Law Professor Charles E. Rounds, Jr., has a sharply-worded call for a return to the basics in law teaching on the Pope Center’s website–more Socratic method and focus on traditional law school subjects. Here’s a snippet but it is well-worth reading the whole thing:
Common law, of which agency and trust are critical components, is the bedrock upon which all our statutory and regulatory edifices are constructed. Unfortunately, the old required courses in the law—the courses necessary to master the law’s basic anatomy—have largely been crowded out by courses about the law. Almost every self-respecting law professor is now an amateur sociologist engaged in “ground-breaking” and “cutting-edge” scholarship that has a gender, race, or sexual identity hook. Those who are less sociologically inclined are likely preoccupied with some ultra-technical aspect of the Constitution, some piece of legislation, or a regulation. Many professors manage to cobble together entire courses around their preoccupations.
In short, professors mainly teach what they want to teach, which does not overlap much with what prospective lawyers need to know in order to sort out the rights, duties and obligations of parties. Even a negotiation, mediation, or arbitration requires a context, which the core curriculum was designed to supply. Instead, law students at great expense are getting little more than bad sociology.
Professional schools need to strike a balance between book-learning and real-world experience. The American law school now deserves failing grades in both departments.
I’m guessing his critique will resonate with some and infuriate others!
TRE says:
He is wearing a bow-tie, he HAS to say that.
January 6, 2010, 12:08 pmMick says:
How about teaching Natural Law, on which our Bill of Rights stands? I find lawyers to be woefully ignorant of the Constitution through the lens of Natural Law. For instance the Natural Born Citizen requirement of A2S1C5 (born in the US of 2 Citizen parents, where the child is Naturally ONLY the Citizen of and ONLY subject to the jurisdiction of the US). Natural Inalienable rights don’t come from British Common Law, and Citizens are fundementally different from Subjects.
January 6, 2010, 12:09 pmgeokstr says:
WHAT?!?!
And deprive the Democrats of several tens of millions of votes once amnesty is passed sometime before the 2010 elections?
January 6, 2010, 12:14 pmDotar Sojat says:
Count me among the ones with whom the article resonates.
January 6, 2010, 12:17 pmCJColucci says:
I used to think the same way; then I read his piece and now I’m not so sure.
January 6, 2010, 12:19 pmCMH says:
My sense is that a lot of the fluff courses cited in the post are more the result of the pointless third year of law school. If law school were only two years, my suspicion is that a lot of these courses would cease to be, since there wouldn’t be time for most students to take them.
There may be something of a two-way street on the specific course complaints like agency and trust. For example, I didn’t take trusts in law school because it wasn’t a tested subject on the bar exam. I don’t know if this is unusual or not (I took the Ohio bar). If the Ohio Supreme Court put trusts on the bar exam (or the multi-state people did), I’d have an incentive to take it.
January 6, 2010, 12:25 pmConnor says:
Rounds makes some important points, but we’ve all studied for the bar and had that “aha moment” where we realize all the subjects are connected.
January 6, 2010, 12:32 pmMick says:
Geokstr says:
WHAT?!?!
And deprive the Democrats of several tens of millions of votes once amnesty is passed sometime before the 2010 elections?
_________________________________________________________________________
January 6, 2010, 12:42 pmOh I forgot, most lawyers ARE Democrats, and sold their souls to them long ago, in detriment to the constitution. Now every line is subjected to tortured logic that totally skews the original meaning and brilliance of the document, in order to arrive at their desired meaning. It was written for the common man to undrstand, until the lawyers got through with it. Kind of like determining the meaning of the word “is”.
Jesse says:
I graduated from law school in 2008. While it’s true that you could fill your second and third years at my school with the kind of underwater basket-weaving classes Professor Rounds complains about, almost all of the classes that I took were “in” the law. So I think it goes to far to say that these kinds of classes aren’t being taught, but I agree that many students do not take enough of them.
January 6, 2010, 12:43 pmDavid says:
Connor’s point strikes me as particularly significant.
I passed the July bar and expect to enter the bar this month.
Studying for the bar seems to have taught me more “useful” stuff about the law itself than law schoold did. It is better connected and better organized in my mind. This is not to say that the heavy duty emphasis on contracts and crim wasn’t important but I could have done without the seemingly unending liberal browbeating in con law courses.
