Bricks without Straw: The Sorry State of American Legal Education

Abstract

While many law students and recent grads have come to feel that legal education is an expensive waste of time now that the job market for lawyers has collapsed, some seasoned law practitioners have their own concerns about the worth of a legal education. Their concerns, however, relate to product quality rather than product marketability. Newly-minted lawyers don’t seem to write as well as they used to. Other complaints are more nebulous. In a recent edition of The Economist, Cravath, Swaine & Moore’s presiding partner was quoted to the effect that law schools spend too much time and effort teaching students to think like lawyers and not enough inculcating the practical skills of lawyering. He decried “the difference between what law schools teach and what lawyers do.” He is in good company. Judge Harry T. Edwards’s “The Growing Disjunction Between Legal Education and the Legal Profession” comes to mind. His article sent the legal academic community into a collective hissy fit. For starters, everyone might read or reread And Gladly Teach, the autobiography of Bliss Perry (1860–1954)—editor of The Atlantic Monthly, a prolific author in his own right, and humanities professor at Williams, Princeton, and Harvard—particularly the passage on the marginal utility of Acad. Quest. (2011) 24:172–180 DOI 10.1007/s12129-011-9215-1