A New Law School in Texas to Address Unmet Legal Needs

Before we can ask whether there are too many lawyers we must answer several preliminary questions: whom do we consider lawyers, and what does and should influence their number? The term ‘lawyer’, w...

我國大學聯招第一類組近年來的熱門科系均為法律系包辦，但早期文法商科系的錄取分數多以法律系墊底。本文檢視民國69至85學年度第一類組中主要科系的排名變化，發現法律系的竄起並非逐年來平緩的調整，而是由民國73學年度聯招改制開始，及至74學年度連續的排名大幅向上跳躍所帶起，再接以歷年波動平緩的調整所達成，而文組科系以對應的反向方式調整，排名大幅下跌，這種排名的跳躍以私立大學最為劇烈。女性考生傳統上較易被區隔成讀文（乙)）組的最佳人選，舊制的乙丁分組聯招將性別「職業隔離」時間提前。數據顯示，新制聯招實施後，許多女性考生有捨文從法商的傾向，這也是法科志願前移及文科志願㆘降的主要動力，同時打破以往乙丁分組的「職業隔離」提前效果。

The Double Life of Law Schools

The law school of 2020 will soon appear around the corner. An increasingly asked question is, What will it look like? Will it look like the Langdellian model of the past 120 years, centered on the coverage of appellate case reports, leavened by a modest degree of experiences and some tweaks? Or will it look very different – a blend of technology, Langdell, Carnegie, and a reshaped marketplace? Our view is that the 2020 law school will indeed be different. But how different depends on who wins the war between traditional education, tracing back to the days of Professor Christopher Columbus Langdell in the 1870s, and the current drivers influencing legal education from inside and out. In a word, we are living in a time of struggle – struggle for control of the soul of legal education.In legal education orthodoxy, the law school essentially has lived a double-life – part grand university, part Hessian craft guild. The grand university identity takes on a similar hue as a graduate liberal arts endeavor: offering a good background for its emphasis on critical thinking, whether students practice law or not. The Hessian craft guild, by contrast, trains students to learn the details of the skilled practitioner, to welcome clients into a specific domain. This double life is firmly rooted in traditional legal education, but it is not evenly spaced. Instead, it generally has been skewed toward the grand university identity. As the oft-repeated saying has it, law schools teach people how to think like but not actually how to be lawyers. In this regard, legal education appears to be a professional training ground that at least implicitly distances itself from the practical preparation required to succeed within specific domains.Especially in the United States, the tensions underlying this double life have been exacerbated in recent years by powerful market forces – students are applying in strikingly lower numbers to enter law school, clients are demanding changed fee structures, and the Internet is providing access to forms purveyors and legal services across states and countries. At the same time, the old legal education pipeline, from law school, to big firms, to in-house and other jobs, has been significantly degraded.Accompanying the degradation of the legal education pipeline has been the demise of the complementary but implicit partnership with the legal profession – that law schools teach students to think, and lawyers teach students how to actually practice law. The understanding is that schools turn out unpolished students, and the profession turns them into completed lawyers, acting as finishing schools for the profession. Historically, this implicit partnership thrived. All parties benefitted. It created greater demand when jobs were plentiful, as well as exuberantly high salaries. It even benefitted law professors, who could teach within the university confines, draw increasingly large salaries, and devote time to scholarship and a few classes each year.This training agreement essentially collapsed during the great recession of 2008-10, when lawyers and law firms could no longer devote the resources to polish students over a period of time. With fewer students applying to schools and jobs much less plentiful, creating value for the education became paramount. The drivers of change became reframing tools, causing law schools to commence vertical and horizontal remapping of the entire education in a way that had not occurred for decades. Critical evaluation of the Langdellian education form grew exponentially.This article posits that the legal education of 2020 will have to involve reframing if it is again to thrive. The drivers of change, particularly the law services marketplace and the changing nature of clients and legal work, will require faculty and administrators to reconsider outcomes, values and objectives of the enterprise. In many ways, any resulting configuration ought to become more like that of a business school than a liberal arts curriculum. For example, there should be a reinvigorated focus on connections between lawyering, clients and legal education, including the recognition that most students who attend law school intend to practice some form of law. The education should connect with new realities – that lawyers today reach solutions collaboratively, often in teams; that lawyers manage projects and utilize a variety of skill-sets, all within a service profession requiring expertise in different but specialized knowledge domains; and that access to legal services is still an issue for many persons living in the United States. Given the utilization of these new drivers and the connections illuminated between lawyering and law school, the underlying theory-practice tensions also should shift. In essence, law schools likely will start producing more measurable outcomes – outcomes focusing on transforming novices into nimble experts with multiple skill sets. In 2020, the change in legal education might be significant, but it also needs to be significantly improved, given the volatile nature of the times.