As for “fluff,” I took one seminar (3 credits) in “happiness and the law” for which we had to turn in seven 5-page papers that involved no research, just “reflection.” If only “happiness and the law” was a bar question, eh?
January 6, 2010, 12:48 pmJohn Steele says:
Rather than another debate about “what curriculum?” perhaps we should have a discussion about “who decides?”
Thought experiment: what would happen if a law school turned to its student body and said, “you’re taking on a lot of debt to obtain your JD, and we really want to know what curriculum you think we should offer.” Suppose the school provided thoughtful input to the students from professors, practicing lawyers, judges, hiring partners, and so on. What would the students choose? Should a school acknowledge the enlightened self-interest of the students who are taking on the debt?
I think it’s fair to say that we trust the judgment of the students to decide to enter law school, and so we can’t be too skeptical of their much smaller decisions about what they want to study there. Also, if you are inclined to approach these questions skeptically, shouldn’t you be equally skeptical about the ability of professors to choose the curriculum for the students.
January 6, 2010, 12:48 pmMartinned says:
The very first line, and he’s already all over the place. Since when are trusts part of common law? Last I checked, trusts are equity.
January 6, 2010, 1:02 pmJohn Steele says:
Regarding a course in Agency, is it the case that the proliferation of options for forms of small businesses has rendered classical agency a less critical aspect of the modern economy? And to some degree, the most important modern aspects of agency law can be covered in courses on business organizations and legal ethics. So is the diminishing role of the course on Agency just a natural reaction to modern developments?
(Btw, I’m a big fan of lawyers knowing the law of agency; I’m just wondering about its role in the curriculum.)
January 6, 2010, 1:11 pmMatt says:
Almost every self-respecting law professor is now an amateur sociologist engaged in “ground-breaking” and “cutting-edge” scholarship that has a gender, race, or sexual identity hook.
This is, at best, a rather stupid exaggeration. Even as rhetoric it won’t be effective on anyone who both knows something about the subject and isn’t an ideolog. There may be good grounds for some of the reforms he calls for- I don’t see the case as made, but it’s possible. But obviously false exaggerations like this certainly don’t help the case or make me think that he’s arguing in good faith. It’s a shame to see such nonsense.
January 6, 2010, 1:17 pmJeffH says:
The more interesting question is not whether the School would follow the student’s wishes, but whether the accreditors at the ABA would allow it. I suspect many law schools would like to be more flexible with the law school curriculum than that ABA actually allows. To answer your question, the ABA seems to have the final say on what the curriculum actually is.
January 6, 2010, 1:21 pmJohn Steele says:
JeffH, really? I had often heard that the legal educators dominate that ABA committee. Maybe the practicing lawyers do.
But why would the ABA forbid law schools from developing more practical curricula (which is what I’m guessing the students would opt for)? I thought that the ABA, if anything, was pushing in the same direction as the Carnegie Report.
In any case, if the current ABA approaches already accommodate the esoteric courses and the Baylor approach, I’m not sure that the ABA accrediting function would be the roadblock.
January 6, 2010, 1:30 pmA, says:
Law students’ enlightened self-interest is to move the curriculum towards courses where grading is more compressed and the average grade is higher. Most students can’t be at the top of the class, but all can benefit from grade inflation. Soft classes generally have softer curves (though they don’t have to, in theory), so students support them. Everything they need to learn they will learn later, either when they study for the bar or when they enter practice. Law school isn’t Bar Bri, and students don’t really want it to be.
January 6, 2010, 1:43 pmHalbtrauig says:
Rounds seems like a fine professor. So, it’s safe to say he will be crushed.
I remember fondly the hard-asses who taught most 1L classes. They made you think and would tolerate no distractions. Laptops? Your secretary can type and your paralegal can pull documents; your job is to THINK.
Although I make ridiculous amounts of money now, I refuse to send a penny to the place because almost all the old white guys who were so tough are gone, replaced by hip Gay-Latino-Gender-Immigration-Happyness specialists. A travesty.
January 6, 2010, 1:44 pmMing the Merciless Siamese Cat says:
Arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The current law school model is a bubble on the brink of bursting. A lot of law faculty will soon be looking for real jobs. That should be amusing. Though I shudder for the malpractice insurance industry should they find them.
