The Responsibility of Law Schools: Educating Lawyers as Counselors and Problem Solvers

Abstract

Although lawyers add great value to society, the esteem in which our profession is held-not only by the public, but by practitioners themselves-has declined greatly in recent years. There is a widespread sense that the practice of law is devolving from a profession with a public calling into a business-and a business with sharp practices at that. Some lawyers, judges, and law professors have criticized law schools for failing to improve the situation or even for making it worse. These critics particularly deprecate the interdisciplinary turn in contemporary legal education, arguing that law schools should stick to time-honored methods of teaching doctrine and legal analysis through the case method.1 In my view, American legal education is as strong as ever in doctrine and legal analysis. But it is strikingly weak in teaching other foundational skills and knowledge that lawyers need as counselors, problem solvers, negotiators, and as architects of transactions and organizations-roles that will pervade their professional lives. The need for these skills can only grow as law school graduates encounter problems with increasingly complex technological, global, financial, institutional, and ethical dimensions. The problem is not that legal education has become too adventurous, but that it has changed so little to meet the needs of a changing society. This essay proposes a series of advanced courses that integrate the fundamental lawyering skills of counseling, problem solving, and negotiation with insights from other disciplines, including economics, psychology, and business. I shall refer to these courses in the aggregate as the complementary curriculum-an indication that they are elements of a coherent program that complements the traditional, case-based law school curriculum.