Developments in Legal Education: Beyond the Primary School Model

[Extract] The Senate Standing Committee on Employment Education and Training’s recent Report on Priorities for Reform in Higher Education commented that Universities have produced law graduates who “are usually well grounded in the knowledge and skills essential to the practice” of the legal profession, but who are not familiar in any disciplined sense with the society in which they are going to practise their chosen profession, who are not analytical, creative thinkers, whose education does not provide the basis for adequate flexibility, who are not sufficiently attuned to the need for “lifelong” learning, and who are not good communicators. In short, the Committee noted, “Australia is producing highly training technicians who are under-educated in the broader sense of the term”. A major factor highlighted by the Committee was the low quality of teaching in the education sector. It is difficult to argue against these comments made by the Senate Committee, and their application to law teaching in Australian Universities. They substantially describe my own experience as a law student, researcher and teacher in law schools since 1980. The focus of law teaching in university law schools, with a few notable exceptions is narrow, focusing primarily on exposition of legal doctrine, and rather halfheartedly, its application, with scant regard for the history, philosophy and political economy of the society within which law is practised and enforced. Despite some undoubted progress during the last few decades, law schools still have some way to go to break down the strong focus of professionalism and specialisation, where “knowledge has become cut up into innumerable separate parcels”, with a “specialist profession” as “custodian and user of each of these parcels”. A few years ago, in a perceptive article about the history of legal scholarship in Australia, Chesterman and Weisbrot pointed out that Australian legal scholarship has been “predominantly positivist” and unquestioning, eschewing any recognition of legal pluralism. A major factor encouraging the development of this approach has been the particularly close link between legal education and the legal profession.6 Until recently, university law faculties were “generally viewed as adjuncts to the legal profession, rather than truly academic institutions dedicated to liberal educational aims”. Law teaching was carried out mostly by practitioners, and there were very few fulltime academics. Little legal research was done, and the general approach in courses taught was fairly uniform. What distinguished Australian legal education from the English system was that the professional authorities did not themselves take responsibility for the “practitioners” subjects such as Evidence, Procedure and Conveyancing. Instead the law schools became “trade schools” providing almost all of the substantive law courses required for admission to practice. The professional authorities were not prepared to accord recognition for professional entry purposes to a university law degree unless it had a substantial “hard law” content in subjects directly relevant to legal practice.9 As Chesterman and Weisbrot noted: Australian university law schools, having won the right to be the principal providers of legal education and socialisation, also inherited the imperatives of practice from the profession. This included the empiricist tradition of English legal training, with its emphasis on pragmatic, inductive reasoning, and its lack of concern for sociological jurisprudence.

This article explores the reasons for a greater emphasis on access to justice in UK legal education and how law schools might go about raising awareness of the issue in students and fostering a commitment on their part to play a role in redressing problems of unmet legal need. It argues that the most effective means of doing so is through law clinics and other forms of voluntary legal services which expose students to the issue of unmet legal need and which may inspire them to seek to enhance access to justice when in practice. Moreover, it argues that the potential for the practical engagement by students with problems of access to justice is enhanced by the very same neo-liberal forces that make the issue of access to justice so urgent in UK society and which seem to militate against an education in which access to justice plays a central role.

