While there’s a lot worth criticizing in David Segal’s NYT article about law professors and law schools — Matt Bodie covers a lot of good ground in this post at Prawfs — there’s an underlying point that I think is both important and correct: Law professors, at especially the “top” law schools, are becoming less connected to the legal profession. As a result, over time, they are less likely to know — and therefore less able to teach — the perspective an experienced lawyer would bring to legal problems.
Richard Posner made this point nicely in his 2007 essay celebrating the life of his late colleague Bernard Meltzer. Posner begins by describing the professional identities of law professors before the 1960s:
Law professors used to identify primarily with the legal profession and secondarily with the university. . . . Law professors in that earlier era were hired after a few years of practice, on the basis of evidence (heavily weighted by performance as a law student) of possessing superlative skills of legal analysis. A law professor was expected to be a superb lawyer and to see his primary role as instructing generations of law students so that they would become good, and some of them superb, lawyers—instructing them by precept but also by example, by being a role model; and the role was that of a practicing lawyer.
That all changes starting in the 1960s, Posner argues: Now law professors identify academics first, and with the legal profession second or not at all. Posner argues that this switch has real costs to students, as law professors who identified with the legal profession served as role models for students who were trying to master the craft of lawyering:
Even at the most intellectually ambitious of the modern law schools, a large majority of students will become and remain practicing lawyers; and there is a good deal more to the practice of law than economics, or philosophy, or feminism, or theories of race. There is the knack of reading cases and statutes creatively, there is a largish body of basic legal concepts that every practicing lawyer should internalize, there is a bag of rhetorical tricks to be acquired along with a professional demeanor, a procedural system to be mastered, a subtle sense (“judgment”) of just how far one can go in stretching the limits of established legal doctrines to be absorbed.
Posner then argues that while you wouldn’t want every law professor to be completely oriented to the profession, law schools should strive for balance between the profession-oriented legal academics and the university-oriented legal academics.
[The practical lawyer's sense] cannot be the entirety of the modern lawyer’s professional equipment, and their inculcation cannot be the entirety of a first-rate modern legal education, because the law has become too deeply interfused with the methods and insights of other fields—and the law schools are still lagging badly in attempting to overcome the shameful aversion of most law students to statistics, math, science, and technology. Maybe at the law schools that have the brightest students only a third of the instruction should be in the traditional mold. But to reach that level the law schools will have to start hiring teachers who identify more strongly with the practicing profession than they do with academia.
I don’t know what the right balance is, but I do think that students are best served when their classes are taught by professors with a mix of approaches.
all that you need to know says:
“If medical schools took the same approach, they’d be filled with professors who had never set foot in a hospital.”
There you have it.
November 20, 2011, 6:55 pmAnonymous physician says:
A similar problem arises in medical education. When I was in medical school (a top ten US medical school), some faculty members were superb clinicians and could actually manage complex medical problems. Other physician professors were terrible at clinical medicine. They would still be required to be in nominal charge of a clinical service a certain number of weeks per year, but really wanted to be back working in their lab. In those cases, the senior residents really ran their service, even though technically, the professor had to sign off on their decisions.
Most patients never knew whether their care was being overseen by the first type of faculty member or the second. (The medical students and junior residents quickly figured it out).
Fortunately, most of the senior residents were good enough to keep the service afloat. But I couldn’t help but wondering how badly the patients, the residents and the students were being short-changed by the system.
– MD who prefers to remain anonymous
November 20, 2011, 7:25 pmSteveLaudig says:
there’s not a thing terribly wrong with the trade school approach. my experience with law professors was that there were two “types” academic and mechanic. In a fight give me a Jesuit trained mechanic.
November 20, 2011, 7:26 pmandy grewal says:
“I don’t know what the right balance is. . .”
Orin, even if you can’t opine on the precisely correct balance, I think we would appreciate hearing your thoughts on whether the modern academy weighs too heavily on the theoretical side, or whether the criticisms are simply being blown out of proportion.
