Legal Commentary

In this op-ed for the National Law Journal last year, "Legal Education Must Look Beyond the First Year," UCLA Dean Michael Schill, soon to move to University of Chicago, talks about a theme I agree with: the consistency of schools doing sophisticated interdisciplinary research, and training lawyers in a rigorous way. He says:

For the first 20 years of my career as a legal academic, the pendulum of legal education swung strongly away from the "trade school" model of legal education toward interdisciplinary education and theory. The Carnegie Report suggests that, perhaps in our embrace of abstract theory, many law schools have neglected their principal obligation -- teaching our students to be lawyers. As schools adjust their curricula, UCLA's experience suggests that we be careful not to overreact. Deep interdisciplinary knowledge and mastery of theory can co-exist very well with increased specialization and practical skills development. Indeed, both sets of skills training reinforce each other, and only by embracing both will we produce the best possible legal professionals.

He and his team also made a terrific case for the strength of UCLA in educating lawyers in a piece, "How UCLA Law Trains Lawyers," you can find here.

I have no reason to believe this orientation had much of anything to do with his hiring or his plans at U of C, but think it's interesting that a school with a great reputation in interdisciplinary work (at least with one discipline), but less of one in clinical and skills education, has hired a dean who embraces both.