Education in India is losing its relevance. This seems much more applicable to the situation in the present day of legal education. This essay aims to focus on two aspects of legal education. Whilst, on one hand, it aims to provide details of the existing legal education system on the other, it aims to drive more attention to the various improvements and developments that are needed. The essay firstly shall describe the existing legal education system. It shall analyze and assess the curricula that are available for the various undergraduate law degrees available in India. It aims to provide an understanding of the perceived distinctions between the three-year law degree and the five-year law degree. As a second aspect, the essay aims to explore options to further the quality of legal education in India by considering examples of various law schools or colleges of law across the world that have consistently proven themselves as a cut-above not legal education and research in their global scale. Also, from the learnings of the gaps in the curricula of the law degrees as discussed previously, the essay shall provide suggestions on the various plausible collaborations with foreign law schools and universities for the benefit of the Indian law schools and colleges of law. As a third and final aspect, as a measure to curb fake or bogus law schools or colleges of law within India and to enhance the employability of law graduates in India at par with those across the globe, the essay aims to provide suggestions applicable for the present-day legal education scenario.

Hanyang University College of Law was established in 1959 as the Department of Law, College of Politics and Economics, and it marks the 60th anniversary this year, 2019. At the time, when the status of the college of law was determined by the number of students passed in the judicial examination, Hanyang University Department of Law, a latecomer, which was founded 10 years later than that of major universities in Korea, did not produce judicial examination passers until 1975, more than 10 years after it was established.<BR> However, since the late 1970s, the Hanyang University College of Law has grown rapidly enough to rank the second to the fifth in the number of people who passed judicial examinations among the universities in Korea. The reason for this rapid growth is primarily due to the class to prepare for the judicial examinations, which the university headquarters fully supported to select outstanding students as special scholarship students for the College of Law.<BR> Hanyang University has produced a total of 1,243 lawyers through the judicial examination (including military judicial officers" examination) (including 17 passers outside the College of Law). They play an important role in legal profession, politics, government and academia. Among those who have passed the judicial examinations from the Hanyang University College of Law, there are the Supreme Court Justice, the Chief of the Judicial Research and Training Institute, the Chief of the High Court and the Chief of the District Court, and the Deputy Chief of the Supreme Prosecutor"s Office, the Chief of the High Prosecutor"s Office, the Chief of the District Prosecutor"s Office, and the Secretary of Justice of the President"s Office.<BR> Many Hanyang University College of Law students have passed also administrative examinations, diplomacy examinations or legislative examinations and have entered the bureaucracy. In academia, more than 90 graduates from Hanyang University College of Law have worked as law professors in universities in Korea.<BR> Meanwhile, Hanyang University School of Law was opened in March 2009 under the new legal education system. There are currently 41 full-time professors at work, and former Supreme Court Justice Yang Chang-soo and former Constitutional Judge Seo Ki-seok are chair professors. Hanyang University School of Law has a total of 754 graduates (attainment of master"s degrees) by 2019, and a total of 662 people passed the lawyer examination. Graduates from the School of Law also are showing outstanding abilities in a variety of fields including courts, prosecutors" offices, law firms and large corporations.<BR> In conclusion, both the Hanyang University College of Law with a history of 60 years and its School of Law with a history of 10 years have greatly contributed to the development of law through academic research by professors, and more than 9,000 graduates have demonstrated outstanding abilities in the legal, political, administrative and academic fields. Accordingly, the Hanyang University College of Law and School of Law have established themselves as prestigious law school and can be said to have greatly contributed to the development of the country.

Will the Income-Based Repayment Program Enable Law Schools to Continue to Provide 'Harvard-Style' Legal Education?

