Lynda Collins, How to Succeed (and Stay Human) in Law School: Pathways to Happiness and High Performance in the Study and Practice of Law

Going Back to Basics: Changing the Law School Curriculum by Implementing Experiential Methods in Teaching Students the Practice of Law

The Double Life of Law Schools

The competence of the practicing bar has been subjected to substantial criticism in recent years. Since law schools have a virtual monopoly over access to the bar and licensure is granted without further training, legal education has been a particular focus of attack and reform efforts. Yet there has been little systematic study of what skills and knowledge are important in the actual practice of law or the relevant contributions of legal education. This study of practicing lawyers in Chicago examines the nature of the competencies important to the practice of law and the sources lawyers credit for contributing to their development. Practitioners cite a broad range of skills, many of them not unique to the practice of law, with their importance varying by the predominant legal specialty practiced. The data further indicate that law schools play but a part in the development of skills and knowledge important to the practice of law and that experience, both prior and subsequent to graduation, plays a significant role. The evaluation of law schools' contributions is related to opportunities for further training, particularly in the context of law firm practice. There is, however, a strong general view that law schools rather uniformly concentrate on some skills to the exclusion of others and that the former are not necessarily those that lawyers think are most important to the practice of law.

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.

This article describes a student-led interprofessional mock trial designed to explore the legal and regulatory dimensions of pharmacy practice through collaboration between law students and pharmacy students at the University of Mississippi. Developed by the Interprofessional Education (IPE) Board, the mock trial provides an immersive learning experience that simulates real-world legal proceedings involving pharmacists. Students work in interdisciplinary teams to create original case files including fact patterns, deposition transcripts, and trial evidence - based on scenarios involving professional misconduct, medication errors, or regulatory violations. Faculty advisors from both the law and pharmacy school provide guidance to ensure accuracy and educational value. The mock trial involves multiple rounds judged by legal and healthcare professionals, offering students a dynamic platform to develop professional communication, critical thinking, and collaborative skills. Law students gain practical insight into healthcare law while pharmacy students deepen their understanding of legal accountability, compliance, and the stages of a professional liability lawsuit. This interdisciplinary mock trial approach can especially be beneficial to law schools and law students desiring practical skills in healthcare and malpractice litigation, given that - unlike medical schools' and pharmacy schools' clinical programs - law schools' courses involving medical liability issues frequently do not have a clinical component offering practical experience in malpractice litigation. In sum, this article offers a descriptive account of the mock trial, highlighting its structure, implementation, and replicability.

The Law School of 2020

Over two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson suggested the need for a broader legal curriculum. As the twenty-first century begins, the practice of law will increasingly demand interdisciplinary knowledge and collaboration — between those trained in law and a broad range of scientific and technical fields, including engineering, biology, genetics, ethics, and the social sciences. The practice of public health law provides a model for both the substantive integration of law with science, and for the way its practitioners work. In addition, public health law also provides a model for interdisciphuy and integrative teaching.

Wellness and Law: Reforming Legal Education to Support Student Wellness

Creating the New Law School by Fully Integrating Experiential Education Across the Entire Curriculum

Raising the Bar: Law Schools and Legal Institutions Leading to Educate Undocumented Students

The editors have asked me to comment on Judge Edwards' doublebarreled blast at legal education and the practice of law.l This I am happy to do. It is an important article, stating with refreshing bluntness concerns that are widely felt but have never I think been so forcefully, so arrestingly expressed. Nevertheless I have deep disagreements with it. Judge Edwards' thesis is easily summarized. Law schools should train ethical practitioners and produce scholarship that is useful to lawyers and judges. Law firms should practice law ethically. Neither is doing either any more. Especially but not only at the elite law schools, faculty, especially young faculty, is increasingly disdainful about the practice of law (including the judging of cases) and about the forms of legal scholarship that assist in that practice. The faculty is not interested in training ethical or any practitioners, or in professionally relevant scholarship. All it is interested in is theories about law theories drawn from other fields such as economics and philosophy. [W]e see 'law professors' hired from graduate schools, wholly lacking in legal experience or training, who use the law school as a bully pulpit from which to pour scorn upon the legal profession.2 As for law firms, they increasingly are interested in making money rather than in maintaining high ethical standards, and they are actually abetted in this unlovely endeavor by the law schools' growing indifference to instilling students with those standards. As for the scholarship that the new-fashioned law school faculty members are producing (as opposed to the kind of scholarship that they are not but should be producing), it probably has little value. Law professors are unlikely to be able to do economics or philosophy or literary theory or whatever as well as people who are trained in and work full time in those disciplines. There is an obvious but perhaps superficial paradox to the article. It is not an article about legal doctrine, although as a judge and former

