Academic

Law School For Non-Lawyers

By JA Hodnicki

Most U.S. law schools offer degree programs for lawyers (JD, LLM, SJD).  However, lawyers are not the only people who regularly interact with law and regulation.  Compliance officers in a number of regulated industries such as finance, insurance, securities, telecom, energy, health care and tax have practitioners who need to better understand law for their every day work.  However, law schools do not serve this group of working professionals who want a basic understanding of the US legal system and a more in-depth understanding of the law in their particular regulatory field.  In a time in which law schools are pressed to find new revenue sources to compensate for shrinking endowments and/or state budgets, more law schools should think about creating certificate or graduate degree 1-2 year part time programs for working professionals in legal compliance.  The explosion of LLM programs since 1990 suggests that law schools understand that graduate programs can be cash cows.  I suggest a program that takes legal education a step further.  Unlike LLM programs, businesses may be willing to underwrite the entire cost of a part time graduate program - lets call it the M.Reg.   The M.Reg would provide the benefit of bringing legal analysis to people who regularly work in regulatory affairs.  Law schools would make money but unlike LLM programs the students would not have a hefty financial burden associated with an additional degree.  I suspect that such a program would work best in urban centers, where you could use adjuncts to assist in course staffing.  However, even in college towns like Gainesville, one could imagine a weekend executive MBA styled M.Reg program.

Posted by D. Daniel Sokol

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on November 14, 2008 (boomark / email).