"Monday, August 15, 2011
The Editorials on this page are the product of the Editorial Board. The views expressed are not necessarily those of any individual Board Member or of the Law Tribune’s management. The Editorial Board has no role in the management of the Law Tribune.
Editorial: Law Schools Should Change, But Not Retreat
Legal education is under fire. Prominent news stories have criticized everything from increases in law school tuition to allegedly deceptive scholarship practices. Chief Justice John Roberts spoke harsh words about the relevance of contemporary law review articles. Large clients have begun refusing to pay for legal matters handled by first- and second-year associates.
Law school curricula have been branded out of date for failing to teach topics such as financial literacy and project management. And, of course, the dominant backdrop is the bleak climate for legal jobs that confronts recent law school graduates.
Legal educators must respond to these changes. Costs must be kept down so that tuition increases may slow. Incoming students have a right to candid consumer information about the terms of scholarships and the job prospects of graduates. A law school that lures a student with a merit scholarship that depends upon maintaining certain grades should communicate clearly the percentage of students who reach the targeted GPA.
Law schools must also forthrightly distinguish – as the American Bar Association will soon wisely require – between graduates who find employment as lawyers or at similar jobs in business or government and those at work waiting tables. Faculty members should strive to write in a style that is accessible to a broad legal audience. And law school graduates should understand the difference between an income statement and a balance sheet.
Two strands in the attack on law schools, however, deserve immediate and universal rebuke. Despite recent comments from those who should know better, law schools are not “cash cows.” Perhaps there are a few schools where higher tuitions have been used to cross-subsidize other university units. The vast majority of ABA accredited law schools, however, provide a first-class education that costs far more than the schools collect in tuition revenue.
Competition for faculty members has pushed up salaries, although law professors remain far from matching the incomes of attorneys at large firms. Rankings pressures and the salutary trend of augmented clinical opportunities have kept class sizes wonderfully low. Above all, the competition for top students has caused many law schools dramatically to increase scholarship budgets. Nominal tuition is now more like a sticker price that many students don’t pay.
The shift of scholarship dollars from need to merit-based awards raises its own problems. Yet it is a key part of today’s financial equation in which law schools are under intense financial pressure and nothing like the golden goose of media portrayals.
Still more important, law schools must respond to these calls for reform without retreating from the cardinal virtues of contemporary legal education. Conceptual dexterity and analytical rigor must remain the law school hallmark if we are successfully to train those who will manage complex transactions, juggle busy litigation dockets or draft key governing documents.
Legal education can only gain from enhanced clinical experiences that provide students an opportunity to put their learning into practice. But at the end of the day, law graduates who cannot locate the proverbial courthouse door are still better than those who have not been trained why we have courthouses in the first place. Showing students at an early stage exactly how something gets done in practice today misses the key point that the student must understand why things are likely to be done differently tomorrow.
Law schools teach abstract reasoning or so-called “theory” for the sake of lawyers who will thrive in practice. We need to push harder to make the theory relevant, and training in modern communications, group dynamics and, yes, financial literacy can help improve our profession. But this is a far cry from calls to return to the imagined good old days when students were allegedly rewarded for rote memorization of existing rules. The way to confront changes in law practice is to make law school more sophisticated not less. Anything else will just be helping others pile dirt upon our collective grave. •"