January 6, 2010, 1:58 pmDjDiverDan says:
Yer kiddin’ me, right? Just pulling my leg? Honestly? Please tell me that whatever Idiot thought that was a useful course for Law School was denied tenure, or (if he was aleady tenured)was involuntarily retired. I’ll only believe your story if you tell me you went to Harvard (the online copy of the final in Evidence tells me everything I need to know about how undeserved Harvard’s reputation as an “elite” law school really is), or someplace like Joe’s Dry Cleaning and School of Law.
January 6, 2010, 2:02 pmJohn Steele says:
A, if you are correct, then the students would overwhelmingly vote for the current curriculum. If they did, I would be the last to complain. But I seriously doubt that the curriculum the students would vote for is identical to the curriculum that is offered. A simple internet-based experiment would prove one of us right.
January 6, 2010, 2:02 pmDavid says:
DjDiverDan,
Nope. Not kidding. The Professor was Peter Huang at Temple and I think it was spring semester of 2004.
January 6, 2010, 2:13 pmJardinero1 says:
Maybe the problem is too many law schools and law professors. A smaller supply of both would change the dynamic significantly. A smaller number of schools might only teach a curriculum suitable for the needs of hiring law firms. Eliminating the Guaranteed Student Loan Program for law students would be an effective way to reduce the supply of law students and law schools.
January 6, 2010, 2:14 pmBuffaloBill says:
Is there a basis for his argument? No evidence is identified in the article beyond cherry-picking some fluff courses across several law schools. The argument will hold water if the author can demonstrate core curricula like the typical first-year courses are increasingly being crowded out in favor of these kinds of electives in law schools across the country. Since the author provides no real evidence, I’ll just counter him with my anectodal evidence from two years ago when I graduated from a Tier I (albeit, non-Ivy League) school. The core bar exam courses were taught in first-year. You could theoretically load up on electives in your second and third year (a bad idea unless the student thinks he can find employment related to such subjects), but there were plenty of traditional law subjects available as well, like Evidence, Tax, Wills, Crim Pro, BA, Sales, etc.
And what’s with the diatribe against clinics? The premise of the article is that law students are graduating without any practical knowledge on the law, but clinics are great ways to get it, all while in school. The law school I went to allowed third-years to prosecute misdemeanor offenses, or engage in civil rights litigation for inmates in real cases, often complex class-action suits. Great experience.
Agency doesn’t need a stand-alone course. The basic principles can be taught in BA and Torts. Trusts are usually taught in the Wills course.
And you know what, after getting bored into a stupor by sitting through Wills and BA, it was a nice break to go to the Law and Anthropology seminar. There’s nothing wrong with offering students the chance to take these electives, so long as the core courses are also being offered. I don’t see any evidence in the article that this isn’t occurring.
January 6, 2010, 2:23 pmDavid Nieporent says:
I believe that’s where Orly Taitz went to law school. And Mick, above.
January 6, 2010, 2:24 pmEcon_Scott says:
Having spent a good part of my career consulting or co-consulting with Fortune 500 companies in association with top law firms, it would seem that there is a presumed “Filtering” of the duly indoctrinated and not educated, by the firm when hiring associates and eventually promoting to Jr. Partner.
Whatever the work product and the assumption of very deep pocketed clients about the education their attorneys received in law school, well …
If they think it’s education …
… “it ain’t necessarily so”.
January 6, 2010, 2:29 pmDavid says:
Jardinero1,
“Eliminating the Guaranteed Student Loan Program for law students would be an effective way to reduce the supply of law students and law schools.”
In addition, cutting off those pesky middle class students from access to financing will make sure that only the very rich and the very poor will become lawyers. Yeah!!!
Jerk.
January 6, 2010, 2:32 pmkrs says:
I think he’s right, but I don’t understand the part that trashes clinics. After going on for a while about how law schools don’t prepare students for the real world, he proceeds to refer to the one aspect of law school that exposes students to the real world as “pedagogically cancerous.”
