Law School as Social Innovation

Mindfulness and legal technology are both trending in legal education. Their increasing presence in law school curricula reflect laudable efforts to better prepare students for the realities of law practice. These two legal education trends, however, have evolved largely separately. This article proposes that law schools link legal technology education with mindfulness training. A holistic approach to two of the newest trends in legal education — mindfulness and legal technology — will help produce a more balanced, more compassionate, and more empathetic group of law school graduates. For years, Silicon Valley tech culture has embraced mindfulness practice, as exemplified by mindfulness programs offered by Google, Intel, and other tech companies. Legal educators should take heed and bring mindfulness into the legal technology fold. The benefits of legal technology education would only be strengthened by mindfulness training. Legal technology courses and programs have emphasized user-centered design and the application of tech tools, design principles, and creativity to increase access to justice for the millions of consumers with unmet legal needs. Mindfulness training, sometimes referred to as “brain-hacking,” can help manage bias, enhance creativity, and improve focus. Part II of this article reports on the mindfulness curriculum trend in legal education and provides an overview of the benefits of mindfulness training in law school curricula. Part III discusses the rise in legal technology offerings at law schools and summarizes the reasons proffered for their inclusion in law school curricula. Part IV explains why law schools should explicitly connect mindfulness training with opportunities for legal technology learning; it also provides suggestions for how law schools might make that connection. In a phase of experimentation and innovation with legal technology curricula, law schools are poised at an unprecedented juncture to develop such curricula with maximum potential for compassion, creativity, empathy, and openness.

우리 법학교육은 전통적으로 일본과 독일의 영향을 많이 받았다. 1990년대 법학교육 개혁이 사회적 관심사가 되면서 법학교육에서 미국의 영향력이 급속히 커졌다. 2009년 3월 미국로스쿨을 모방한 법학전문대학원 제도를 도입할 즈음 미국 법학교육이 우리나라에 미친 영향력은 최고에 달하였다. 이 글은 미국의 법학교육이 우리 법학교육에 미친 영향을 법학전문대 학원 도입 이전, 도입 즈음, 그리고 도입 10년 후인 현재로 구분하여 검토한 후 마지막으로 향후 전망을 논하고 있다. 미국식 로스쿨을 지향하는 법학전문대학원의 근간은 앞으로도 상당기간 유지될 것으로 전망된다. 그동안 법학전문대학원을 운영하면서 적지 않은 문제가 드러났지만, 그렇다고 폐기해야 할 정도로 현행 제도에 결함이 있는 것은 아니다. 과거 제도에 대한 향수를 가지고 있는 사람도 많지만, 법학전문대학원의 틀이 고착되어 과거로 회귀하기에는 너무 멀리 왔다. 법학전문대학원 제도의 개선 논의는 앞으로도 계속 될 것이다. 주시해야 할 것은 예비시험제와 변호사자격 취득 후 실무연수 강화방안이다. 두 가지 모두 법학전문대학원 제도의 근간을 흔드는 것이어서 실현될 가능성은 크지 않다. 법학교육이 변호사시험에 예속된 상황에서 미국 법학교육이 한국에 미치는 영향은 아주 제한적이다. 새로운 법적 분쟁에 관한 미국 판례 및 학계 반응을 비교법적으로 검토하는 정도에 그칠 가능성이 크다. 교육방법 역시 당분간 지금의 틀을 그대로 유지할 것으로 전망된다. 변호사시험의 방법이 바뀌지 않는 한 교육방법은 바뀌기 어렵다. 미국 로스쿨의 법학교육방법중 소크라테스 방식이 우리나라에서 인기를 끌 가능성은 거의 없다. 리걸클리닉 교육에 대한 관심은 여전히 있겠지만, 변호사시험에 대한 부담감이 사라지지 않는 한 크게 활성화될 가능성은 없다.South Korean legal education was traditionally affected by those of Japan and Germany. As legal education reform became a social issue from the 1990s, the influence of U.S. legal education model has increased rapidly. The influence of the U.S. model reached its peak when the U.S.-influenced law school was instituted in March 2009. In this article, the influence of U.S. legal education model to Korean legal education system will be reviewed in three stages―before the adoption of U.S. legal education model, around the adoption, 10 years after the adoption―and the forecast of Korean legal education will be discussed. The foundation of the law school aiming for the American law school seems to be maintained for a long time. Not a few problems have come out during the operation of the law school, but it is not a big defect to shut down the current system. There are many people who have nostalgia for the past, but the law school framework has been stuck and it has been too far to return to the past. The discussion on improving the law school system will be continued. What should be considered important is a preliminary exam and a plan to strengthen the practical training after attaining a lawyer’s qualification. It is not likely to be realized because both of them will shake the basis of the law school system. The claim that the legal education of the law school should be liberated from the bar exam is strong, but it is not likely to happen. Because the traditional thinking of examining capability through the exam is dominating the Korean legal profession, the bar exam is likely to take the form of assessing legal knowledge in the future. In conclusion, the impact of U.S. legal education on Korea is very limited in the situation where legal education is subject to the bar exam. It is likely that the U.S. case and academic response to the new legal dispute will only be comparatively scrutinized. The education method is also expected to maintain the current framework for the time being. Unless the way of the bar exam changes, the education method is difficult to change. It is very unlikely that the Socratic method of American law school will become popular in Korea. Although there is still interest in legal clinic education, there is no possibility that it will be greatly activated unless the burden of the bar exam is gone.