November 20, 2011, 7:26 pmPhillip Edens says:
Orin, I attend a local Non ABA night law school in Alabama called Birmingham School of Law. We are strictly taught by professors who are actual lawyers and tuition is more than half what an ABA school would charge. My Corporations professor taught us the ins and outs of Corporations law by the Business Code since the Model version is how the law is tested on the MEE portion of the bar exam. He would have no doubt flunked these new lawyers for not knowing how a merger gets done.
November 20, 2011, 7:37 pmJonathan H. Adler says:
Orin –
I generally agree with you (and Posner). Too many law professors are wanna-be philosophers and don’t know much about actual practice, and there needs to be a balance between theory and practice at any law school that’s doing more than teaching prospective academics.
JHA
November 20, 2011, 8:02 pmBH says:
On another site it was pointed out that the law school that the students who could not answer the question attended had a course on M and A.
November 20, 2011, 8:05 pmDid the students take it? Also, whatever profs at elite schools are doing, their students are the ones who have the best shot at getting jobs..
Jimbino says:
I attended UT Austin law school because it was virtually free. Profs were excellent, the students much less so. First year, of course, was pure philosophy. I found that wonderful.
Seminars in second year were great. I took a job miles away third year, skipping out on all those boring classes in practical law.
I never wanted to be a lawyer, being much more entertained designing nuclear weapons, missiles, bombers, fighters and doomsday communications devices.
The one mistake I made was to sit for the “required” Oil and Gas law. I think that those poor suckers who paid attention third year and went on to practice law are mostly miserable today.
November 20, 2011, 8:24 pmAfter Law School, Associates Learn to Be Lawyers – NYTimes.com « lennyesq says:
[...] What the NYT Article on Law Schools Gets Right (volokh.com) [...]
November 20, 2011, 8:41 pmMark Field says:
There’s a least one professor too many who believes he’s a philosopher.
November 20, 2011, 8:54 pmwm13 says:
I haven’t gone to law school recently, but current graduates seem as well-prepared as they ever have. (Frankly, with the job market being what it is, our Amlaw 2d 50 firm is getting better first years than we used to.) The stuff about knowing that the document you file is called a “Certificate of Merger” is silly: that’s not what a top-tier law school is for.
If there is a problem, it might be that so many professors are actively hostile to the transactional/commercial work that most of their students will be doing. But remember, most students don’t take their professors very seriously, or think of them as role models, or anything like that, so I doubt that their professors’ childish social and political views are really a problem.
November 20, 2011, 9:15 pmLaw Clerk says:
To at least some extent, the problem is not only that most current profs do not have a background in law practice, but also that they actually disdain the practice of law in its current form.
November 20, 2011, 9:38 pmThe River Temoc, in Winter says:
Your evidence for this assertion is…?
November 20, 2011, 10:45 pmPliny the Elder says:
I recall Posner developed this critique more thoroughly in his book “The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory” back in 1999 or 2000.
November 20, 2011, 10:54 pmJoe (not that one) says:
I find the thesis of the NYT article odd. I’ve had basically two careers in my decade since law school (about to start a third) — half a particular flavor of commercial litigator at a big huge megafirm, and half as essentially a goverment appellate litigator. I frequently use what I learned in law school. Yes, law school really served as a launching point more than anything — when I encountered an opposing party claiming that the agreement was modified by a telephone call, I knew that it was a parol evidence issue, but I needed tens of hours of research to figure it out, exactly. Or when a party filed suit in federal court while state proceedings were pending, I only knew that some sort of abstention was implicated, and not qwhich sort (it was Younger, as countless hours of research fleshed out). But without Professors Bernstein or Strauss, I would have been lost.
November 20, 2011, 11:14 pmRandy says:
I wish law school taught a little more about business. After all, many lawyers will be counsel to a business, whether in house or not. They should have a basic understanding that what is legally proper does not always make business sense, or whatever.