Rounds says this about clinics:
I’d have 2 questions for him if he was a guest poster or otherwise likely to answer:
1. In what way are clinics crowding out “traditional core courses”? As far as I know, most of these clinics are entirely optional. In law school, I was required to take torts, contracts, property, criminal law, and a few others, but I did not have to do a clinic of any kind and chose not to. The existence of clinics might have raised the cost of my tuition, but they didn’t impair my ability to take whatever traditional courses I wanted.
2. How are clinics bad? Perhaps my inexperience with clinics is the problem. At their worst, they’re good for networking and propaganda and nothing else, but from what I know secondhand, they generally expose students to real “clients” with real legal problems and require students to do the sorts of things that Rounds complains they’re not trained to do. As he says, “Professional schools need to strike a balance between book-learning and real-world experience,” and “[t]en writing courses will not help the law student who is unable to connect the dots because he or she does not know where the dots are.” Do clinics not expose students to the real world and require them to find the dots?
—-
Also, in response to Matt’s comment, I think I agree that the post contains a bit of a false exaggeration, but I think its force is blunted by the sentence that follows what you quote.
Also, the “gender, race, or sexual identity hook” is a gratuitous swipe that will likely alienate people who might otherwise be convinced… but I think there’s plenty of truth to the underlying point. A lot of law professors are amateur sociologists, or amateur economists, or amateur philosophers, and there’s a bit of a disconnect between what professors want to teach and what students need to learn.
The essay has some rough edges, but I hope it gets read and discussed.
January 6, 2010, 2:54 pmMick says:
Ah Mr. Nieporent, just the kind of lawyer to which I was referring (if you are a lawyer). Sold out to the highest politician to the detriment of the constitution.
January 6, 2010, 2:58 pmSkyler says:
It seems to me that common law has little to do with practicality in most cases. It still exists but legislatures have been busy statutorily bypassing common law for quite some time now. I’ll leave it to others to decide if legislatures controlling law more than judges is a good thing, but it seems to me that the argument put above should not claim common law as being more useful to being a lawyer.
January 6, 2010, 3:00 pmfrankcross says:
Or, Mick, it is possible you are wrong. And the fact that you referred to the Bill of Rights as an interpretive guide for the natural born citizen requirement does suggest you may not know what you are talking about.
January 6, 2010, 3:55 pmMatt says:
KRS said, A lot of law professors are amateur sociologists, or amateur economists, or amateur philosophers,
(I have a strong desire to add a “-One” to your name. That shows when I was growing up, I guess.)
I could agree with this statement, and agree that it’s a problem. There’s a big difference, though, between “a lot” (a number that’s compatible with well less than 50%, I’d think) and “nearly all”, which was what was actually said. (That’s probably not compatible with anything less than 65%, and more realistically something like 80% or more. I think that’s clearly not supported and strongly suggests something other than good faith is behind the argument.)
January 6, 2010, 4:12 pmNot my usual name says:
I don’t really understand the Rounds’s problem with legal writing, but I think I understand what he’s saying about clinics.
Clinics are supposed to provide practical experience in settings that serve the public interest. Clinics are staffed by a people other than the doctrinal faculty that teaches torts, contracts, crim pro, etc. Then the students who take clinics aren’t exactly a cross-section of the general student population. At least at some schools I’ve heard of (including the one I attend), you get a vibe from the clinics that they’re really only for students who want to do public interest law as a career. They don’t want you there taking up a slot and consuming their considerable resources if you’re planning to go into private practice. On the other hand, the hiring partners downtown don’t expect to see “poverty law clinic” on your transcript and might well wonder what your game is. The clinic ends up serving only a distinct population and does not inculcate practice skills in the student body generally; rather, it serves as a feeder for a few types of job.
I guess legal writing is somewhat like that, in that it has an insular faculty, except that at every law school I’ve heard of everyone is forced to take legal writing and you don’t get the self-selection problem. But I loved legal writing and don’t really understand criticisms of it.
So the only thing I think Rounds can be arguing is that clinics and legal writing diminish the pressure on the doctrinal faculty to teach practical legal skills. They actually facilitate the doctrinal faculty not only offering more “law and” course but also quietly turning torts, etc., into “law and” courses. After all, the doctrinal faculty can say, you were supposed to learn how to write in legal writing and if you wanted to pick up practical skills you could take a clinic.