Student loan debt has reached crisis levels, topping $1.64 trillion dollars this year and surpassing credit card debt to become the second largest source of debt held by Americans. When discussing student loan debt, it is easy to fixate on the aggregate impact of the burdens this debt places on taxpayers, the economy, and borrowers alike, such as the depressive effects that student loan debt has on marriage, homeownership, and entrepreneurship. Yet, a discussion of which graduates are saddled with the largest student loans and how their debt obligations impacts their career choices is often absent from conversations about student debt and has been understudied to date. This Article contributes to the discourse about student loan debt and its potentially negative externalities by investigating responses from an original survey administered at four law schools, revealing novel findings about law students’ expected debt loads, career choices, and intentions to participate in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. In Part I of this Article, the student loan crisis is more closely examined with particular emphasis on its salience for law school graduates. In addition, the first part of this Article provides credible descriptive evidence that rates and amounts of borrowing to attend law school impact law students differentially on the basis of their endowed characteristics, such as race and parental education. Next, Part II explores the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, describing the program’s creation and implementation, in addition to evaluating its efficacy and the direct and indirect costs of its administration. Part III discusses two pervasive issues within the legal academy with significant social implications — the access-to-justice gap and the public-interest drift — against the backdrop of the student loan crisis and the possible answers that the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program could provide in addressing these issues. Part IV describes the data collected from the original survey, the methods used to analyze these data, and reports and discusses the results. The findings reported in Part IV offer insight into how a law student’s endowed and acquired traits influence their career intentions and provide evidence of the causal relationship between loan debt and career choice and intentions to enroll in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. Finally, this Article concludes by suggesting that the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program presents the best available option to address problems stemming from the access-to-justice gap and the public-interest drift, while also offsetting the negative effects of structural stratification in legal education.

Mapping unmet legal need assists university law clinics plan activities to meet the needs of the communities they serve. This article, by looking at a project where students started mapping unmet legal need in their locality, will consider the pedagogical issues associated with identifying unmet legal need and how it might enable university law clinics to be better embedded into their local communities by considering aspects of physical and human geography when considering injustice. It will also look at exiting research methodologies in this area and how mapping unmet legal need can develop students’ empirical research skills. The article also assesses the project’s aims to develop attributes such as entrepreneurship, as well utilising teaching practices such as visualisation to enable students to think spatially to perceive and understand social inequalities more clearly. It will argue that involving students in mapping unmet legal need will help them make those services more accessible; devise holistic solutions to clients’ problems; and enable them to work more effectively with other disciplines to both their own and their clients’ benefit.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. ABA, Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Legal Education and Professional Development: An Educational Continuum: Report of the Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Narrowing the Gap, Statement of Fundamental Lawyering Skills and Professional Values (1992) [hereinafter the MacCrate Report or MacCrate]. 2. Id. at 163. 3. Of 181 schools reporting on the 2008 survey, 151 responded that legal research instruction was integrated with legal writing instruction. ALWD/LWI, 2008 Survey Results, responses to questions 10 and 18, available at http://www.alwd.org/surveys/survey_results/2008_Survey_Results.pdf. 4. See, as an example, Nancy Johnson, Best Practices: What First-Year Law Students Should Learn in a Legal Research Class, 28 Leg. Ref. Servs. Q. 78 (2009) (describing the legal research class taught at Georgia State University Law School). 5. ALWD/LWI 2008 Survey Results 1, available at http://www.alwd.org/surveys/survey_results/2008_Survey_Results.pdf. 6. The extent to which research instruction has been subsumed into legal writing is shown by this definition from ALWD/LWI 2008 Survey: “LRW means legal research and writing, sometimes simply referred to as legal writing.” Id. (emphasis in original). 7. In 1988, 1,343 legal titles were published. The Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information Almanac (Filomena Simora ed., 36th ed., R. R. Bowker 1991). By 2004, this number had grown to 3,316 print legal titles; 4,733 print legal titles were published in 2006. Library and Book Trade Almanac: The Bowker Annual (Dave Bogart ed., 53rd ed., Information Today, Inc. 1241 2008). 8. See e.g. Graham C. Lilly, Law Schools without Lawyers? Winds of Change in Legal Education, 81 Va. L. Rev. 1241 (1995); Harry T. Edwards, The Growing Disjunction between Legal Education and the Legal Profession, 91 Mich. L. Rev. 34 (1992). 9. See e.g. Bethany Rubin Henderson, Asking the Lost Question: What is the Purpose of Law School? 53 J. Leg. Educ. 48, 76 (2003). 10. At the risk of sounding like a complainer, I note that often there is a status hierarchy within law schools that can influence the perception of the importance of a subject, including which classes are approved (or not) by the voting faculty. The statuses, analogized to Hindu castes, are, in order, “tenured and tenure track faculty, deans, clinical faculty, law library directors, legal writing directors and faculty, and adjunct faculty. The untouchables, who are barely mentioned when we talk about what our institutions teach students, are of course the professional staff of law schools.” Kent Syverud, The Caste System and Best Practices in Legal Education, 1 J. ALWD 12, 13 (2002). Law librarians may be faculty but often are professional staff; this could well influence the perceived importance of legal research, librarians’ subject expertise. 11. MacCrate, supra n. 1, at 163. 12. William M. Sullivan et al., Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2007). 13. Part Two of this compilation will be published in the next issue of the Legal Reference Services Quarterly. 14. See e.g. Robin K. Mills, Legal Research Instruction in Law Schools, The State of the Art or, Why Law School Students Do Not Know How to Find the Law, 70 L. Lib. J. 343 (1977); Joan Howland & Nancy Lewis, The Effectiveness of Law School Legal Research Training Programs, 40 J. Legal Educ. 381 (1990); Thomson West, Research Skills for Lawyers and Law Students, White Paper (2007), available at http://west.thomson.com/pdf/librarian/Legal_Research_white_paper.pdf. 15. ABA, Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Standards for Approval of Law Schools, available at http://www.abanet.org/legaled/standards/20082009StandardsWebContent/Chapter%203.pdf (emphasis added) [hereinafter Standards for Approval of Law Schools]. The Association of American Law Schools, a membership organization to which most ABA-accredited law schools belong, includes a similar requirement in its regulations: “… member schools shall offer instruction that provides students with an opportunity to develop the skills of legal research …” Association of American Law Schools, Executive Committee Regulations, ECR 6–7.9(b), available at http://www.aals.org/about_handbook_regulations.php#6. 16. Preamble, 2008–2009 Standards for Approval of Law School, available at http://www.abanet.org/legaled/standards/20082009StandardsWebContent/Preamble.pdf.

