Legal Commentary

With the beginning of a new school year, and a new law professor hiring season, one might want to know the answer to this question. Specifically, I can imagine law-professor job candidates being asked the question: "Are you familiar with the Carnegie report on legal education, and how would it affect your approach to teaching?"  So I'd recommend you at least read the executive summary. Over at Concurring Opinions, Kathleen Boozang says that the report was greeted by a "big yawn" by most law professors, but she speculates that the collapse of the legal market could change that. 

A recent National Law Journal article quotes Rod Smolla, the dean of Washington and Lee and architect of its new Carnegie-esque third-year curriculum, as saying "we are at a moment of historical change in legal education...When we look back at this period in five to 10 years, we will mark it as the time when the whole mission of law schools made a fundamental turn."  In W and L's third year, students learn "substantive" areas like family law or employment law through real and simulated cases where students act as lawyers and try to solve problems, not by reading appellate opinions, taking notes in class, and mushing it all into an outline at the end for a 3-hour typing race. More students opted into the new curriculum than expected, and applications there were up 33% this past year, with a survey indicating that the new curriculum played a role in many students' decisions to go there. 

Meanwhile, Martha Minow, the new dean of Harvard Law School, where the Langdellian method of teaching from appellate opinions was developed, has called for "another case method" closer to the one used in business and public-policy schools, and consistent with W and L's approach and Carnegie. 

So will there be significant change or not much at all? My own view, for what it's worth, is that much depends on the success or failure of innovations like Washington and Lee's third-year curriculum, the more practice-oriented curriculum at Northwestern, and the new law school at UC-Irvine. If they succeed, I would imagine others will follow.  What do you think?