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Panel: Law Schools Must Adapt to New Post-Grad Reality
The Legal Intelligencer
May 06, 2009
Law schools across the country may soon feel the push toward making their curricula more real-world oriented, according to one panel of law school deans.
A panel discussion titled the "Future of Innovation" at the 3rd Circuit Judicial Conference in Philadelphia Tuesday saw representatives from four prominent, yet very different, law schools talk about how they've been trying to better prepare their students for life after graduation.
Moderator David F. Levi, dean of Duke Law School, said while law schools are currently facing a very uncertain time, they're also in the midst of a time of "ferment and innovation."
Dean Michael A. Fitts of the University of Pennsylvania Law School said he feels now is a good time to think about curricular reform.
There was a time when the dean of a law school asking the faculty to consider curricular reform was "like the president going to Congress, saying, 'We need Social Security reform,'" Fitts joked.
But it's not like that anymore, he said.
Fitts said the legal landscape has changed in such a way that the old curricula just may not cut it anymore.
For example, he said, most law institutions are no longer interested in training new graduates the way they were 20 years ago.
Now, more than ever, graduates need to come out of school with some knowledge of how to apply what they've learned in a real world setting.
And with practice areas at a much higher level of specialization than they once were, law students need to learn "problem solving as opposed to issue-spotting," he said.
Martha L. Minow, a Harvard Law School professor, agreed that "learning to be someone other than the no-sayer" is important for today's law students -- not just being able to recognize problems but being able to solve them, too.
And to that end, teamwork and management skills are much more important today than they were even 10 years ago, Fitts said.
Dean JoAnne Epps of Temple University's Beasley School of Law agreed, saying law students today need to learn to be strategic thinkers, to understand organizations and to understand management -- skills that were, up until now, taught almost exclusively in business school.
Fitts said nearly half of Penn's law faculty also teach in another discipline and that a number of law courses are taught jointly with other schools at the university.
For example, he said, in one class law students engage in negotiations with students from the university's Wharton business school, an exercise that often leads to a mutual learning experience in which law students are exposed to the decidedly riskier mentality of business students and business students get to witness the more cautious approach of law students.
Invariably, at the end of these negotiation drills, Fitts said, the Wharton students either "make a million dollars or go broke," while the law students usually come out somewhere between the two extremes.
Minow said teamwork and collaboration is a great way to teach law students that "maybe humility is a good place to start" when trying to decide how to solve a problem.
Epps said this type of integration of skill sets may eventually lead to discussions about the possibility of having different "tiers of legal assistance," much like the different tiers of medical assistance, in which people other than the traditional three-year law school graduate would be allowed to provide legal aid to those who need it.
