Title: Changing the Modal Law School: Rethinking U.S. Legal Education in (Most) Schools
Abstract: This essay argues that discussions of educational reform in U.S. law schools have suffered from a fundamental misconception: that the education provided in all of the American Bar Association-accredited schools is roughly the same. A better description of the educational opportunities provided by ABA-accredited law schools would group the schools into three rough clusters: the “elite” law schools, the modal (most frequently occurring) law schools, and the precarious law schools. Because the elite law schools do not need much “reforming,” 2 the better focus of reform would concentrate on the modal and precarious schools; however, both elite and modal law schools could benefit from some changes to help law students move from understanding the theoretical underpinnings of law to understanding how to translate those underpinnings into practice. “Practice” itself is a complex concept, requiring both an understanding of the law and an understanding of how to relate well to others. Because law students may not understand how to relate well to those with different backgrounds from their own, law schools should do more to explain how one’s perspective is both limiting and mutable. Too many law schools suggest that students can “see” different perspectives by, essentially, merely thinking harder. The essay 1. Gordon Silver Professor of Law, William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Many thanks to the University of Edinburgh and its conference, Beyond Text in Legal Education (June 20-21, 2009), at which I first presented an earlier version of this paper, and to Rachel Anderson, Jack Ayer, Zenon Bankowski, Peter Bayer, Bernie Burk, Maks Del Mar, Randy Gordon, Jennifer Gross, Jeff Lipshaw, Paul Maharg, Nettie Mann, Morris Rapoport, and Jeff Van Niel. 2. My allegation that elite law schools don’t need much reforming stems from my experience that students at the elite schools matriculate at law school having received a good education already. They probably could be left alone with some law books and some law review articles and do a decent job of teaching themselves. The faculty members at elite schools, of course, can—and do—add to their students’ education, but there’s a lot less remedial work that they must do first. 1120 PENN STATE LAW REVIEW [Vol. 116:4 concludes with some suggestions regarding possible reforms of U.S. legal education, focusing primarily on the modal law schools.
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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