Too Little Theory, Too little Practice? Stevens's Law School

Abstract

What is a law school? To its faculty? To its students? To its graduates? To other members of its university? To those excluded? To the public it is expected to serve? To a historian? The answers to these questions are complex and multifaceted. Robert Stevens's study of American legal education from the mid-nineteenth century to the present attempts to answer them to facilitate some intelligent discussions of the lines that might exist between the vocational, the academic, and the professional (at xvi). This essay focuses on the problematic nature of any effort to produce a descriptive and analytic history of an institution that has meant many things to many people. While other commentaries have focused on whether or not Stevens's book is sufficiently tied to other developments in intellectual history,' or represents legal education in a diverse and pluralistic nation,2 or is too critical3 or insufficiently critical4 of legal education, this essay focuses on Stevens's treatment of the issue he identifies as the mixed mission of legal education, a mission that changes depending on who is defining it-the professoriate, the consumer, the practitioner, the academic, the aspiring professional, or Jean Q. Public. There has been little change in and much criticism of legal education, Stevens tells us; his study is motivated by a desire to explain the simultaneous