[Exract] I had aspired to a career in teaching for a long time. But when I decided to go to law school instead of pursuing graduate studies in French language and literature, I thought I had finally decided against this career choice. I had chosen law because of its stability and reliability as a profession — and it would provide a certain level of income too! Like many other kids growing up I also had my standard court room heroes, but it was neither Raymond Burr’s Perry Mason nor EG Marshall’s Defender that really stirred my interest in the practice of law. Before entering law school I had worked as a clerk in a law office and had some idea about the more routine aspects of legal practice, especially as they relate to conveyancing and small scale collection litigation. This experience did not inspire me to enter a career in law either. I studied law in the end without much focus other than it might provide me with a stable, reliable and remunerative career. Teaching would provide the former two but not the latter. And besides, the idea of teaching law seemed far beyond my ken. To me, then, a choice to attend law school was a choice against teaching. It never once occurred to me I might teach law one day! Law school began a late transformation for me. It was a time of slow intellectual awakening when for the first time I faced, albeit obliquely then, the social and economic issues which I of course eventually found were always reflected in legal doctrine. But in fact, my legal education, while providing a pad to launch my interest in perplexing, subtle and challenging issues, laid a groundwork for me as a legal educator only through its mostly negative effects on me as an individual. I found the study of law alienating, competitive, lacking in direction, and peopled by teaching staff and students both fundamentally disinterested in the learning-teaching process and the substantial issues of moment which underlie most law study. My classmates were always more interested in jobs at the major law firms or their trading accounts with their brokers than in asking questions about law’s meaning or purposes. For a long time in law school I felt like a lost spelunchian trapped in a cave whose entrance had closed and whose exit was obscured by stalagmites and stalactites of indifference and coldness. No one seemed to care about learning, students or the values which were or might be reflected in law’. Regrettably, although there were many fine people with whom I studied law, the overall feeling I had about my legal education experience was that it was designed to distance me from reality, to separate intellect from emotion, to numb my sensitivity to the hurts and struggles of individuals, and to embolden me in the acceptance of the underlying but never spoken values embedded in the subjects of our daily study. The study of law was made up mostly of empty pursuit of rules characterised by order, clarity, continuity but not by worth, utility or aspiration. My first year of law study was met by modest academic success in face of minimal understanding but significant ability to regurgitate data. Second year simply frightened me by its torrential onslaughts of reading. There were seven final examinations at the end of second year, and two others midway through. In third year, I suddenly learned that what I was expected to know was neither complex nor subtle — learning law at my law school was easy, I just was not supposed to know that. I relaxed for the first time since registration and started to see some fascinating political, social, economic and philosophical issues. And while I could see many roles a teacher might play, the connection between myself and a career in law teaching had not been made by the time of my graduation. I was mostly concerned with graduating, trying out legal practice and leaving the dispassionate world of law study well behind me.

Killing Them Softly: Neuroscience Reveals How Brain Cells Die from Law School Stress

This article examines the recently developed postgraduate, law-school-supported programs intended to provide recent graduates with a continued experiential learning environment in order to bridge the gap between law school and law practice. Both law school firms and practice incubators are discussed. Specifically, this article looks at what, if any, role academic law libraries have within these programs. Lastly, ways in which these libraries might possibly add or improve services to the programs are explored.

Margaret Drew and Andrew Morriss argue that the internal politics of legal education has impeded clinical programs from fully meeting their two primary goals: serving unmet legal needs and preparing law students to be lawyers. As clinics evolved and clinicians fought for equal tenure status, clinical programs experienced a shift from service clinics that provided direct legal representation to issue-based and impact litigation clinics. The authors propose greater integration of clinical legal education and the more traditional law school curriculum to achieve the two original purposes of clinics: to teach students the law and skills in a live-client legal practice, and reverse the trend away from service clinics that fill unmet legal needs. Virtually everyone agrees that there are large unmet needs for legal services among people and organizations that cannot afford them. Similarly, there is widespread agreement that law schools do a substantially less than perfect job of preparing students to practice law, a role that could be enhanced by expanding the curriculum beyond traditional doctrinal courses to focus on more practical training for the practice of law. Even though opinions differ on exactly how much more practical training law schools ought to provide and how they ought to provide it, blending the doctrinal and clinical perspectives offers a potential solution to both problems: establish law clinics that would enable students to gain live client experience solving real legal problems in courts, government agencies, and organizations, while simultaneously providing additional legal services for the poor and enhancing the practical training of new lawyers. Both these goals were part of the initial impetus for establishing law school clinics in the late 1960s, when clinical education became the reform du jour. While law school clinics have become an almost universal part of law school course offerings, they have not fulfilled their initial promise to change the face of legal education by making it noticeably more practice-oriented, a result of law schools’ separation of clinical training from the rest of the law school curriculum. Rather than incorporating clinical training into a coherent overall curriculum, law schools have largely minimized the effect of clinical education on non-clinical training. As a result, the impact of clinical legal education on legal education generally has been muted.