Legal Commentary

Over at MoneyLaw, Jason Solomon writes that the fact the first-year legal-writing program at Penn (as at Yale) is taught by 3-L's "prevents Penn from having an 'outstanding' JD program".  Why should this be true?  He elaborates:

So Penn, it's time to spend some money on real legal writing professors. The people who head Penn and Yale's progams may be terrific, but there's only so much one person can do. The law student instructors may be doing a good job given what they know, but... they're law students.

I don't have a strong view about the "best" way to structure a legal-writing program (well, maybe it's my strong view that there is no "best" way).  And, to be clear, nothing in this post should be taken to indicate any lack of commitment on my part to the idea that it is very, very important for law schools to teach good legal-writing, and to do it well.  That said, I'm not sure -- not yet, anyway -- about Jason's "but . . . they're law students" argument.  He's clearly thought more about this than I have, but . . . Are we sure that Penn's best third-year students -- despite being just students -- aren't able to teach good legal writing well, even as well as the "real legal writing professors" Jason thinks Penn should and could hire?  How do we know this?  Isn't the "smart third-years v. real legal writing professors" question one whose answer will vary depending on, e.g., who the non-student director is, and also on the school's ranking, location, and tenure-and-voting-rights policies (because such policies, it seems to me, will affect the ability of a law school to attract and retain "real" legal writing professors)?

I can understand (easily) the argument that the Yale-Penn model is not as good as some others.  I'm a bit uneasy, though, with the suggestion that an otherwise "outstanding" law program should be downgraded -- should confront what Jason calls a "ceiling" -- entirely because it has opted for the Penn model.  Thoughts?  (I should disclose / confess, I guess, that I was taught legal writing by two very able, supervised third-year students and -- as a third-year -- taught legal writing to first-year students.)