For instance, too many lawyers think that as long as you have a well written contract, you can’t be sued, and that if you need to sue the other party, you have a very strong basis to win.
But the business world doesn’t work at all like that. I often tell businessmen that since I don’t practice law anymore, I can tell them all the things a lawyer won’t tell them, like the fact that a contract isn’t worth much at all in many circumstances, and they’d be a fool to rely upon it.
November 20, 2011, 11:47 pmGilbert says:
As a recent law school graduate, I have a hard time seeing anything wrong with David Segal’s article. Law school did almost nothing to adequately prepare me to be a generalist in the law. The concepts I learned in law school were outdated by about 100 years as of the day I graduated. I resent the time and money I wasted to get a degree that made me less qualified to practice law than a paralegal.
And I went to a top 30 law school.
November 20, 2011, 11:49 pmOrin Kerr says:
Gilbert,
I’m curious, what courses did you take in law school? A majority of law school classes are electives, and I’m curious about the choices you made in selecting courses. For example, did you take any clinicals? Courses in law and technology? Courses like evidence or admin law, which are generally considered important in many areas of legal practice?
November 21, 2011, 1:00 amRinao says:
Here’s the thing about the argument implied by this particular article, and the many not dissimilar articles written on the same subject: it’s a critique that, depending on one’s point of view, could be applied to just about any academic discipline that purports to prepare students for non-academic professions. While I agree that tuition is WAY overpriced, the fact remains real universities, with real academicists and intellectuals aren’t in the business of cultivating your innermost corporate persona. You’ll have thirty or more years of your working life to figure that out. Law school is not -nor should it be- paralegal-style trade school.
November 21, 2011, 1:05 amIspep Teid says:
Let’s hear specifics. What didn’t you know? Which concepts were outdated?
November 21, 2011, 1:12 amJoe (not that one) says:
This is a really good question. Because if he was a litigator who practiced frequently in federal courts, much of what he learned in law school would either be (a) good law, or (b) overruled or overturned since he graduated from law school (I’m specifically thinking Twombley or Iqbal stuff here). At least that was the case for me!
November 21, 2011, 1:19 amBL1Y says:
I found myself in pretty much the same situation Gilbert described.
I took administrative law (which was required), corporations, corporate tax 1, corporate finance, law and econ, law and behavioral econ (aka: everything you learned in law and econ is wrong), employee pensions and health benefits (aka: ERISA), cyberlaw, negotiations, and alternative dispute resolution.
One of the first assignments I got was to analyze a stack of contracts and other documents related to a deal with a cell phone company. Basically, “look these over, see if there’s anything that would affect the deal.” What part of my legal education prepared me for that?
Had another assignment to find out record keeping requirements on various types of chemical storage facilities. The admin class of course didn’t involve actually reading any regulations, so I wasn’t really prepared for that either. Also got assigned to find out what sort of documents needed to be filed with the government in a deal to purchase spare airplane parts, and another on the docs needed for acquiring a communications satellite.
Now, I do recognize that most of these issues are very esoteric and there’s no way for a law school to anticipate the random things that will come into your professional life. But, if law schools are incapable of preparing graduates to go be practitioners, then they need to admit their shortcomings, and until they get things figured out, they should stop accepting money for a service they’re failing to provide, and work to remedy the situation for former students who didn’t receive an adequate education. This isn’t an “extremist” idea, it’s basic business ethics. Don’t accept payment for a job you know you are incapable of performing.
November 21, 2011, 2:15 amtvk says:
BL1Y and Gilbert,
Part of the complaint seems to be simple miscommunication or differential expectations. Going by BL1Y’s account, the complaint seems to be that you went into law school thinking that you would come out knowing, for example, “what sort of documents needed to be filed with the government in a deal to purchase spare airplane parts.”
But no law school represents that it teaches you that kind of stuff, and nor can it do so if being a generalist means knowing this kind of specific material across multiple fields. BL1Y seems to concede that such teaching is impossible, but suggests no solution except that law schools should shut down until they figure out how to do the impossible. Which does not seem a very useful suggestion.