I think the piece is mostly wrong-headed, by the way. Rounds seems to be suggesting that law schools should singlehandedly revitalize the common law. Well, that’s not the world we live in. I come to the end of law school wishing I knew a lot more about statutes and regulations than I do. Also, my experience at perhaps a less-hip tier-one school has certainly not been that “bedrock” classes were crowded out.
January 6, 2010, 4:12 pmSW says:
I agree with this much at least, unless they have a PhD in the subject (and a JD) and could be offered a position in the other “school,” they should not be teaching ‘Law and ______,’ anything
January 6, 2010, 4:14 pmBC says:
I’m enh about the Socratic method (which is a rant all its own), but insofar as the guy’s critiquing the proliferation of academic kudzu in law school curricula I find much to agree with in the column.
January 6, 2010, 4:47 pmRowerinVA says:
The “sociologist” part rings somewhat true but the “gender, etc.” part doesn’t. I know very few law professors who fit this description as to gender, race, and sexual identity, even among the far leftist professors. Sure, they exist, but they are a minority. For one thing, students have grown sick of them. And my rough tally is that the ones that fit this description are mostly older, considered to be relics, and largely irrelevant to current dialogue (although not to faculty politics). There are a ton of these people at AALS every year but they aren’t getting hired all that frequently, at least not by top-50 schools.
Even among the left, professors aspire to be Cass Sunstein, not MacKinnon or Dworkin, and not even Ogletree; the former has respect and the latter are treated gently and largely ignored by young leftist professors. This is quite a change since the early 1990s.
January 6, 2010, 5:31 pmSebastian the Ibis says:
Almost every self-respecting law professor is now an amateur sociologist engaged in “ground-breaking” and “cutting-edge” scholarship that has a gender, race, or sexual identity hook.
…….. That’s certainly the Tenured/Tenure track Faculty at Miami.
Unless you write about those topics you will not be interviewed, even for a line that is supposed to be dedicated to international commercial transactions. Hopefully it is changing under the new Dean.
January 6, 2010, 6:16 pmDjDiverDan says:
David, it was really nice of you to answer my post – I see that you failed the course in Law School about how to be a complete a*#hole (I AmJur’d that course in law school – it took me years to learn when & how to turn it off). But seriously, why would you actually tell which Law School you came from if it offered a Class on being Happy in the Practice of Law? Don’t you realize that there might be Hiring Partners who visit this Blog? Do you want them to blacklist your Law School?
January 6, 2010, 6:55 pmWilsonD says:
“This de-professionalization of the American law school, a phenomenon of profound concern to many in the legal profession, suggests that there is an opening for the for-profit sector. A bare-bones, back-to-basics for-profit law school…” — Charles E. Rounds, Jr.
-
If we allowed a normal, voluntary market in legal education and practice — quality, availability & cost would improve dramatically.
At the start of the 20th Century, aspiring lawyers had three choices: self-study law… as Abraham Lincoln did; apprentice into a law firm… as Clarence Darrow did; or go to a formal law school. Apprenticeship was the most common route. Law schools varied greatly, usually with one or two-year programs. Prospective lawyers had a wide choice and each of the three methods historically produced many accomplished & notable lawyers in the profession. The public also enjoyed a wider choice in law practitioners.
In 1921, the ABA decided to “professionalize” legal education by imposing three-year law school program as the only route into the legal profession. Of course, the ABA claimed only the highest motives in their quest — ‘to protect the public from shoddy lawyering’. Artificially restricting the supply of new lawyers to reduce competition, thus permitting higher fees by practicing lawyers… never, ever, ever entered into the ABA guild calculation.
Tactically, the ABA lobbied across America for new laws to devalue any professional legal study that did not follow the ABA law achool model. Most state governments cooperated– enacting laws limiting eligibility for state bar exams only to persons with a degree from an ABA-accredited law school. Those laws effectively shut down the non-law school avenues into the profession and put control of law schools firmly into the hands of the ABA.
Building on that triumph, the ABA later successfully lobbied for new laws forbidding “unauthorized practice of law”… sanctifying ABA “professional” monopoly control over the practice of law.
January 6, 2010, 7:56 pmsmrstrauss says:
Re: “Natural Born Citizen requirement of A2S1C5 (born in the US of 2 Citizen parents, where the child is Naturally ONLY the Citizen of and ONLY subject to the jurisdiction of the US).”