법학전문대학원 제도가 도입된 후 법학은 큰 변화를 맞이하였다. 바로 학문으로서의 법학의 시대는 저물고 직업으로서의 법률실무가의 시대가 도래한 것이다. 학문으로서의 법학의 역사는 오래되었다. 서양에서는 로마 시대부터 학식 법률가들이 법학의 발전을 이끌었다. 이후 중세시대 대학교의 개교도 법학 교육과 깊은 연관성을 가지고 있었다. 서양의 여러 문화와 문명의 발전에 법학이 이론적 기초를 제공한 것이다. 동양에서도 오래전부터 서양과는 다른 형태의 율학(律學)이 발전되고 계승되었다. 또한 동양에서는 국가 차원의 법학 교육뿐만 아니라, 민간에서는 송사소설(訟事小說)을 활용하여 법학 교육을 하기도 하였다. 한국에서는 1890년대 이후에야 근대적 의미의 법학 교육이 도입되었다. 법관양성소와 법학교에서 교재로 사용하기 위해 일본의 법학통론 교과서 등을 저본으로 법학교과서를 만들어 학생들에게 교육을 하였다. 대표적으로 주정균의 저서인 법학통론을 들 수 있다. 해방 이후 한국 법학은 일제 잔재인 일본식 법학을 극복하기 위한 노력을 하였다. 특히 초기 법학자들은 독일의 이론을 받아들이면서도, 이를 한국 실정에 맞게 변용하려 하였고, 한국법제사 등 한국 고유의 법학 교과목이 개발되기도 하였다. 현재 한국의 법학 수준은 세계 여러 나라에 비추어 부족하지 않다. 도리어 한국의 로마법 연구는 다른 나라의 로마법 연구를 압도하는 수준이기도 하다. 그렇지만 법학의 미래는 암울하다고 할 것이다. 학문으로서의 법학은 고사가 되었고, 오래지 않아 법학은 그 명맥이 끊어질 수도 있다. 이는 법학전문대학원을 개청하면서 법학과를 폐지한 것이 제1차적 원인이라 할 것이다. 법학전문대학원은 법률실무가를 양성하는 기관이고, 법과대학은 법학자를 양성할 수 있는 기관이다. 그런 의미에서 지금이라도 법학전문대학원 체제와 학부 법과대학을 병행할 수 있는 제도적 길을 모색할 필요가 있다.After the introduction of the law school system, legal studies changed drastically. The era of studying law as an academic discipline has passed and the era of legal practitioners as a profession has arrived. Law as a discipline has a long history. In the West, from Roman times, scholarly lawyers led the development of jurisprudence. The establishment of universities in the Middle Ages also had an immediate relationship with law education. Jurisprudence provided the theoretical basis for the development of many Western cultures and civilizations. In the East, criminal jurisprudence different from that of the West has been developed and inherited. In addition, legal education was provided at the national level and in the private sector, and law education used ancient books based on litigation cases. In Korea, legal education in the modern sense was introduced only after the 1890s. In law schools and training centers for judges, Japanese law textbooks were used to create law school textbooks and educate students. A typical example is legal outline by Ju Jeong-gyun. After liberation, Korean jurisprudence developed by attempting to surpass Japanese jurisprudence. In particular, early jurists accepted German theories and attempted to adapt them to the Korean situation. Korean law courses, such as the history of Korean law, were also developed. Currently, jurisprudence in Korea no longer lags behind compared to other countries worldwide. The study of Roman law in Korea is at a level that surpasses the study of Roman law in other countries. However, the future of jurisprudence is not promising. Jurisprudence as a discipline is over, and it may not be long before it will cease to exist entirely. The primary reason for this is that the Department of Law was abolished when the law school system was introduced. A law school is an institution that trains legal practitioners while the College of Law is an institution that trains legal scholars. In that sense, it is necessary to find a systematic solution to combine the law school system with the College of Law.

