Fixing Law Schools Requires More ‘How To’ And Less ‘What To’
Everyone has an answer for reforming law school -- but we need practical solutions.
Fixing the modern American law school is a lot like quitting any other self-destructive practice: the first step is admitting you have a problem. While the elite schools barrel into the future assured that nothing will ever knock them off their vaunted pedestal — sorry, Georgetown — the rest of the legal academy seems unaware that anything’s wrong. Tuition is skyrocketing and jobs (at least those that can support those student loans) are dwindling, but most lower-tier schools are proclaiming that everything’s fine and “I can quit teaching ‘Law and Mario Kart’ any time I want.”
No, you should seek help.
And much like quitting smoking, there’s a crowded market of folks peddling solutions — including us. Unlike quitting smoking, law schools don’t seem eager to embrace any of these prescriptions, no matter how ingenious. This morning, Mark A. Cohen — a veteran attorney, founder of Qualitas, and lecturer at Georgetown — unveiled a series of proposals for reforming law schools to meet the challenges of the modern legal market. Is he the neon blue vape that the legal academy needs?
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Translation: not all law schools are Harvard. Their curricula, faculty, and price should reflect that. Law schools should specialize and focus on training students for a particular market segment. Yale does not produce many solo practitioners and Valparaiso is not a feeder of Supreme Court Justices and Clerks. Yet both schools operate as if they were preparing students for similar careers.
Later in the article — discussing cost control — Cohen compares law schools to the difference between a Kia and a Mercedes. There are different cars for different customers, so why not different law school models for different students? Maybe the better analogy is from the fashion world, where we need fewer runway designs with thorns and feathers and whatever the f**k this is and more Banana Republics.
Because even at the top-tier law schools, there’s not really much professional advantage to teaching a new generation of people who won’t end up on the Supreme Court. Does it really behoove the average, say, Penn student to be trained like a Supreme Court justice before beginning a three-decade career in commercial real estate for Dechert? The old joke is that law school doesn’t teach you anything about being a lawyer, but that’s not true — law school doesn’t teach you anything about being a lawyer unless you’re one of the ten to twenty students nationwide every year who go on to premier appellate practice.
It will not be easy or popular, and many Deans will lack the stomach even to attempt serious restructuring. Entrenched interests—principally underperforming tenured faculty, administration (have you ever noticed how many ‘Deans’ most law schools have these days?), and staff will fight like hell.
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The problem with Cohen’s ideas — and we’re focusing mostly on his vision for curriculum reform — isn’t that faculty and administrators might not like change, it’s that they may not be capable of it.
Law schools generally teach each — contracts, torts, civil procedure, etc.– as stand-alone areas. Why not merge, for example, litigation with civil procedure, contracts, employment, and legal ethics to afford students a better understanding of the realities of an age discrimination case? This issue and problem-solving approach better prepares students for what they will confront in practice.
At a recent pre-law counseling event, a few of us here at Above the Law were talking to students about this quirk of legal education. While the actual practice of law is mostly divided along litigation/transactional lines, legal education doesn’t track these professional groupings, which is odd for a professional school. One would expect something more akin to Cohen’s problem-based proposal.
But who takes the plunge and writes up this new curriculum? It’s not going to be the elite schools who have exactly zilch incentive to deviate from the 19th century Harvard casebook that keeps their graduates gainfully employed. It’s not going to be the mid-tier schools who may have every reason to change but have to look out for their students, because no matter how useless this education model may be practically, the regional firm recruiting partner knows what an A in Civil Procedure means in evaluating a candidate. Shake up the curriculum and the only thing a school can guarantee is a lot of confused employers. The first movers on any new curriculum would have to be schools who expect their students to go into solo practice out of the gate, and those are the worst possible schools put in charge of revolutionizing the way we teach law school.
And that’s not so much a swipe at the imagination and commitment of those teachers, but let’s face it, 80 percent of those professors are trying to prove they can teach what Harvard’s teaching so they can get the hell out of Lower Basin City College Law School. When Cohen discusses costs, he poses this idea:
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The cost of delivering core courses could be reduced dramatically by having many lecture courses delivered remotely by leading scholars (think MOOC but with smaller classes and more interactive). Law schools are already utilizing more adjunct professors instead of additional full-time faculty. This has two benefits: (1) more practitioners teaching ‘hands on’ courses; and (2) significant cost reduction. That trend should continue.
Well, there’s the problem right there. “Leading scholars” would just double down on the old theories as they recycle decades of lectures into their remote learning courses. And while adjunct professors may offer a cheaper, more practical perspective, they’re ultimately practitioners first and educators second. Like your divorced mom’s new boyfriend, they may be a lot of fun, but eventually they’re going to go back to their practice (banging younger divorcees in this analogy). It’s the full-time faculty who are in it for the long haul, and any model that doesn’t place faculty at the forefront is doomed to be a flash in the pan.
Cohen thinks these reforms will be hard, but they’re downright impossible unless someone like Columbia throws tradition to the wind and completely reimagines itself knowing that its relationships with top firms will still land its students in prime associate positions. But the people who must act to generate any change are the ones feeling no pressure. Perhaps if the ABA forces some academy-wide transformation, there could be some traction, but without some top-down regulation to enact these changes, there’s not going to be any broad reform.
Cohen’s proposals themselves aren’t really all that far off of what the academy needs. But his article is the “just go cold turkey” of cures.
Law Schools Must Restructure. It Won’t Be Easy. [Forbes]
Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