The Double Life of Law Schools

Over the past three decades, legal education in China has boomed. Numbers of law students and schools have increased exponentially. Legal education has become standardized at universities throughout the country. Prominent legal academics have emerged as public voices for political reform.But Chinese authorities now perceive flaws in these trends. A flood of law graduates faces dismal employment prospects. Schools remain uniformly focused on academic research rather than practical skills. And the liberal orientation of many faculties is at odds with new conservative Party views on legal reform. In response, officials are remolding legal education. They are reducing numbers of law students. They are pushing law schools to differentiate themselves from each other. And they are increasing political content in classrooms.This Article analyzes both the expansion of legal education in China and its impending retrenchment.China’s difficulties are not entirely unique. In both Latin America and Japan, efforts at rapid reform of law schools have foundered. And in recent decades, the United States has experienced unsustainable, credit-fueled growth in the cost and structure of legal education.This Article argues that the current bubble in Chinese legal education is largely the result of state policies pursued since the late 1990s. These pushed the rapid expansion of university legal education through the use of one-size-fits-all target evaluation systems. But they have detrimentally affected the quality and direction of legal education in China.As a result, authorities are reviving educational practices from the 1980s, that themselves have roots in the 1950s. Chinese legal education may be returning to its own past, rather than converging with foreign models. This Article also contends that legal education can serve as the canary in the coalmine for understanding the direction of political and legal reform in China. The ability of conservative Party authorities to politically remold legal education may indicate whether their influence has already crested or if it will continue to expand yet further.Last, this Article argues that Chinese developments will directly impact the efforts of American legal educators to address their own financial problems. Efforts to blindly ramp up recruitment of Chinese LLM students may be unsuccessful as a long-term strategy to solve the current problems confronting U.S. law schools.

This article addresses a growing imbalance in law school curricula and will be the first to document, through the author’s independent research, the degree to which schools are ignoring a call to cultivate students' professional formation and ethical decision-making. Two influential studies, one by the Carnegie Institute for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning in Educating Lawyers (Carnegie Report), and the other by the Clinical Legal Education Association in Best Practices for Legal Education (Best Practices Report), agreed on two deficiencies in legal education. One was the lack of lawyering skills course through which students could develop skills be the ready to practice once they leave school. The other, more pervasive critique, was that law schools were failing completely to cultivate students' professional formation and judgment. A recent ABA Survey of Law School Curricula showed a significant increase in skills and experiential courses. The survey was unclear on curricular efforts in law schools to address professional formation and sound judgment. By independently reviewing the published course offerings of every U.S. law school and tabulating data, the author demonstrates through that his findings show that most law schools are ignoring the recommendation to focus on students' professional formation and judgment. Since originally posting this article on SSRN, the author is in the process of gathering data through a survey of law schools to determine the extent to which law schools are employing educational methods designed to cultivate professional identity formation -- or what the Carnegie Report calls the Third Apprenticeship. The other development is that the original author's colleague and Co-Director of Regent University School of Law's Center for Ethical Formation and Legal Education Reform is assisting with the development of a survey instrument to determine data on teaching professional identity and will revised the article to reflect the findings of that empirical data. The results of the survey and the ultimate findings of this article will be presented at Regent Law Review's Symposium on Cultivating Professional Identity schedule for October 4, 2014. The Symposium's papers and proceedings will be included in the Regent Law Review's Symposium Issue (Spring 2015).Comparing law schools' response to the recommendation on skills with their lack of response to the recommendations on professional formation shows a clear lack of commitment in most law schools to addressing a deficiency that has significant implications. Both 2007 reports, through empirical studies and investigation, that the degree to which students learn what it means for them to be profession (and not some abstract concept of professionalism in general) has a direct link to the likelihood of effectiveness and satisfaction in practice. The article addresses the reasons that may be causing law schools' inertia, particularly the perception that teaching in this area is too difficult. The last third of the article provides concrete curricular efforts and teaching methods already employed in some law schools. In addition, the article examines methods from other professional schools and suggests specific methods to adapt these to law schools -- teaching methods that have not yet been used, but which should work as well in law school as they do, say, in medical school. Therefore, this article not only provides original data showing that a significant inadequacy in legal education is going unaddressed in most schools, along with clear recommendations for those schools that decide to implement professional formation on how to do so.

