Legal Research: MacCrate's “Fundamental Lawyering Skill” Missing in Action

Abstract

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.