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MobBlog at Madisonian.net: What Kind of Institution Do We Want a Law School To Be?

By Jim Chen et al.

Deven Desai kindly emailed me the following (as if I wasn't reading Madisonian.net religiously, but I appreciate each and every personal email and link tip):

As you have followed and pondered the way in which legal education works, I wanted to let you know that Madisonian.net is holding a mobblog about ?What Kind of Institution Do We Want A Law School To Be?? So far Erwin Chemerinsky and Mike Madison have posted. Jim Chen (Dean, Louisville), Nancy Rapoport, (UNLV, former dean at Houston), and Rodney Smolla (Dean, Washington & Lee, former Dean at Richmond) have agreed to participate. In addition, Professors Ann Bartow, Al Brophy, Jack Chin, Dan Filler, Brett Frischmann, Christine Hurt, Rick Garnett, Greg Lastowka, Orly Lobel, Nate Oman, Frank Pasquale, Larry Solum, and Fred Yen will also share their thoughts on the topic.

Well, I do ponder the ways in which legal education works, inasmuch as I am still currently being educated and looking forward to being myself an educator. I am currently a different type of institutional citizen (the student), but at some not-too-distant point I will occupy a different institutional role entirely--that of a professor. It is a role that occupies not only a different place in the hierarchy, but a different physical space (in front of the lectern) and a different institutional space (as member of the faculty).

The life of law schools is embedded in its institutional structure: the administration determines the organizational culture and allocation of resources (and concomitant values), and articulated pedagogical goals determine the discursive space and intellectual life. Both work in confluence to produce a particular kind of scholarly reputation and student body. What kind of law school you want to be is, of course, a normative question, and I am pleased to see that most of the responses are normative in their orientation, and not merely caught up in purely descriptive terms of what courses should be required of first years, or a numbers-driven approach that focuses on how to improve US News rankings, etc.

I am very excited to read this series of posts! And I think you will enjoy these posts as well. At the end of the series I'll do a roundup of links with brief descriptions, but here are the posts available now. I'm thinking of starting a Wiki on legal pedagogy so that the online legal academic community can aggregate these interesting, and I hope, useful posts.

1. Deven Desai kicks things off.
2. Dean Erwin Chemerinsky on law schools for the 21st Century--e.g., the new law school at UC Irvine.
3. Mike Madison on law schools and law firms, and what exactly is legal education for?
4. Al Brophy: law schools should be mini-universities: interdisciplinary, drawing on the broad and varied expertise of its community.
5. Nancy Rapoport on resistance to change, having prerequisites, and what law schools can learn from other schools.
6. Nate Oman on putting the burden of experiential training on the students.
7. Mike Madison asks some good questions about legal education, that will no doubt be endlessly debated.
8. Alfred Yen suggests that law schools coordinate with other departments to create a collaborative, experience-based, problem-solving learning environment.
9. Ann Bartow most interestingly suggests that law reviews only publish the work of their own school's faculty, thereby reducing fallacious distinctions and competitions in "placement" and improving the scholarship of each school and the quality of each journal.
   
10. Nancy Rapoport on the ideal faculty for a law school: honest, engaged, mutually supportive (rather than competitive), conflict-resolving, student-developing, supportive of all types of scholarship and teaching, and fun.
11. Deven Desai identifies a trend in all the posts: are lawyers generalists or specialists? Answering this question perhaps answers the question of what type of institutional model a law school should have.
12. Al Brophy follows up on Ann's post, and says that law schools should focus on actual quality of scholarship, and not merely its placement in a journal as a proxy for quality.
13. Christine Hurt resists the idea of a one-size-fits-all "perfect model" for a law school: law schools vary because the landscape of law is so varied.
    

It takes forever to sum up and link to all of these posts, but I'll keep adding to this list as posts are added to Madisonian.net, and then change the time-stamp to keep this at the top of the blog.

Full post as published by MoneyLaw on April 08, 2008 (boomark / email).