The legal meaning of Natural Born Citizen is simply a citizen who was born in the USA. The clause in the Constitution bars foreigners from being president, and it bars naturalized citizens from being president. But it does not bar the US-born children of foreigners from being president.
January 6, 2010, 9:34 pmR. Richard Schweitzer says:
Often left out of consideration has been the trend of “Legal Education” to concentrate on preparing individuals for specific participations in what has been (at least since the early 1900s) the continuously changing functions of the Legal System as part of our overall social organization.
As an example, it is probably an accurate guess that the vast, vast majority of litigation and other processses in the legal system are matters of legislation, regulations, ordinances, and promulgations by “authorities,” as compared to the earlier dominance of matters of private disputes.
Even Criminal Law is now weighted by legislated crimes (far beyond the codifications of common law).
So, the processing of those who will operate the legal system under the designation of Lawyer or even as Attorney (see, “attorn”) has been adapted – often to further modify the system to accomodate political and social objectives not related to the original functions for the establishment of a legal system for an open society.
Whether this is for good or ill matters not, the broad membership of “society” appear to want a legal system through whose processes they can seek material objectives, including influence over the conduct of others.
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January 7, 2010, 6:41 amDYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » A Call for Back to Basics in Law Teaching says:
[...] Read it. Unfortunately, the old required courses in the law—the courses necessary to master the law’s basic anatomy—have largely been crowded out by courses about the law. Almost every self-respecting law professor is now an amateur sociologist engaged in “ground-breaking” and “cutting-edge” scholarship that has a gender, race, or sexual identity hook. Those who are less sociologically inclined are likely preoccupied with some ultra-technical aspect of the Constitution, some piece of legislation, or a regulation. Many professors manage to cobble together entire courses around their preoccupations. [...]
January 7, 2010, 6:50 amConnecticut Lawyer says:
The “law and sociology” courses were developed by professors who lacked the intellectual horsepower to compete with the “law and economics” professors.
That’s just a snark, of course. The law and economics courses actually have some benefit, since economics underlie the reasoning behind many common law rules and statutes. The law and sociology courses have a benefit, I guess, if you think that the law is a facade created by the powerful to oppress the weak and your aim is to open the eyes of future lawyers to its cruelties so that they will join the revolution upon graduation.
Roundtree is right in his general criticism. It’s impossible to be a decent lawyer without a broad understanding of the basic principles of the traditional common law (including, for this purpose, equity). But even when I went to law school 30 years ago, agency was subsumed into a business organization class and trusts were combined with wills. He has a good point about keeping trusts separate. A lot of students (including me) who were never going to practice T%E law didn’t learn much about trusts in law school (I think we covered a bit in property). But in the real world of finance, trusts are commonplace.
January 7, 2010, 7:15 amDavid says:
DjDiverDan,
I was not aware that law firms “blacklisted” and, so, had not considered that possibility. Frankly though, “blacklisting” tells me more about those engaged in the practice than those blacklisted.
Why would anyone want to work for someone who signs off a law school because it has the same sort of “fluff” courses that every other school has? Besides, returning to the post itself, the practice of providing less-than-legal courses in law school appears to be a widespread problem.
Of my law profs, only a few would qualify as “rigorous” teachers. One in particular – Stephen Mikochek – taught 1st Amend in a way that was truly challenging and engaging; so much so that he radically changed my views in favor of an extremely robust defense of that right. ALL of my other Con Law profs (four) were far Lefties, masquerading as “open-minded.”
My torts and contracts were pretty standardly taught I think and business courses by Salil Mehra were structured in such a way that I was able to draw heavily on the material for the bar some three years later. (I attended the four-year evening division.)
Overall, I think Temple deserves its status as a high-ranking school. Perhaps that is what makes the presence of fluff courses like “Happiness and the Law” which do little more than provide students (like me) with at least one sure-fire “A” per upper-class semester that requires little more than nodding at every preposterous proposition that the Prof lays out.
Am I slandering Temple by saying so? I don’t think so but anyone who would decide against hiring a Temple grad because their law school offers some fluff courses needs to have their head examined.
