And Now a Crisis in Legal Education

2012

Brian Z. Tamanaha’s book, Failing Law Schools, asserts and echoes criticisms of U.S. legal education, calling for the end of the required third year and of scholarly model of law teaching. In this book review, Steve Sheppard reads the historical record and statistical data and contends that Tamanaha’s arguments from history and policy fail. Sheppard charges Tamanaha with incomplete historical analysis, which leads to misleading conclusions. Specifically, the article details how Tamanaha’s acontextualism, analytical gaps, trouble with sources, and unsupported rhetoric lead the author to advocate remedies that fail to resolve real problems facing legal education. Sheppard provides data and history that are essential to a more contextual picture. The article concludes by explaining how Tamanaha’s proposals would harm not only law schools but also society at large, among other concerns, by limiting the quality of legal education available to the poor and the quality of the lawyer who wo...

Georgia State University Law Review, 2010

The Modern Law Review, 1985

Reviewed work: Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s by Robert Stevens.

The Law Teacher, 2020

This seminar was held on 17 th June, at Northumbria Law School, Newcastle upon Tyne. It was wellattended with over 60 delegates, representing over 30 Institutions from the UK, Australia and Canada. The seminar also stimulated substantial engagement and coverage on online platforms. The seminar hashtag #20yrson was used 320 times on the day of the seminar, with a potential reach of up to 73,102 unique users on Twitter. Professor Paul Maharg, from Osgoode Hall Law School, Canada also live blogged the seminar at paulmaharg.com on the day, which has been viewed over 600 times.

The satiric novel, as a “message” novel, can provide unvarnished truths about the object of satire. Institutions of higher learning, particularly law schools, and the denizens of those institutions, are prime subjects for satire because they take themselves so seriously. Unfortunately, though, The Socratic Method by Michael Levin takes itself as seriously as the law school it is criticizing. One of the hazards of the satiric novel is that the message may overwhelm the plot and characterization. Levin, in his zeal to awaken the reader to the torture of the law school, and particularly the torture of the law school variant of the socratic method of pedagogy, has failed to avoid this hazard. All the characters are two-dimensional, and the story line is picked up and laid down seemingly at random. Still, it is possible to capsulize what Levin believes is wrong with the present structure of the law school based on this novel, and to critique legal education based on the picture Levin creates. Though Levin’s story line and character development suffer for the message he is attempting to convey, he has an excellent point to make about the failure of legal education.

Acta Academica, 2014

This article reflects on recent debates on legal education in South Africa. I argue that the value of legal education should not be indexed by how well it serves the needs and expectations of the legal profession and judiciary, but rather how it contributes to a new jurisprudence suited to the legal, social and political transformation of South Africa. I therefore argue against a reading of the crisis of legal education as one that is instrumental and economical (the inability to produce efficient legal professionals) and focus rather on the jurisprudential crises that lie at the heart of law and jurisprudence, namely the crisis set in motion by the shift from a general jurisprudence, centered on the ideal of justice, to a restricted jurisprudence, focused merely on the coherence of the positive law. I argue that what is needed as a response to this crisis is a critical legal education, or an approach to the study and teaching of law grounded in a critical jurisprudence. The turn to a critical legal education suggested in this article is then further linked to an understanding of law as a humanities discipline and to the humility that this will require of legal academics, lawyers and judges.

University of Pittsburgh Legal Studies, 2018

This Essay consists of an invitation to participate in conversations about the future of legal education in ways that integrate rather than distinguish several threads of concern and revision that have emerged over the last decade. Conversations about the future of legal education necessarily include conversations about the future of law practice, legal services, and law itself. Some of those start with the somewhat stale questions: What are US law professors doing, what should they be doing, and why? Those questions are still relevant and important, but they are no longer the only relevant questions, and they are not the only places to start. What about other legal educators, meaning those who teach and train in legal services worlds but who don’t teach the professional practice of law or the delivery of traditional legal services? What about those who are involved deeply in the production and distribution of law, legal services, and legal information but who are not, themselves, lawyers? Why start with current teachers; why not start with current or future students, or current or future clients, or current or future institutions, or current or future sets of values? Expand the communities of interest and identities of potential participants not only beyond elite US law schools, and not only beyond the private law firms that constitute BigLaw, but also beyond the US and beyond North America. The invitation goes out, in short, to a much broader audience than US law professors, and it is framed in broad but pragmatic terms.

The University of Toronto Law Journal, 1983

2019

2011

Washington University Journal of Law Policy, 2014

insights about lawyering competencies and experiential legal education; the shifting nature of legal practice in the United States; a decrease in law jobs; changes in the economics of the legal profession that challenge the current cost of legal education; a dramatic drop in law school applications and admittees; increased competition for students among law schools; increased market demand for-practice-ready‖ law graduates; and increased numbers of law grads going into solo and small firm practice. 3 Current concerns about legal education echo long-standing criticism of the upper-level curriculum, particularly the third year of law school, when, as the saying goes, law schools-bore you to death.‖ 4 As long ago as 1883, Harvard Law Dean Ephraim Gurney lamented in a letter to Harvard President Charles Elliot, one of the inventors of the modern Langdellian law school:-If you[r] LLB at the end of his three years did not feel as helpless on entering an office on the practical side as he is admirably trained on the theoretical, I think he would begrudge his third year less.‖ 5 Economic, social, and political conditions make it impossible to ignore the clamor for reform. Today's climate invites a deeper examination of law school curricula and pedagogy, with a focus on the-sequencing of doctrine, skills and values across the curriculum designed to prepare students for practice. .. .‖ 6 Legal education is at 3.

2000

Based on Plenary Address to the Association of American law Schools

1983