Best Practices for Legal Education

In 2001, the Clinical Legal Education Association established a committee to study the education of lawyers in the U.S. and offer recommendations for improvement: the result is Best Practices for Legal Education: a Vision and a Road Map (2007). Detailed reports like this rarely make for fun reading, but they can offer a comprehensive evaluation of a field and suggest detailed improvements.

The Best Practices for Legal Education report comes down hard on American law schools for what it perceives as major failings: licensed lawyers unable to competently practice law, too much focus on lecturing and the Socratic method, too much emphasis on single end-of-year exams, a "wasted" second and third year, etc. As the report is written by the Clinical Legal Education Association, it's probably not surprising that the report's primary cure for these ails is more clinical education, both in-house and through supervised "externships". I don't want to be glib here though, as this is a thoughtful, well-researched report that makes a strong case that law schools often just don't do a very good job at transforming students into lawyers.

I do think more clinical instruction is probably the future of legal education, and this report fits nicely with what the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law is trying to do. (Although, personally, I fit in much better with the old-school use of Socratic method and the teaching of doctrine than I do with a practice-oriented approach).

The difficulty with the Best Practices report is that it seems intended for two very different audiences: law school deans and law school teachers. Law school deans will have difficulty implementing many of the large-scale institutional recommendations because doing so will necessarily limit some of the traditional autonomy of individual faculty members, who tend to hold on tightly to their ancient prerogatives in setting out teaching, curriculum, and evaluation methods. On the other hand, many of the recommendations made to individual faculty members will be difficult to adopt because faculty members (at least the new ones) face a great many expectations from both other faculty members and students to keep doing things the way they've always been done.

In other words, the problem is this: if just one or two junior professors agreed with the report and (for example) decided to do away with the single end-of-year exam for grading in Torts or Constitutional Law, they would probably cause quite an uproar. On the other hand, if the Dean tried to make sweeping changes across the board to get rid of the single end-of-year exam, a handful of professors would probably put up a major fight. This sort of opposition takes a long time and a great measure of cooperation between faculty committees and associations to overcome, which is why legal education, though it does change, tends to change slowly.