January 7, 2010, 8:38 amEzra says:
I think it’s law faculty that have driven this change, not law students. They’re the ones who decide who gets into the club, and accordingly what credentials (in writing and teaching) matter, and what classes are offered for the most part. And law professors just have so many more interesting things to do than worry about what actually matters in the law. They’re public intellectuals, dadgummit!
In any event, the critique is clearly correct, in my view, but also obvious and the decades overdue. The identity-based curriculum phenomenon replicated like a virus in the ’80s and ’90s as people recognized that critical theory could be applied to everyone’s personal circumstance to make their identity into a tenure-worthy credential. But when we’re talking agency and trust as examples of what’s not taught, you know this problem jumped the shark a long time ago. Rights and Remedies used to be a class, 50 years ago (probably taught by Herbert Wechsler), and I’ve long thought that lawyers today would do well to go find an old syllabus and review it. I’d guess you can date this problem to the equity / law division being dropped (1938), as distinctions mattered less and concepts more. I also think the development of the modern class action device obliterated important fundamental distinctions in jurisdiction, procedure and due process, subordinating rules designed to protect individuals to the needs of groups, the concept of ‘justice’ and the altar of efficiency.
January 7, 2010, 8:48 amDjDiverDan says:
David, I was being facetious. I’m not terribly surprised that most (if not all) Law Schools now offer some “fluff” offerings these days. Maybe I’m just jealous – I graduated from Law School 27 years ago, and I don’t recall a single “fluff” course. Yes, there were professors that had a political agenda (like the Prof. that taught my Employment Discrimination class, who thought every woman who ever walked in the door had at least one valid discrimination claim against the Employer), but the material was always substantive and designed to teach “the Law.” I did have “fluff” classes in undergrad, like the class in Astronomy for Non-Science Majors offered at Michigan State, where the multiple choice final could have been aced by the above-average 8th grader (Representative question -Our sun is: (a) a moon; (b) a star; (c) a planet; (d) a big light bulb turned on and off by God). But those days were over by the time I got to Law School.
January 7, 2010, 10:47 amDavid says:
DjDiverDan,
Sorry for missing the joke.
Law school was a real trial for my family. I get up for work at 0430 and, during law school, would not get home until 2315 three or four nights a week. With two of my three kids born during law school, my wife accomplished nothing less than a herculean feat in keeping everything together. Where many unmarried or unemployed classmates spent six or more hours out of class for every hour in class, I was lucky to put together two or three. It was anything but fun.
I am not complaining… We knew it would be tough (I don’t think we could have guessed HOW tough) when we signed on and it was the right choice at the right time. But, while I poke fun at the fluff courses, I have to also acknowledge that they provided a providential break at times that I was barely holding on.
January 7, 2010, 11:21 amJon Rowe says:
I had Mikochek for the religious rights course at Temple. I liked him a lot. You could tell he was a bit of a pariah for his positions.
January 7, 2010, 11:51 ammikeyes says:
(It will be clear that I am not a lawyer.)
OK, I know that law is a wide ranging field with ever changing aspects and no unifying central theoritical base so it is hard to get a handle on it. That fact alone can explain why “core curriculum” is such a difficult issue to define. But why is it the only profession that does not have a practicum in its basic school? Other professions have a similar problem with the body of knowledge.
After all, most law school graduates (at least the few that pass the bar) are going into in a practical field and eventually have to learn the nuts and bolts if they want any modicum of success. One suspects that law student also need to learn to communicate since this is a profession of the mind that involves successfully transmitting ideas to others.
Other professional trade schools – medicine/nursing, pharmacy, engineering, seminaries, chiropractic, etc. – all seem to have a basic knowledge requirement followed by a practical test of knowledge in the field that is monitored by experienced teachers. Included in that test are the expansion and application of knowledge and communicating what happened in each interaction. In other words clinics and writing.
Law, on the other hand, seems to have a basic knowledge requirement to pass law school and then…what? An ad hoc apprenticeship with no set of standards other than those imposed by the firm or public body joined by the lawyer? No back and forth of law and reality monitored by an experienced practicioner in a controlled setting where mistakes can be made without too much damage? It seems to me that such an approach significantly limits the ability of a graduate to practice law once thay have graduatied from the system.
I realize that most law school graduates don’t really do face to face law in the courts, but I don’t really understand why a law professor would object to such a basic standard for any professional school.
