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Blawg Review #24 & Improving Law School
Jaybeus Corpus posted a great Blawg Review on Monday. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out. And since the next one will be right here at the imbroglio, please be sure to submit your best posts—both those you've read this week and those you've written. A good Blawg Review depends on you!
But in keeping with the theme of late, Blawg Review #24 contains a link to a great post from the [non]billable hour about how to improve law school from a blawgger's perspective. There are lots of great ideas in there; I especially like
- 9. Ignore big firms. Seriously.
- 11. Guarantee student satisfaction. (By making the first semester free!)
- 12. Remember, the law is not rocket science.
On the other hand, #2, “Bring in BarBri as a curriculum consultant,” seems like a royally awful idea. One of the problems w/law school is that it teaches too much for tests already at the expense of teaching practical skills and knowledge; bringing in BarBri is only like to exacerbate that problem.
Number 4, “Auction off legal research access to West or Lexis,” is interesting and it would be a good start—Wexis should definitely have to pay more for its captive audience—but I'd definitely take this further: Put Wexis out of business, either by using eminent domain to buy them out (replacing their for-profit services with non-profit analogues), or by simply creating a publicly-funded competitor that offers the same material for free to anyone with an internet connection.
Isn't it fun to dream?
See also: A recent survey of which schools produce the most BigLaw Drones Associates.
Posted 12:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack | 3L
Who's Gonna Kill 3L?
Following up on yesterday's post about whether the cost of law school should prevent people from pursuing public interest careers, Andrew Raff points to an ongoing debate at the Legal Affairs Debate Club over the oddly-phrased question: Abolish the third year of law school? Check out the give and take between Laura I. Appleman and GW's own Daniel Solove (who blogs at both Balkinization and PrawfsBlawg). Appleman seems to be the proponent of change (although she's not arguing explicitly or forcefully that law school should be only 2 years, only that something needs to change), while Solove is defending the third year (but grants that the current landscape of legal education has problems that law professors and law schools could do more to address).
I've written about this topic before, but let me be more clear: While I see pros and cons in both positions, I'm all for getting rid of the third year for cost/debt reasons alone. Saving students lots of money would reduce barriers for them to enter public interest careers, and it could theoretically reduce the cost of legal services for everyone, so it would be good public policy. An added benefit is that it could take some of the snobbery and pretentiousness out of law school and the legal profession generally because at two years the JD would become a Master's degree, plain and simple. In fact, why don't we change that pretentious name, anyway? Let's all get our Master's Degree in Law (drop the whole pile of Latin b.s.) and get on with our lives. The world would be a better place. Perhaps people would even have less disdain for lawyers if they dropped some of their pretensions.
That said, I'm willing to consider alternatives. A few pretty good ideas were floated in the comments here, any of which would probably be improvements over the current system. The debate between Appleman and Solove is generating other interesting points to consider. (Unfortunately I don't have time now to consider them in detail, but soon, I hope.)
More obscurely, does it strike anyone else as peculiar that the question posed by the Legal Affairs Debate Club does not name an actor who would do the abolishing? Is the question whether the ABA should abolish the third year (it could), or whether law schools should do it, or law professors, or law students, or...? Any of these groups could take on this cause and, with sufficient organization, could probably succeed in rolling law school back to two years. But the form of the question gets to the truth that this is an issue for which no one really wants to take responsibility. Perhaps the status quo in legal education remains largely undisturbed because the constituencies involved are so diffuse and at odds that none of them can get together well enough to really change things. If that's the case, this seems a place where the ABA, as a sort of umbrella over all of these groups, should really be taking the lead...
UPDATE: See also this post on PrawfsBlawg about states that allow people to take the bar exam w/out attending law school. That post also links to previous debate on the issue by Appleman and Solove.
