A Plea for Real-World Training in Law Schools

From the issue dated January 19, 2007

A Plea for Real-World Training in Law Schools

Carnegie Foundation report suggests more focus on clients, less on Socratic dialogues

By KATHERINE MANGAN

Washington

While medical, business, and other professional schools frequently reinvent their curricula to require that students get hands-on practice before beginning their careers, law-school teaching has remained remarkably unchanged over the past century.

As a result, many students graduate with little experience working with real clients and an inadequate grounding in ethical and social issues, according to a new report from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

The report concludes that the Socratic "case dialogue" method that dominates law-school teaching does a good job of teaching students legal-reasoning skills but does little to prepare them to work with people or juggle morally complex issues.

"The gap between teaching students to think like a lawyer and act like a lawyer— especially in ethical situations— is greater than ever," said Lee S. Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation and one of the report's authors.

The curriculum is also extremely similar from school to school, which creates "a striking conformity in outlook and habits of thought among law-school graduates," according to the report, which was distributed and discussed at this month's annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools.

The foundation singled out a few law schools that are emphasizing practical skills.

New York University School of Law stresses simulations and clinical experiences, and students are assessed on how well they comply with an ethics code that is modeled after the American Bar Association's code. And at the City University of New York, all first-year law students take a series of small-group seminars in which they act out cases and compare their performances with films that dramatize similar court arguments. Says John Farago, who teaches law and family relations: "Students learn law best by linking it to practice."

Reforming Professional Schools

The Carnegie report, "Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law," is the latest in a series of major reports the foundation has published that examine professional education. In October the foundation recommended an overhaul of medical education, saying students were buried under too much information and professors did not have enough time to teach and train students.

The law-school study is based on visits to 16 public and private law schools in the United States and Canada, as well as conversations with legal educators and experts. The schools were geographically diverse and varied in selectivity.

The authors are four scholars and one former scholar at the Carnegie Foundation. In addition to Mr. Shulman, the president, the authors include William M. Sullivan and Anne Colby, directors of the foundation's Preparation for the Professions Program; Lloyd Bond, a senior scholar at Carnegie; and Judith Welch Wegner, who has served as a senior scholar for the foundation and is a former president of the Association of American Law Schools.

The authors hope the report will help revitalize legal education at a time when it sorely needs a boost. "Critics of the legal profession, both from within and without, have pointed to a great profession suffering from varying degrees of confusion and demoralization," they write.

Most first-year law students take a standard menu of classes— including constitutional law, property law, torts, and contracts— that usually meet in large halls where professors call on individual students and grill them about cases.

One of the shortcomings of the Socratic case-dialogue method is that "the focus remains on cases rather than clients," the report says. The second and third years of law school usually include a series of elective courses and options for students to work in legal clinics.

The foundation recommended more emphasis on clinics and simulations of practice or trials. Those approaches would teach students how to apply abstract theories to real people and realistic situations, and help prevent law students from feeling alienated or disillusioned, the report concludes.

One of the reasons law schools are slow to change is that most faculty members are drawn from a small number of elite law schools and are groomed along similar paths as law-review editors, law clerks, and legal scholars, the authors say. Schools have little incentive to introduce practical skills or clinical experience in the first year because large case-study classes are much cheaper to offer. The result is a tendency to turn out "legal technicians."

"In their all-consuming first year, students are told to set aside their desire for justice," the report finds. "They are warned not to let their moral concerns or compassion for the people in the cases they discuss cloud their legal analyses."

While this advice can be helpful early on, law schools should also teach students when it is appropriate to consider moral issues, the report says. Students are often left with the impression that ethical and social concerns are secondary to legal procedure and doctrine.

The Value of Clinical Practice

Medical, business, and engineering schools all use case studies to deal with ethical and social issues, while most law schools do not, even though those schools invented the case-study method, the report says. It draws additional parallels with training in other professional schools.

Medical and nursing schools require students to practice in a clinical setting before they graduate, and engineering students must demonstrate that they can design functioning projects, the report notes. "At present, however, a law degree requires no experience beyond honing legal analysis in the classroom and taking tests," the report says.

"Compared with the centrality of supervised practice, with mentoring and feedback, in the education of physicians and nurses, or the importance of supervised practice in the preparation of teachers or social workers, the relative marginality of clinical training in law schools is striking," the report notes.

One law-school dean interviewed at the conference in Washington this month called law schools "the most conservative educational institutions in the country" and said it was unlikely that sweeping changes would happen anytime soon.

"Virtually every law student takes the same set of courses from faculty members who graduated from the same small set of law schools," said Thomas F. Guernsey, president and dean of AlbanyLawSchool.

While Albany encourages clinical training, Mr. Guernsey said he did not think most law schools would integrate significant practical training into the first and second year because it would be expensive and "law schools don't have the medical-school equivalent of a teaching hospital" to provide that clinical experience.

New Programs

In recent months, a number of schools have announced that they will offer clinical training.

In November, StanfordLawSchool announced an overhaul in its curriculum that includes more opportunities for second- and third-year students to represent clients and litigate cases. The changes also include simulation courses in which students work in teams with students from other professional schools. For example, some law- and medical-school students collaborate in a new clinic that focuses on patients' legal and medical needs, while other law students work with students from the natural sciences to prepare a witness to testify in a patent-infringement case.

"Talk to any lawyer or law-school graduate, and they will tell you they were increasingly disengaged in their second and third years," says Stanford's dean of law, Larry D. Kramer. "It's because the second- and third-year curriculum is for the most part repeating what they did in their first year and adds little of intellectual and professional value. They learn more doctrine, which is certainly valuable, but in a way that is inefficient and progressively less useful."

The law school is also developing a clinical rotation in which students spend one academic quarter taking just a clinic.

HarvardLawSchool also overhauled its first-year curriculum last year, for the first time in more than a century. The changes include simulation and mock litigation, as well as a new problem-solving course.

The University of Dayton School of Law offers an accelerated program that allows students to graduate in two years rather than the usual three. The program pays actors to play the role of clients to help teach students how to effectively interview, plea bargain, and negotiate. Students learn how to analyze body language and voice inflection to determine whether a person is lying.

Edward L. Rubin, dean of VanderbiltUniversityLawSchool and chairman of the Association of American Law Schools' curriculum committee, says that too often clinical work is "an add-on, rather than being integrated into the curriculum."

Vanderbilt is trying to integrate experiential learning with class work. For example, it assigned one clinical teacher to connect students with "externships" around the world, such as working alongside lawyers in international courts like the Iraqi tribunal. Students share the experiences when they return to the classroom.

Mr. Rubin and Stanford's dean, Mr. Kramer, agree that the Carnegie report may stimulate new ways of teaching, which should involve getting students out into the world.

"You can't imagine someone graduating from medical school without spending time in a hospital, and you can't be a rabbi without some serious clinical experience," Mr. Kramer says. "Law is about the only profession that doesn't require it. That's wrong, and it needs to be corrected."

A summary of the report is available on the Carnegie Foundation's Web site (

Section: The Faculty
Volume 53, Issue 20, Page A6