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.

In December 2011, the Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Higher Education called for a meeting among all Law Deans to discuss on the numerous critics about the standard of local law graduates at public law schools. The meeting was attended by the Deans and Deputy Deans of the schools. At the meeting, the Chairperson, Prof Dr ZaridaHambali, allocated a special fund for the law schools to conduct a study on the future directions of legal education in Malaysia. The research was supposed to take 6 months. However, trying to gather 7 law schools to work on a project was not an easy task. After intensive deliberations and effort to convince all law schools that this was for the betterment of legal education in Malaysia, an official Committee for the first time met on February 2012. The second hurdle was to get the cooperation of legal practitioners to participate in the survey. It took more than 6 months to distribute the questionnaire and after at least two attempts the team managed to get the response approximately 5% of the members of the Bar. Most questionnaires were returned unanswered. The team sent at least 35 students to assist in distributing the questionnaire. In this research we found a common disagreement among law lecturers and practitioners on the scope of their duty, not just in Malaysia but globally. The American Bar Association in the MacCrate report recorded the gap between academia and legal practice thus lead to:"Complaints and recriminations from legal educators and practicing lawyers. The lament of he practising bar is a steady refrain; 'they can’t draft a contract, they can’t write, they’ve ever seen a summon, the professors have never been inside a courtroom'". Law schools offer the traditional responses, "We teach them how to think, we're not trade schools, we're centre of scholarship and learning, practice is best taught by practitioners". Enhancement of legal education as this study will show is not the duty of law schools alone, neither does the law practitioner. Both must cooperate to find the best possible way to resolved the perceived weaknesses in our legal education. This study outlines the academic component at the law school and investigates the students and employers perspective about legal education in Malaysia. The research shows that all law schools are aware on the challenges on legal education and had taken reasonable steps or try to look for possible ways to improve on the quality. This becomes possible with the feedback from the survey on students perspectives and employers’ perception on local law students. The feedback from the students and law practitioners is then used to make recommendations on the appropriate strategies toward the improvement of legal education. This research is the catalyst for further research in legal education. To promote the development of learning and teaching in law at both the academic and professional stages the Committee strongly suggests for the establishment of a Centre for Legal Education at the national level. The centre will be a body where all law teachers not only meet and exchange their teaching experience but promote professional legal education in Malaysia, and to foster research opportunities with and on the legal profession.