My understanding has always been that law school teach generalist skills in the sense that it imparts a set of skills to look up what you need to know. So you can find the regulations on what forms need to be filed and parse the sometimes convoluted language. So far as I know, every law school still teaches those basic skills in 1L legal research and writing.
November 21, 2011, 6:05 amtarheel says:
The reality (sadly) for many young associate litigators is that you spend 75% of your time in Rules 26 through 45. In my law school experience, those were not covered in Civ Pro and there was no class that came even close to touching them. It would appear that law profs hate discovery just as much as partners.
November 21, 2011, 7:06 amJames Madiscon says:
+1.
Once upon a time, a tenured professor at my school made some subtle slight at adjunct professors who were not bright enough to be tenured faculty. An adjunct who also happened to be head of a practice group at an Amlaw 20 firm, called him out and quite accurately pointed out that he had won more cases for more money than the entire tenured faculty combined, and had published more in the past 2 years, than this professor had in his life.
November 21, 2011, 8:04 amInstapundit » Blog Archive » WHAT’S WRONG, AND WHAT’S RIGHT about the New York Times’ piece on legal education…. says:
[...] WRONG, AND WHAT’S RIGHT about the New York Times’ piece on legal [...]
November 21, 2011, 8:15 amEric says:
Personally I think that complaining isn’t going to reverse the trend toward professors doing obscure scholarship. What the schools COULD do that would be reasonable, is make better use of that third year they make law students sit through. By your first two years you have absorbed the academic side of law. The third year should be more focused on practice oriented activities like clinics, perhaps seminars and projects; and, for those truly interested in academic careers, projects oriented towards scholarship.
November 21, 2011, 9:00 amAnderson says:
you spend 75% of your time in Rules 26 through 45. In my law school experience, those were not covered in Civ Pro
Goodness, even Ole Miss *covered* those.
But they’re difficult to teach; there’s not much case law, relatively speaking. The best approach might be problem-oriented: for instance, drafting some objections to interrogatories and having the students learn which objections are well-founded and which aren’t. That of course would be more work for the professor.
November 21, 2011, 9:22 amQET says:
For most young attorneys (and even old ones), what you actually do once you start working is not really “law” in any meaningful respect. Speaking as a corporate & securities lawyer–with the exception of some fairly specific SEC rules and a handful of sections of the DGCL (and the MBCL), all of which could be taught/learned fairly quickly in actual practice, all of what I did was transactional work and performing that work involves very little law. Though I did very little litigation work, I think the same is largely true of that sort of work in the larger firms. Law is a for-profit business and on the transaction side, you earn your fees by closing transactions, and that process, which is a skilled trade in its own right, has almost nothing to do with Law. So, I really don’t see how such things can be effectively taught in law school. Having a professor walk you through a typical merger agreement and/or read Anatomy of a Merger is not really going to provide you with the knowledge you need for the first 5 or so years of your transactional career.
November 21, 2011, 10:03 am3 Years Out says:
Seems to me the problem is not choosing between trade work or academic understanding, but realizing when each of those is useful. As a new associate at a large firm, associates are generally asked to push paper — which they are not trained to do in law school, but would be under a trade school approach. However, as they advance and are asked to be more creative and to address novel issues/circumstances, the broader thinking and analysis of legal issues (from law school training) becomes critical.
November 21, 2011, 10:23 amSteveL says:
Interesting. My law school (Kansas) was lauded for only one thing really, teaching quality. Most of the faculty had long careers in private practice and/or remained in private practice while teaching. Adv. Appellate Advocacy was taught by a sitting judge on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Employment by a woman who was still an active partner in a big firm with several major clients. There are some subjects that don’t lend themselves to that, Constitutional Law for example, but on the whole it was good preparation. Clearly there will always be a fair amount of on the job training in the legal profession.
