A Bleak Future for Legal Education?

Actually, though, I doubt that the deans and administrators who push pedagogical reforms think in these cynical terms. Their motivations are more mundane. They are interested in improving their schools numbers on factors measured by the U.S. News & World Report s rankings bar passage, and percentage of grads who are legally employed nine months after graduation. Many of the changes in legal education are driven by U.S. News & World Report s rankings, which students use in choosing where to go to law school, and with which many administrators and faculty accordingly have a near obsession.

And yet that obsession may itself reflect the loss of a higher purpose in the legal academy. If you have no loftier vision of what law is, and hence of what legal education should aspire to impart, you will naturally tend to focus on the more measurable factors. Rankings. Bar passage rates. Dollars.

What law schools desperately need, it seems to me, is some loftier conception of what law and hence legal education are about. Social justice agendas seek to fill that need, but for reasons I have discussed, they may actually aggravate the problem.

Might law find some more ennobling view by rediscovering its roots in some form of the classical legal tradition? I have for years been attempting, in my inevitably puny and idiosyncratic way, to promote some such rediscovery. But the prospects seem slim, and the conspicuous movement currently advocating such a revival has adopted a stance so eccentric, belligerent, and potentially dangerous that there is a risk that the classical tradition will be further discredited.

Things may change who knows how? But at present, contemplating the future of legal education is more dispiriting than inspiring. Where there is no vision, the people perish.

via lawliberty.org

Steven D. Smith (my colleague here at USD).