MALW’s Board of Editors,
The Daily Record Newswire
The New York Times reported extensively last week on the impending crisis facing all but the most elite of U.S. law schools and the measures some institutions are taking to counteract it. But more is needed.
Law schools nationwide are in what pilots call a “graveyard spiral.” Graveyard spirals are insidious. They start when the pilot misses cues from the instruments and thinks that the plane is straight and level, when actually the plane is starting a diving turn. By the time the pilot’s senses catch up with this, the turn is often so tight and the sink rate so high that attempts to stop the spiral by jerking the nose up result in pulling the wings off the plane. Next stop, graveyard. (This has been the cause of death of certain celebrity amateur pilots.) The cure is to recognize the peril, level the wings and then stop the dive.
For the law schools, the cues are plainly there. It is a simple matter, at base, of chain of causation. Fewer jobs = fewer applicants = falling measures of aptitude = seats filled with people incurring huge debt, many of whom have a less than 50 percent chance of ever finding work as a lawyer (or maybe even passing a bar exam). And, of course, one must factor in the bloated infrastructure of law schools, the pressure to fill seats and keep the cash flowing (often to be siphoned off at university level) and the large number of tenured teachers who carry light caseloads that enable them to write law review articles that no one in real law practice reads, and the stage is set for disaster.
As the Times reported, some law schools have detected their peril and taken baby steps toward rescuing themselves before their wings are pulled off. These have included downsizing incoming classes, as well as offering “early” (read “forced”) retirement to staff (first to go) and, likely soon, to tenured faculty. To the extent the American Bar Association allows it, it seems predictable that cheaper (and usually more real-world-trained) adjuncts will be used to replace them, mirroring what has happened at the college level.
All of this will help level the wings. To stop the dive, more drastic measures will be needed, and these must bridge the yawning gap between academic and real law. Law firms can no longer afford to hire academically brilliant graduates whose law schools have gifted them with a magna cum laude diploma, but virtually no real-world skills. The old way of indoctrination to the real world of law practice is gone, for the most part, forever. Competitive, bottom-line economics of legal practice have relegated the traditional method of professional indoctrination — sitting at the feet of a seasoned practitioner, whether in the office or at trial — as dead as last year’s Christmas goose. The problem is, no consensus has yet been reached on how to replace it.
Many schools have begun to increase the practical indoctrination of their graduates by reinventing the structure of the third-year curriculum, including offering a broader range of clinical experiences. Good idea, but it does not go far enough.
Some deans are seriously floating the idea of paring law school back to two years, as it was before Dean Langdell invented the third year — allegedly as a way to balance Harvard Law School’s books. Gone will be many teachers’ beloved seminars, which have for years given them a bully pulpit for thumping their favorite agenda tub, to be replaced by clinics and other skill-building programs centered on putting real-world tools in the students’ kits.
One approach we think deserves serious consideration is — on the model of other professional schools — to center the third-year curriculum on a capstone-type project. Such a project would involve a soup-to-nuts simulation of real law practice. It would start with client interviews, attempts at non-litigative resolution (from “lawyer letters” through formal mediation), working up pleadings and conducting discovery, ADR, trial and appeal.
Simple idea, no? Out of the box, yes. It would take work and dedication to make such a curriculum reform a reality, but it could be done, and it might even help stop the nose dive. Some thoughtful law school leaders, somewhere, must be smart and brave enough to think this far out of the box. Such people are out there, starting with two excellent deans within a few blocks of each other in Baltimore. Let’s hope they will stem the spiral before it imperils the health — not to mention the survival — of their institutions.