November 21, 2011, 10:28 amHouston Lawyer says:
I took business associations and securities classes in law school, which most closely match my areas of practice. These classes emphasized theory over the actual rules in force. Most of my other classes were similar to those taken by most law students, like bankruptcy, UCC 3,4 & 9, intellectual property and the like. Now over the last 25 years, corporate and SEC rules have changed, but the theory has not. Theory can serve you well.
Actual practice is very specialized. There is no way that the professors could adequately teach most specialties. There is only so much you can learn in three years of school. The rest will be up to you and your employer.
November 21, 2011, 10:32 amDan Z. says:
For the most part, its a question of expectations. Even after graduation, it takes a long time to become something of a competent, complete lawyer, i.e., someone who can give advice to a client with a real legal problem, without going to a more experienced lawyer. It used to be that you developed that experience on the job, under the supervision of more experienced lawyers. A few things have changed- fewer jobs where that kind of “training” can be had, the disappearance of classic young lawyer assignments, e.g., write me a memo on recent cases on the enforcability of restrictive covenants in our jurisdiction in the last five years in favor of massive, mind-numbing yet profitable grunt work, e.g., review these electronic documents for 12 hours today and note those which might be considered relevant, and a general change in the culture of firms, where profits are paramount and nobody has the interest, patience or incentive to help newbie lawyers grow into full lawyers.
No, I wasn’t competent to practice when I walked out of law school, but I would have been even further behind had it not existed at all.
November 21, 2011, 10:37 amjosh says:
How so? Did they not discuss contract formation in contracts? Duty/breach in torts? As a general litigator, I rely on those concepts on a daily basis {heading off to trial in two hours on a commercial eviction in which a client tried to exercise a purchase option and now seeks to avoid eviction. The only question in this case is whether the attempt to exercise the option formed a binding contract.)
November 21, 2011, 10:54 amNDuff says:
++1
I really wished this happened more often. The majority (all?) of the law professors at my top 25 school entered academia almost immediately after they graduated from (some ivy league or equivalent) law school. It was amazing to me how people whose only apparent achievement in life was to be admitted to a good graduate school in their 20s, could be so arrogant.
November 21, 2011, 11:04 amDotar Sojat says:
A professoriat of drones.
November 21, 2011, 11:18 amBL1Y says:
Neither my administrative law class nor my legal research class provided any instruction in how to look up administrative regulations. It’s not at all impossible to make a minimally skilled graduate.
Here’s how: administrative law should involve looking up regulations, interpreting them, and applying them to fact patterns. Contracts should involve reading contracts, analyzing them, and writing them. Trust and Estates should involve reading wills, analyzing them, and writing them, and doing the same with trust documents.
I’d think this sort of thing would be a no-brainer, yet few (if any) law schools include exercises like this as a regular part of their education.
November 21, 2011, 11:29 amDan Z. says:
My legal research and writing class taught us how to look up administrative regulations.
November 21, 2011, 11:38 amIrving2Smokes says:
Three years of law school did very little to prepare me for the practice of law. Newly hired at a law firm, I was asked to prepare a motion for summary judgment. I had never heard of such a thing and it had to be explained to me. I took all the probate and estate planning courses that were offered in school, but when it came time to prepare and file an actual petition for probate, I was helpless. It makes me wonder what law school was for. I would have been served much better by a one-year apprenticeship with a practicing attorney.
November 21, 2011, 11:52 amdybbuk says:
The vast majority of law grads are utterly clueless as to how to represent a client on any matter. Well, why shouldn’t they be clueless? Their professors are clueless as well.
Financially strapped law students borrow huge amounts of money in the trust and expectation that they will be trained to be lawyers, and law schools betray that trust.
Law school should return to the apprentice model, updated of course, for these more complicated times. Legal education should start with a bar review type crash course to teach core doctrine fast, plus a couple of classes in legal writing and research. After that, there should be a structured series of clinics and externships, supervised by successful local lawyers, to train students to try a case, write an appeal, run an office, and represent clients in various practice areas.