There does not appear to be much incentive for the ABA to adhere to the formal standards (i.e. the form of the professional school) that other professions have in their basic schooling. While it was mentioned above that apprenticeship was the old standard before 1922, it seems to me that it still is, you just have to be vetted by a law school first before you enter it. That vetting helps future employers more than students. Law school seems to only serve as an employment filter – passing the bar is more dependent on intelligence (and a good prep course) – as no practical knowledge is needed to graduate law school.
Am I wrong about this?
January 7, 2010, 11:56 amyankee says:
And those damn kids should get off his lawn too!
January 7, 2010, 2:58 pmRandy says:
Rounds article makes several assumptions without any evidence or logic to support them:
1. Students learn legal writing in courses in the law.
2. Students do not learn legal writing in courses about the law.
3. He states that writing improves ‘when one has something rational and coherent to express.’ Furthermore, he fails to explain why the courses he derides fail to provide ‘something rational and coherent to express.’
4. He assumes that ‘boot camp’ rigor will prepare law students for the real world. Which one? There are thousands of types of legal jobs. Can he be sure that students will be prepared for all these types of jobs in a boot camp atmosphere?
5. He assumes that these types of courses and being taught *in place of* the more traditional subjects. Again, no evidence of that.
Sorry, but this is just another one of those conservatives rants against teaching things that he doesn’t like. So what if students take law and sociology classes? If you haven’t learned legal writing by your first year, you can still learn it from moot court or law review. If you STILL haven’t learned legal writing, I doubt any more torts classes will help.
In short, Rounds essay is a perfect of example of bad legal writing. He makes several unsupported assumptions, ones that can easily be refuted. His analysis lacks any real argument beyond saying ‘this is bad.’ He fails to even address the merits of the opposing viewpoint, a critical factor in any logical, let alone legal, analysis. He should be forced to take some real law classes in order to prepare himself for the real world. If his teaching methods are as shoddy as his analytic abilities, he really shouldn’t be teaching any classes, even the sociology ones.
Especially those, actually.
January 7, 2010, 5:19 pmGuest14 says:
Given your propensity to capitalize Random Words, I would’ve guessed closer to 270 Years ago.
January 7, 2010, 5:31 pmTed says:
Professor Rounds’s (valid) point: If you love your work, you’re not doing your job.
January 8, 2010, 8:01 pmBryan Caplan should not feel so superior « Entitled to an Opinion says:
[...] second-best career choice after economics. I just came across something more they have in common: lax boundaries. [...]
January 11, 2010, 9:47 pmGramarye says:
The subtext of Rounds’ rant is that law schools aren’t requiring enough black-letter law courses, possibly (in his view) in order to enable students to take, and professors to teach, more “fluff” courses. It isn’t that such courses aren’t offered.
I believe it should absolutely be the responsibility of law school deans to ensure that courses in the black-letter law courses that Rounds identifies (Trusts, Agency, Evidence, etc.) are offered, and that if such classes fill and have waiting lists (assuming one’s law school has a means of tracking the same), then to get more faculty willing and able to teach them. Students should not be denied the opportunity to take such courses. I am still a little annoyed at my legal alma mater’s only offering a Remedies course once every year (and having one year, I believe, in which it was never offered because of a professor on sabbatical–a school should have multiple faculty able to teach a subject like that), as that was one that I definitely felt would be necessary as a lawyer. I would hope that the same would be offered every semester. However, that doesn’t mean that I think that students–who are paying good money for their legal educations–should be forced into even more courses than they already are.
My law school did offer all of the classes that Rounds identifies. Perhaps Rounds would suggest that the school offer them more often, so as to minimize the risk of time conflicts preventing a student from taking them, since a typical law student only gets four semesters of relative freedom to take electives. I might sympathize with that point. Rounds’ thesis is much stricter, however. Requiring more common-law courses would have resulted in making even more of my legal education all but irrelevant to by practice, and possibly could have created even more time conflicts preventing me from taking courses that were relevant, e.g., Legislation, Federal Income Tax, Secured Transactions, Bankruptcy, Corporate Tax, and similar courses that Rounds seems inclined to disfavor (less overtly than fluff courses, but still to disfavor) because they are not common-law courses.
January 13, 2010, 11:41 am