Legal education has undergone significant changes from the apprenticeship system of the eighteenth century to the more formalized legal education of today. While most of these changes have been beneficial, practical real world education and skills are missing from most students’ legal education. Experiential legal education programs, which are available at virtually all law schools, in some form, is an excellent way to bridge the gap between the skills taught in the classroom environment and the skills required to be a successful attorney practitioner. For example clinical education provides students with real legal skills that are considered valuable by many employers. Even though experiential education programs are extremely beneficial to students, employers, and the community, the benefits provided by experiential education can be increased by making them mandatory and modifying the experiential programs. This paper explores the need for mandatory experiential programs and their impact on modern legal education. Specifically, this article explores the vital role that clinics and other practical skills programs play in legal education. Introduction: As the primary means for educating future lawyers, the quality of education offered by law schools is important to both law students and the community at large. Because of the important role of law schools in society, it is crucial that educators ensure that law students are receiving an education that will give them a solid foundation as practitioners. Studies and critiques of modern law schools reveal several striking similarities. These studies show that modern law schools offer an integrated curriculum and teach legal analysis in the classroom, but could benefit from an increased focus on practical skills, ethics, and communication skills. This leads to the conclusion that law schools need to provide programs that focus on training students for the actual practice of law. Clinical legal education fulfills this objective by giving students an opportunity to obtain experiential learning. Experiential learning encompasses all three domains of learning: cognitive, performance, and effectiveness. It ensures that the students’ education encompasses the four stage sequence of optimal learning: theory, application, experience, and reflection. Thus, experiential learning allows students to learn and apply legal skills in a manner that is not available in the classroom environment. This article further explores the vital role that clinics play in legal education. The article begins with a history of clinical legal education and a summary of modern legal education, so we can examine where we have been and the current state of legal education. Then, the article explains the important role that clinical education plays in the bigger picture of modern legal education. Finally, the article more closely examines the nature of clinical education today, discusses several innovative apprenticeship programs, and offers suggestions as to how clinical education can be improved to ensure that students are receiving a legal education that will truly prepare them to enter the workforce as counselors and advocates. Conclusion: As we have seen, clinics play a crucial role in a legal education by offering students real-world experience and bridging the gap between theory and practice. Clinical legal education is essential because it helps ensure that students are prepared for the practice of law, and teaches them to act ethically, competently, and responsibly. Through making clinical, apprenticeship, and externship programs mandatory for all students, and integrating clinical methodology and goals into the core curriculum, legal educators will ensure that their graduates are better prepared for the real world of lawyering upon graduation.

In the wake of recent dramatic reductions in the demand for legal education, law schools are reacting to the changed marketplace in ways that reveal Coasian “firm behavior” by responding to perverse incentives inherent in the competitive legal education marketplace. For example, to fill empty seats, law schools are enrolling students with lower GPA and LSAT scores than before 2010. Also, new evidence suggests that financial aid award allocation might be influenced by increased pressure to meet minimum enrollment requirements since the Recession. These trends evince market responses on the part of providers of legal education — law schools — as well as consumers of legal education — law students. This study aims to isolate the impact of one such firm behavior: financial aid award allocation. In the competition for shrinking pools of potential law students, law schools can discount the expected cost of attendance through institutionally-provided financial aid awards. This study assesses this trend — the effect of increasing median financial aid award amounts on matriculant enrollment totals and yield rates, controlling for law school and law student covariates — through two competing, but not mutually exclusive, theoretical frameworks. The rational choice theory, which holds that demand for legal education is determined by the exchange of information about costs and benefits. Scarce resource theory suggests that, like most institutional scholarships, the majority of law school financial aid awards are cross-subsidized.Employing the use of OLS and fixed effects regression specifications — looking within year, to account for differences in cohorts, as well as within school or U.S. News & World Report peer review rating tier — this study finds evidence of (1) students’ preference to consume subsidized legal education; (2) scarce resources theory; and (3) rational choice theory. These results can be explained as a market response by both law schools and students: reacting to labor market outcomes, as demand for legal education declines and fewer students accept the offers of admission and financial aid awards, the share of the financial aid awards to which law schools avail the students who do accept offers of admission increases. These findings bear out when employing a robust multiple fixed effects specification looking within year and peer reviewed rating tier. It is hoped that this study will contribute to the understanding of law schools as competitive market participants.

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.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of prevailing issues in UK legal education in terms of current developments and changing patterns.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is designed to bring together a range of perspectives which inform how legal education is changing in terms of key spheres of influence. The authors are directly involved with the Committee of Heads of University Law Schools in the UK and also have extensive experience of managing law programmes in business and management environments. This experience provides a dynamic opportunity to lead ideas for change whilst being at the forefront of policy and strategy.FindingsGlobalisation of legal, business and management education indicates that the stimuli operating in one jurisdiction are not without response to others. Universities are subject to external influences which impact on the extent to which law schools are able to operate. Political, social, economic and technological factors shape the nexus between external factors and internal spheres of influence. In many ways, law schools appear well‐placed within business or management schools to maximise opportunities to lead change most effectively. This wider perspective provides the ability to transcend local influences and create a more contemporary environment in which to enhance legal education in a global context.Originality/valueThe value of this paper is to highlight current challenges for those in positions of policy‐making and strategic responsibility in law schools. It provides an awareness of prevailing issues in order to inform thinking about how best to position legal education given the changing influences which shape legal education in a global context.