November 21, 2011, 1:13 pmECW says:
\
One could make the same argument about those on the Supreme Court.
November 21, 2011, 1:44 pmECW says:
One might make the same case with regard to the Supreme Court.
November 21, 2011, 1:50 pmAnderson says:
all of what I did was transactional work and performing that work involves very little law
Transactional lawyers who mistakenly think that, make lots of work for litigators.
November 21, 2011, 2:11 pmZiz says:
I have a hard time believing this. Motions for summary judgment frequently underlie the cases used in the standard 1L classes. And I don’t think there’s any civil procedure text that doesn’t at least mention them.
November 21, 2011, 2:12 pmDan Z. says:
Summary judgment was covered pretty extensively in my first year civ pro class.
November 21, 2011, 2:21 pmIrving2Smokes says:
Yes, I probably saw the phrase “summary judgment” used in the procedural history of some of the opinions I studied, but I don’t believe it was ever explained. I was never taught how to seek summary judgment in Civ Pro or any other class. Even for something as basic as amending a petition to add an additional defendant, I was never taught the how-to — the concept, sure, but not how to draft the motion or whether I needed leave of court, etc.
November 21, 2011, 2:31 pmAnderson says:
Motions for summary judgment frequently underlie the cases used in the standard 1L classes. And I don’t think there’s any civil procedure text that doesn’t at least mention them.
Is Civ Pro even *required* at every law school? I have it on good authority that even Evidence is elective at some.
November 21, 2011, 2:33 pmBen P says:
I don’t have a hard time believing it at all.
I work in a very heavy motion practice and I can recite case law on both federal and state Rule 56 standards in my sleep. But when I first started at my firm (and actually in my case it was as a law clerk between 1st and 2nd year) I didn’t have the first clue on details of drafting a summary judgment pleading.
Our civ pro class spent 2+ months on personal jurisdiction, and another month and some on subject matter jurisdiction and venue. 2nd Semester I know we had a segment for a week or two on various types of judgments, but I’m sure we didn’t go into detailed readings of Anderson and Matsushita.
As a good indicator of what real law practice is like, when I asked for help, someone said, here’s a good summary judgment motion from a file I worked on last year, you can copy most of that, just change it around to fit the facts.
November 21, 2011, 2:35 pmTed W says:
If Drinker is not satisfied with the quality of students it hires from HLS or Yale or other “top tier” schools, do what the buying public does with other purchases or hires. Go someplace else. There are schools that are educating students with clinicals, with more preparatory courses, or with transactional documentation courses. Sitting around a law school meeting with grads who say their firm cannot recruit their alma mater because of rankings outside top 10 USNWR, and yet they still complain about the ones they hire is just ridiculous.
The market will work, but the buyer law firms have to look beyond the name plate on the diploma.
November 21, 2011, 2:43 pmQET says:
Transactional lawyers at large firms in years 1 through 5 (roughly) do not think that mistakenly. This is my point.
November 21, 2011, 2:47 pmGreenjeans says:
Most law school classes are required ‘bar’ courses. Like the state and multistate exams, they are memorization contests. Students may choose precious few electives. The whole system needs to be revamped to teach professional skills. As long as the schools are teaching to an antiquated exam system, the students lose and so does the profession.
November 21, 2011, 3:56 pmAnderson says:
Transactional lawyers at large firms in years 1 through 5 (roughly) do not think that mistakenly. This is my point.
Whatever. I’m not sure why you think this — maybe because the form contracts that the associates doctored up didn’t blow up later, or at least, they didn’t hear about it.
But that’s a bit like the old 1940s Bugs Bunny cartoon where he tests the artillery shells for duds by hitting each one on the detonator with a mallet, and then scrawling “DUD” on it when it doesn’t blow him up. (“After 30 years, I can retire!” he exclaims.)
My colleague next door to me does the transactional work for my section, and it is Real Law indeed. (Thank god she does it and not me.)
