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Originally Posted by The Rumor
With respect I completely disagree about the usefulness of what is taught in law school and with the need for it to be a postgraduate degree.
For one there is no tie between a law degree and your undergrad major. That is possible for few other doctorates. Medical doctors have years of science in college. Etc. Law could easily be made into a four year program in place of whatever major classes lawyers took in their last two years of their undergrad.
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I disagree for a couple of reasons. The first is that there is too much to teach in law school for it to be taught in college.
The second reason is that if you pushed law school down into an undergraduate program, you would be teaching first year law classes to 18 year old freshmen who simply could not master the coursework at such a young age.
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Second law school is mostly theoretical and not very practical. The balance is way off. Too much of a focus on stuff that belongs in law reviews and not enough on what you will actually be doing for a living.
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The "theoretical" nature of law school is largely a result of there being no tie in to the undergrad degree.
But I wouldn't call it theoretical, anyway. Every area of expertise has a canon-- a body of work that serves as the basis for knowledge in that field of study. This is what the first half of law school is about--making sure that all lawyers have essentially the same basic knowledge of the basic principles behind our legal system. Everybody has to take a class in torts, even if their goal is to go on to a career in asset securitization, not because they might have to try a car accident one day, but because torts class illustrates important principles such as how the law treats personal responsibility and such like.
Sufficient familiarity with the underlying principles if the law, as illuminated by the canonical curriculum, allows practitioners to predict how the law will relate to new situations; this ability is the essence of being a good lawyer-- the ability to provide clients with learned counsel on how a general law will apply to their unique or unusual specific situation.
A lot of the practical stuff people think is missing from law school-- drafting pleadings and how to issue a subpoena and such like--is actually the easy part of law practice that can often be turned over to a reasonably well educated and trained staff if secretaries and paralegals.
But law school's emphasis on immersion in the canon is absolutely vital, both because it is not and can not be taught to undergrads, and because familiarity with the underlying principles is vital to making a lawyer, as opposed to someone who is merely a competent technical drafter of asset securitization agreements or whatever.
A third reason instruction in the canon is vital is because it is the vehicle through which students are taught to think like a lawyer. This instruction can't be given on an ad hoc basis in a law firm; heck, mist people who graduate from law school aren't even very good at it. It is the most difficult skill in a lawyer's skill set.
Which leads to a 4th reason law school is a good way to train new lawyers: because of the prestige associated with being a law professor, and because if supply and demand principles, law professors tend to be among the best in the legal field--certainly the smartest, if not the best. It insures that new lawyers are trained by people who are capable of mastering the knowledge and skills that they are attempting to pass on. If you tried to train new lawyers in a law firm setting, you'd end up with a lower average quality of lawyer, because instruction would come from the average, not from the top.
Teaching law as an undergrad degree would result in a similar, but less dramatic reduction, as undergrad instruction has nothing like the prestige of teaching doctoral level classes, and would attract a somewhat less excellent corps of professors.
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I'm not arguing everything is wrong about it but jack is spot on. There's really no reason for law to be a grad degree.
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Setting aside everything else I have said, there is simply no way that your average 20 year old has the maturity or the experience as a student necessary to take the proper lessons away from instruction in the legal canon.
I taught law classes to undergrads for several years. Most if them planned to go to law school, and most of them succeeded in doing so, insofar as I was kept informed. One of the hard lessons I learned in trying to teach undergrads was that the pace of instruction had to be slowed way down. In a semester of international law, which I offered only to college seniors, I only got through one half of the textbook.
Another lesson I learned was that only a few if my students at any given time were capable of dealing with the material when presented in Socratic method, the hands down best way to teach someone to think like a lawyer.
So one of the important functions of an undergrad degree right now is to serve as a barrier to entry to law school--if you can't excel as an undergrad, it is hugely unlikely that you would ever make a decent lawyer. I know if exceptions to that statement, but they are very rare. If you lower the barrier to entry by allowing any undergrad to take the bar exam, you would dramatically reduce the average quality of lawyers.
[qoute]You'd still have to pass the bar as a meaningful barrier to entry. [/quote]
The bar exam is the least meaningful barrier to entry that currently exists to practicing law. To anybody who paid even a little attention in law school, it is a bad joke. People stress about it in advance because the stakes are high, not because the test is hard. How hard can it be when the toughest bar exams in the country have a first time pass rage if 50%? how hard can it be when it tries to cover 3 years of education in 3 days of testing?
If you allowed undergrads to take the bar exam, you'd have to substantially increase the effectiveness of the bar as a meaningful barrier. Just off the top of my head, I'd say it would have to be a 7-10 day test, with none of that ridiculous multiple choice stuff that is so easy it is a colossal waste of time.
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The idea that law school minimizes training costs for law firms does not match my experience because of the focus on theoretical over the practical.
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Of course law school minimizes the training cost for law firms--the new lawyer paid a law school to train him in the canon and in thinking like a lawyer. The law firm doesn't have to incur that cost in the same waybit would if you allowed an apprenticeship type program or if you allowed undergrads to go right into law practice with an undergrad degree.
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Think of the class you took on 18th century French law or ridiculous ina
pplicable classes like that.
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I didn't take any frivolous classes; I'm not sure my top 25 school even offered that many of them.
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And, even if you believe in law school there's really no reason for it to be three years long instead of two.
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I would not oppose a two year law school curriculum if graduates also had to do a one year practicum with a law firm similar to a medical residency prior to taking the bar.
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