No one goes to law school with the expectation that their mental health and overall well-being will be significantly compromised during those three years. But, for a substantial number of law students, it is. It does not have to be this way.This is not a typical law review article. It cannot afford to be. Most law students begin law school as reasonably happy and well-adjusted people. We must ask, what is it about law school that contributes to the disproportionate decline in student wellness? The answer to that question is complex because many of the very factors that make good lawyers also contribute to their mental health challenges.This paper contains a blueprint, borne out of experience, of how to reimagine legal education with a focus on wellness. This goes beyond a general call to action, but rather presents concrete actions that faculty, law administrators, and students themselves can take to effectively manage the stresses inherent in law school and the legal profession. These changes will be long-term and will profoundly impact the well-being of not only legal practitioners, but the very practice of law itself. There will be resistance, but making this transition is crucial. We know that when law students first enter law school their psychological profile is similar to that of the general public, but their depression rates increase drastically across three years of legal education. Lawyers have the dubious distinction of being the most frequently depressed professionals in the U.S., and the legal profession ranks among the highest in incidence of suicide by occupation.Two recent and major events have exacerbated this already dire landscape of wellness dysfunction: COVID-19 and widespread protests associated with the quest for racial justice. For students who managed their addiction recovery or mental health challenges in part by having the structure and accountability of a classroom setting and nearby counseling services, social distancing threatens those means of coping. Then the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and others ignited a wave protests that likely caused some law students to experience race-based and other types of trauma. The absence of a culture of wellness in law schools may lead law students to endure these added traumas in silence.As other movements have found national and global recognition recently, it is time for a wellness crusade in legal education. Just as movements have galvanized the public to demand action on issues of racial injustice, gender equality, and climate change, so the legal profession must take steps to comprehensively address the wellness crisis spanning the lecture halls to practice. Just as America must be willing to undergo an honest reckoning and radical reforms in order to evolve into a more just and equitable society, law schools and the legal profession must undergo foundational changes in order to graduate healthy and whole students. The reforms outlined in this article not only reimagine the law school experience for thousands of law students, but they would, over time, lead to a qualitative change in the delivery of legal services themselves. The legal profession, indeed our lives, literally depend on it.