November 21, 2011, 3:58 pmGilbert says:
As to the requests for specifics — I am currently a criminal defense attorney, but whenever I have someone ask me about any other area of the law, I can tell them what I know about the concepts, but I know absolutely nothing about the logistics of initiating or pursuing a lawsuit. I guess my most specific complaint is that (at least in my experience) law school does nothing to teach you how to strategically or appropriately draft legal pleadings.
As to specific outdated concepts, one example is torts – state statutes make absolute mince-meat of any tort claim you might have. In my state, for example, you have to submit your claim to a board before filing a complaint in court. No one mentioned that in law school, but it could get you sanctioned if you don’t know that. Another example is property law. There needs to be a second “20th Century Property” law to explain how to get anything done in a zoning system. When I left law school, I could recite the different kinds of easements, but I had no idea what a zoning system would or would not even care about.
As for the classes I took, I took the basics, some administrative law, and classes addressing the development of technology and the practice of law (there were others of course, but that’s the broad strokes).
The admin law is a great example. In it learned the law governing the creating and work of administrative agencies, but when one of them started investigating my client, I was completely lost. Do agencies take depositions when the matter under investigation is criminal (there are no depositions in criminal matters)? Do they file a complaint before the investigation? If not, how do I get discovery? FOIA?
Law school needs to teach some logistics. I had to draft precisely ONE complaint in law school, and even that took an enormous amount of hand-holding, and probably would have gotten me laughed out of court.
November 21, 2011, 4:00 pmBL1Y says:
We spent a lot of time on 12(b)(6), but not summary judgment. At no point did we ever read either type of motion, nor did we write one.
November 21, 2011, 4:15 pmwm13 says:
I have practiced law (doing transactional work) for almost 30 years, and I have never drafted a pleading, or wanted to. So teaching that sort of practical skill in law school would have been useless. On the other hand, in my life as a real estate lawyer, concepts such as easements, estates in land, even the Rule Against Perpetuities, come up pretty regularly.
November 21, 2011, 4:19 pmMK Jackson says:
As a 2008 law school graduate (of a T20 law school’s Evening Program), I find it laughable that Biglaw harbors so much disdain for law graduates who have actual work experience. It’s truly odd: the majority of large law firms – while refusing to hire students who worked, and gained relevant experience, during law school – bemoan the lack of legal ability (or, often enough, good common sense) of their new hires.
No, law school is not trade school, and law students (and graduates, and applicants) with any sense ought to have known what they were buying with their tuition. To look back and ask, “why didn’t you teach me ____?!” is, in my mind, irresponsible at best. Anyone expecting a law school to manage the expectations of prospective students should take his/her money and run. Investors – which prospective law students should consider themselves to be – should manage their own expectations. This includes asking law schools’ career offices about those inflated employment stats. :)
The only surprise I experienced throughout my four years was being turned away by large firms that didn’t value salient government experience, reams of relevant writing, and, yes, the common sense rarely found in the first-year associate who has literally never held a job before. Sadly, the market is starting to work itself out… in the form of layoffs.
November 21, 2011, 5:55 pmBTB says:
The parol evidence rule prohibits the introduction of oral terms that vary or contradict a written agreement if the oral terms were made prior to or contemporaneous with the written agreement. Oral modification of a written agreement is thus not a parol evidence rule issue.
November 21, 2011, 9:06 pmFederal Dog says:
“It was amazing to me how people whose only apparent achievement in life was to be admitted to a good graduate school in their 20s, could be so arrogant.”
Why? They spend their time lecturing to non-lawyers just out of college who are in no position to challenge anything they say.
They never show up in court for throw downs, and they apparently cannot understand how their skills rate in relation to people who do.
November 22, 2011, 6:44 amQET says:
You’re overdramatizing. I did not say there was no Law involved at all in transactional work; just that, other than very infrequently, young transactional attorneys are not paid to practice that Law. Were a form document to blow up, it is highly unlikely that would be due to the kind of Law that law students find in the casebooks they learn from.