The Day in Court: Legal Education as Sociolegal Research Practice in the Form of an Ethnographic Study

Law schools in Canada and the United States are in a period of transition. New accreditation standards require law schools to ensure that students have acquired a range of competencies upon completion of their law degree. The articulation of competencies, like Carnegie’s emphasis on the three apprenticeships to which law schools should strive, invites greater scrutiny into curriculum design, teaching methods, and student assessment. Law schools are shifting from traditional case law teaching and 100 % final examinations in doctrinal courses to heightened focus on experiential learning and performance assessment—approaches that have already been adopted in clinical legal education, legal writing, and skills-based courses. In this chapter, we conducted a literature review on performance assessment that included the legal and medical education literature, websites of legal education organizations, and of regulatory and licensing bodies. In Canada, under each provincial body, many bar admission courses have incorporated performance assessments into their programs. However, this has neither been uniform nor have the initiatives been rigorously evaluated. While more law schools are adopting performance assessment methods, disciplined theory-based inquiry proceeds slowly. Legal academics rarely refer to the leading authors on measurement and evaluation or to the extensive literature from other professions, notably medical education. With modest exceptions, these authors do not address established conventions: (a) alignment of instructional objectives to assessment methods, (b) processes for development of assessment instruments, (c) analysis of validity and reliability, and d) reporting of results. As a result, it is difficult to ascertain whether a particular course or program has achieved any or all of the five elements for faculty and student learning: (1) Self-reflection on learning own abilities; (2) Self-assessing performance and using feedback to improve it over time; (3) Learners developing metacognitive performance; (4) Learners developing professional expertise; and (5) Learners developing identity as a self-sustained and unique learner, contributor, and professional. To effect real change in performance assessment that incorporates these elements, we argue that law schools need a robust core of trained specialists and comprehensive faculty development in performance assessment, program assessment, measurement, and evaluation.

Developments in Legal Education: Beyond the Primary School Model

The concepts of and are often used interchangeably even though they are different. As this article explains, professionalism refers to appropriate conduct of a lawyer, e.g., honesty, civility, practical judgment. However, a law student or lawyer who has not internalized these professional values is not likely to consistently exhibit them in practice. The breakthtrough of concept of professional identity formation, in both Carnegie Institute's Report and Clinical Legal Association of America (CLEA) Best Practices for Legal Education (both published in 2007) was their recognition that law schools needed to help students develop a One's professional identity would be comprised of values that student will contemplate, reflect on, and ultimately internalize as values held by the kind of lawyer she wants to be. A surprisng number of effective teaching methods have been developed, som in other fields and some in law teaching, to help students reflect on their values, decide whether to internalize values and to develop a method for resolving ethical and value judgments. With such teaching and practice, someone will have a foundation for making sensitive ethical decisions in situations that represent challenges. Such a person is more likely to act according to her values. The notion is as old as Socrates' observation: We are what we repeatedly do. For those who have had value formation part of their law school experience and have developed a professional identity based on those values, they are far more likely to act consistently in ways that reflect professional values. The article surveys earliest law schools in America and how they made it a priority to address ethical values and cultivate a professional identity in their students. The article reviews how law schools, for a variety of reasons, moved away from this priority. The article thus recommends in part that law schools consider practices of earliest law schools, or at least their focus on professional value formation. Moreover, article reviews how ideas in Carnegie and Best Practices are being carried out in a number of modern law schools. These schools combine wisdom of early law schools' priority along with modern teaching methods. The results are courses that can serve as models for schools seeking to begin greater efforts at professional value and identity formation. This article is distinctive in two ways. First, it draws a connection between recent proposals for professional identity formation and character formation that earliest American Law schools made a priority. Second, article explains how professional identity formation ought to begin in first year of law schools. Although developing professional values and identity througout curriculum is important, first year of law school may be most important in process of having students begin to form professional values and an identity. If efforts wait until later, results are likely to be diminished, in part because law school itself in first year will have created barriers to education designed to cultivate professional identity. These barriers are discussed in Carnegie and Best Practices and recounted here. Therefore, article encourages any increased cultivation of professional values and identity and, in particular, efforts in first year to introduce students to professional values that go beyond academic achievent and include professional values that have been shown to be as important to effectiveness in practicing law as analytical skills.