News Flash: On September 20, 2017, Quartz Media published a piece from Professor Gillian Hadfield, under the header “Law schools are letting down their students and society—here are three steps they can take to fix things.” Take a look at the following segment:
“Another fall, another crop of students arriving in law schools, buying the same casebooks, ready to be taught the same way how to reach the same conclusions for the same exams.
Law schools in the US today have become depressingly single-purpose: training members of a closed profession and failing to equip them to tackle the full breadth of problems facing economies and societies that are undergoing extensive transformations.
Law schools are letting down their students. They’re requiring anyone who wants to do any type of legal work, even the pro-forma and routine, to enroll in three years of graduate school and take on an average debt of $140,000, all the while facing dwindling job prospects.
This is bad news for students. But it is even worse news for the rest of us. Today’s law schools are graduating hordes of would-be lawyers who are not prepared to respond to, or innovate new solutions for, the pressing legal and regulatory needs of citizens and businesses alike.
The result is an insulated and out-of-touch conveyor-belt profession that has become too complex, too expensive, and too disconnected from the realities people and businesses face. Law is increasingly not getting the job done, let alone addressing the long-term crisis in access to justice and modern challenges such as automation, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, climate change, and safety and fairness in global supply chains.
Today’s law schools are increasingly chasing their own tails, with the holy grail still being a coveted job in a big law firm that serves large corporations. Meanwhile, roughly 90% of Americans dealing with legal matters do so without legal help.And as I have found in my research, even big businesses are unhappy with what is available to them. In a 2011 survey, 70% of global executives reported that law and regulation were the greatest causes of complexity in their businesses.”[Emphasis mine]
The vast majority of Americans who need legal services do that work themselves. Does anyone with an IQ over room temperature believe that this is due to anything other than the inability to pay for an attorney? Later on, she provided the following insight:
“At the highest levels, law is a learned profession—and it should remain intellectually demanding and informed by philosophy, economics, history, political science, and more. But that is not the appropriate benchmark against which to establish the minimum thresholds needed to ensure widespread consumer and commercial confidence.
Law would do well to follow the model in medicine: test law students early in their educational careers to make sure they have acquired basic legal knowledge. Then focus ultimate qualification on candidates’ ability to actually listen to solve real legal problems encountered by real clients.”
Instead, lazy “law professors” prefer the SocraTTTic MeTTThod and “issue spotting.” Then again, their bloated salaries are not tied into their graduates’ results. Plus, most of these “legal scholars” tend to view the practice of law as mundane.
Other Coverage: On September 21, 2017, the ABA Journal featured a Debra Cassens Weiss article entitled “The legal education model is out of touch, writes new ABA commission member.” Read this opening:
“Legal education is too complex, expensive and disconnected, and the American Bar Association has an “effective monopoly” on law school accreditation, according to Gillian Hadfield, a member of the organization’s Commission on the Future of Legal Education.
Hadfield, a professor of law and economics at the University of Southern California, shared her opinion on Wednesday in a piece she wrote for Quartz. According to her, legal education does not equip graduates to respond to or create new solutions for serious legal and regulatory needs for citizens and businesses.
Instead, for nearly 150 years, conventional law schools prepare graduates to “think like a lawyer” and spot potential legal issues with practical training left to employers.
“During the heyday of the industrial nation-state economy, this worked pretty well,” Hadfield wrote. “… What we need now is greater diversity, new methods, and better engagement with the real world. To get the broad and deep innovation in law that we need, we have to fix legal education.” [Emphasis mine]
Hadfield told the ABA Journal on Thursday that she’s not speaking for the Commission on the Future of Legal Education, and she does not know if it would recommend her suggestions in the Quartz piece, which has generated some responses since it was published.”
Let me make break this down for you. The American Bar Association would never recommend the suggestions outlined in the Quartz article.
Conclusion: Law schools will continue to operate the way they have for over a century. They will employ the same methods, because it is cheap/"cost effective" for the school to jam 75 first year law student into one large room - with one boring "law professor." By the way, when ABA-accredited diploma mills increase their clinical offerings, they immediately complain that it is expensive for the school to use so much space to teach smaller numbers of students. Plus, most tenured faculty are older than dirt, which means that they are reluctant to change. And lastly, these "educators" don't care if a significant portion of their class fails the bar exam. After all, they get paid up front, in full - via federal education loans.