November 22, 2011, 9:37 amNYT front-pager: law schools don’t teach how to be a lawyer says:
[...] academia to Segal’s piece has been largely negative (Matt Bodie/Prawfs, Adler roundup), but Orin Kerr argues: there’s an underlying point that I think is both important and correct: Law professors, [...]
November 22, 2011, 9:49 amRecent Graduate w/ Job says:
In my experience and based on feed back from other new lawyers this is the basic instruction that most new lawyers receive at small to mid sized organisations.
Very few senior partners/associates/judges have the skill set to mentor or apprentice a new associate.
Legal education (in law school and outside of it) seems to do an excellent job at teaching legal analysis, but seems to fail at teaching the process doing a legal work.
November 22, 2011, 12:58 pmSykes Five says:
And some force prevented you asking? I mean, you kept encountering this mysterious phrase and you never asked what it meant?
November 22, 2011, 1:46 pmDan Z. says:
Is that really a bad way of doing it? I mean, if I were a young lawyer asking an experienced and successful litigator for advice on how to draft a good summary judgment motion and he said here are copies of every sj motion I’ve drafted in the last ten years, have a look at those, I’d probably think I’d stumbled on a treasure trove. Does he have to hold my hand?
November 22, 2011, 4:53 pmJimbino says:
I attended UT Austin Law School for almost free ($2000 for 3 years). There’s no way I would pay the fortune it costs to attend now.
Apart from the law classes, the only meaningful extra benefits I gained for the $2000 were the right to attend computer engineering graduate classes for free and use of Lexis and the gymnasium. Use of the fine libraries doesn’t count, since any member of the public can use them for free or for a small annual fee. Though the law profs were excellent, I personally gained more from the engineering classes in terms of subsequent earning power.
Law school, as opposed to med school or science and engineering grad schools, requires no expensive laboratory equipment. It should be a whole hell of a lot cheaper than it is. I’d like to imagine a totally privatized legal education system and wonder how much it would cost for 10 students, acting together, to hire Socrates and the finest modern profs for private instruction equal to that received in classes of up to 135 students at UT Law Austin — instruction sufficient to enable them to pass the bar.
There are roughly 15 hours of law school class instruction per week for around 90 weeks (in three years) yielding a total of 1350 hours. Ten students, each paying $20 per hour, would yield each of their profs $200 per hour of instruction.
The students would end up paying only $27,000 for 90 weeks of instruction. Adding the rent for an entire house or storefront ($400/week) and $10/student-week for LexisNexis would bring the total cost of a law degree to only some $32,000 per student, less than the $35,000+ that UT Austin charges per year for instruction in classes of up to 150 students where you can’t choose your professors.
Of course, in a deregulated system, the student who doesn’t need 1350 hours of instruction to pass the bar would pay $0 in a class of 1 student and 0 profs.
November 22, 2011, 5:12 pmjlowery says:
The one thing I’m always amused at whenever this discussion comes up is that on a blog composed of market-oriented or market-sympathetic professors, there’s a disconnect here. Law schools and the academy at large reward scholarship and care little about teaching ability. At the least, a professor who’s a bad teacher will find it has little affect on his advancement or tenure possibilities.
But law school defenders claim that out of the goodness of their hearts and their belief in teaching as a critical part of their job, despite evidence to the contrary, students will be well instructed. Not even looking at whether professors are equipped to teach properly without practical experience, in what other market or profession do we think actors, with little to no incentive, will spend time, energy and effort to accomplish something?
November 22, 2011, 8:47 pmD. Mann says:
As I student about to graduate in five months (fingers crossed), I lay the blame for the mess at he feet of employers, such as mentioned in the NYT. They are the ones hiring not the the best potential lawyers, but the the ones performing the best in a system they all agree is flawed by focusing on some idiosyncratic legal idea. Its like hiring the best chef based on who clips coupons the best. You don’t have the right to complain how salty the soup is after that.
November 28, 2011, 2:27 pm