There is one thing wrong with the question in the title and that is whether in fact we should have or need to have law schools. The more I think about what the UK Legal Education and Training Review has to do, the more I feel for them. Probably since the days of 1870 at Harvard Law School has there been such an air of turmoil around legal education.
It's clear we don't know what we are doing or why. David Segal's article in Sunday's New York Times, "What They Don't Teach Law Students: Lawyering" speaks to an American dilemma but one that shortly will become an English one too.
The gist of his article is that law firms have to take on the task of training their associates to be "real" lawyers, not just pretend ones out of law school who don't know anything. Moreover, law faculty have no incentive to change this because their reward patterns aren't directly tied to their students getting jobs but to the articles they publish. Teaching also takes a junior role to scholarship.
In part this is because law schools appeared to be trade schools without any serious role in the academy except to bring in money. Now this has become institutionalized because the entire economic infrastructure of law schools is built on a state-guaranteed loan system. Some might say redolent of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. For Brian Tamanaha they're a drug.
Law firms are finding that clients refuse to pay the costs of training associates straight out of law school:
Last year, a survey by American Lawyer found that 47 percent of law firms had a client say, in effect, “We don’t want to see the names of first- or second-year associates on our bills.” Other clients are demanding that law firms charge flat fees.Law jobs as a result are harder to get. Recently in New York a lawyer, who is an adjunct professor at one of the elite law schools there, told me how all adjunct faculty at the elite schools in the north east of the US are being asked to try and place their students. It seems not all are getting jobs.
Whether law schools should become trade schools again isn't the reason I'm writing. There is something wrong with law schools and legal education and they need fixing. Their curriculum follows a path that seems to lead nowhere. And this is true in the US and the UK.
Students are bored, overworked and frustrated. We ought to be able to design a curriculum that excites them and commits them intellectually and emotionally to law. Unfortunately I don't think the legal profession is good at doing that.
Law Without Walls--which is entering its second year--has begun the redesign process and has generated more excitement than any other legal educational venture that I can think of.
So, do we need law schools? While we ponder this I'm sure new educational ventures will come along and stealthily extract the law school consumer base and it could be too late for law schools to repair the damage. Is the law school the best medium in which to learn law?
UK law schools are about to commit seppuku soon. They are to charge tuition fees considerably higher than hitherto but with no concomitant increase in quality or innovation in the curriculum. Indeed, most likely students will be paying more for less as universities freeze hiring or make staff redundant. It won't make the "student experience" anymore satisfying. Indeed, I think it will lead to law schools closing down or shrinking so much that they become adjunct departments to business schools or such. They might as well become paralegal training centres.
All law students--here and in the US--should read David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years. It's a tremendous read showing how the phenomenon of debt is at the root of our social and economic structure. Law students, and others, need to understand the phenomenology of debt and how it rules their lives. If they do, law schools will have no option but to reform. But how?
Follow up: The New York Times has published a series of responses to Segal's article.
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