggestions as an additional component to be added to the curriculum of legal education. They warn that the point is to avoid both the segregation of professionalism and ethical components in legal education. (Id., at 190-191). But there is tension here between the elegance of conclusions demanded by following theory to its end and the realities of an academy unlikely to want to change very much in ways that negatively affect theior individual or collective interests. Thus, the authors make a case for clinical legal education is also made (Id., at 120-122), yet make clear their preference for an integration model is preferred. They put it this way: “we endorse a different strategy, which we call integrative rather than additive. . . . The core insight behind the integrative strategy is that effective educational efforts must be understood in holistic rather than atomistic terms.” They warn that “[l]egal scholarship has generated a succession of bold, even radical, new ways of understanding the law, but this kind of scholarly innovation has proved entirely compatible with a stable, even conservative orientation toward educational practice and is part and parcel of an orientation that privileges the cognitive apprenticeship in its present, stand alone configuration.” (Id., at 192). For this purpose, “the common core of legal education needs to be expanded in qualitative terms to encompass substantial experience with practice, as well as opportunities to wrestle with the issues of professionalism.” (Id., at 195). In that context, educational climate matters. “The goal should be to create a campus culture that is a positive force.” (Id., at 183). It is clear that this can be done. But again there is cognitive dissonance. Law schools will have to pay much attention to reforming the climate among faculty and between faculty and administration, if they mean to be successful in changing the educational climate generally. Faculties are likely to reproduce for their students the academic climate in which they operate. What seems like an innocuous and separable component, thus suggests complexities untouched by the authors of Educating Lawyers.
But integration is costly. The authors of Educating Lawyers tacitly acknowledge the power of the university model in describing the skill sets necessary to effect the integrative model they propose. (Id., at 202). A principal effect of the move to a university norm set has been to denigrate the practice experience of applicants for teaching positions. In many cases, too much experience is sometimes deemed to poison the candidate for a successful academic career. The idea, roughly, is that people too long in practice have too deeply imbued the values and norms of the bar and will not be able to successfully transition to the norm structure of the university—requiring a focus on doctrine and writing. And thus, “Faculty development programs that consciously aim to increase the mutual understanding of doctrinal and lawyering faculty of each other’s work are likely to improve students’ efforts to make integrated sense of their developing legal competence.” (Id., at 196). All must come to accept a common educational purpose and bend their efforts to that objective. Faculty with different strengths must “work in a complementary relationship.” (Id., at 197).
The study ends with a suggestion of law school steps in the right direction. The models proffered include that of New York University and CCNY, which, in different ways seek “to bring the three aspects of legal apprenticeship into active relation.” (Id., at 197). One alternative seeks to leverage the de facto division of talent (doctrinal faculty who are not lawyers, and lawyers who are in charge of clinical courses) within the university to construct webs of courses that are linked in a way that privilege the three areas of legal training. (Id.). The programs at N.Y.U. are also described in some detail elsewhere. (Id., at 38-43). That approach works for large law schools with substantial resources and an institutional framework that permits an adequate administration of programs of this sort of complexity. Cost is certainly an obstacle. (Id., at 198). And this sort of leverage is necessitated by the privileging of the normative structure of the university that tends to privilege “a distinguished well published faculty that includes leaders of the field.” (Id., at 38). Of course, the field no longer necessarily includes the bench and bar, but the community of academic scholars. (Backer 2002). Another alternative involved a greater investment in integration within the curriculum. That required less attention to leveraging differences in talents and more on more broadly changing the focus of the curriculum. (Id., at 197). The programs at CCNY are described earlier. (Id.,, at 34-38). Yale is cited for its decision to reduce the number of doctrinal courses “and encouraging students to elect an introductory clinical course in their second semester.” (Id., at 197). This is said to point to an intermediate strategy, “a course of study that encourage students to shift their focus between doctrine and practical experience not once but several times, so as to gradually develop more competence in each area while, it is hoped, making more linkages between tem.” (Id.). The programs at Southwestern law School are also identified as failing in this category—these involve some curricular changes. (Id., at 198).
Reduced to its essence, then, Educating Lawyers, as a theoretical exercise, seeks to find a space within university centered and positivism focused academic law for the resulting new realities of law and the responsibilities of the profession. More importantly, as methodology, Educating Lawyers seeks to privilege certain specific principles of legal education. Foremost among them is the integrative principle of education over an additive or compartmentalized approach to legal education. Also important is the tacit acceptance of significant class divisions within legal education—what may be appropriate for “top tier” schools may be beyond the abilities, or even the ambitions, of lower ranked schools. To each class of law school belongs a different level of acceptable approaches to integration. In the language of Educating Lawyers, for every New York University, there is a CCNY, for every Yale Law School there is a Southwestern Law School. For those who still cling to the principle of equality among law schools—of horizontal rather than vertical professional organization, this might be disquieting, but only makes explicit what has been implicit for years. As a consequence, there is a bit of flexibility. But it is grounded in academic reputation and resources. Lastly, Educating Lawyers acknowledges that law schools are incapable of great changes in short order—they can act only incrementally. (Id., at 189-191). Changes have to be adapted to that reality, but ought not to settle for incrementalism as a goal in itself. Partial changes must lead to an holistic objective. (Id., at 191).
Yet at the same time, Educating Lawyers is about nothing if not about both incrementalism and the additive principle of changes to legal education. Faculties will read this work. They will debate its propositions. They will dissect the arguments—at least the micro arguments relating to technique. But the larger issues raised at the beginning of the work will be ignored; and for good reason. There is little that can be done about tectonic changes beyond the control of any one individual or any one institution. And so we are reduced not only to method, but also to formalism. We have become creatures of gesture—as Nietzsche once mocked. And so Educating Lawyers will generate tremendous smoke. But it will produce little fire. The dynamics of institutional change within the academy has been liberated from the bar. That is the great insight from Educating Lawyers. Patches will keep the relationship alive for a while longer, at least until there arise in the United States formal bar sanctioned training schools for lawyers. At that point academic law will become as free from the practice of law, as law making in the United States has become free from its “primitive” common law past.
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