Curriculum reform is in the air at law schools. Spurred on by the recent report of the Carnegie Foundation and bold statements of "revolutionary" initiatives undertaken by major law schools, faculties and students are examining whether the needs of society and the profession are being served by the way law is taught and learned today.

A principal problem identified by the Carnegie Foundation is that law schools do not focus enough on what it means to be a lawyer. While schools are very effective in teaching abstract concepts, particularly in the first year, once students have learned how to "think like lawyers," they are not trained in the skills or culture so necessary to be lawyers. To meet this challenge, schools are urged to experiment with substantive specializations in the second and third years and to increase clinical offerings that give students real-world experience.

Some law schools have already moved aggressively in this direction. For example, more than a decade ago, the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law began to implement a number of the curricular innovations that Carnegie now advances. Our experience with specializations and clinics should provide some useful lessons as other schools examine whether to implement similar ideas.

The practice of law has become ever more complex, requiring increasingly greater levels of specialized skills and knowledge. Once the typical student completes the first-year basics and the standard foundational courses of the second year, she is usually on her own. Rather than being purposefully connected to post-graduation practice, course selection is often based on scheduling convenience or rumors about professorial prowess.

Specializations allow students to gain expertise in substantive areas that not only improves their marketability but also generates engagement within the law school. Concentrations at UCLA Law began in 1995 with the creation of the Business Law Program and have been extended to such varied fields as Critical Race Theory, Entertainment and Media, Law and Philosophy, and Public Interest Law and Policy. Specializations focus both students and faculty, provide an opportunity for a more purposeful education and facilitate the creation of community. They also generate important co-curricular benefits such as symposia, conferences, journals and research. They spark intellectual activity and promote synergies in teaching and research that benefit students and faculty alike.

There are pitfalls to an approach that overly stresses specializations, particularly if it forces all students to prematurely narrow their choices. How many lawyers started out wanting to be litigators and ended up becoming corporate lawyers? Moreover, concentrations can overly influence law school hiring priorities and require faculty to give up some of the freedom that brought them to teaching in order to teach required concentration courses. At UCLA Law, we have found the advantages of our concentrations to vastly outweigh these costs.

In much the same way, clinics can impart skills, develop professional norms and give meaning to the second and third years of law school. In the typical clinic, a student represents a client under the supervision of a faculty member. Students learn by doing, and, because the client is often someone without the resources to hire an attorney, clinics help fulfill the profession's obligation to deliver pro bono services and promote social justice. At UCLA Law, we have gone beyond the traditional model and have adopted a variety of different clinical approaches.

We believe that teaching fundamental lawyering skills requires the same attention to pedagogy and theory as teaching substantive legal knowledge. Developing the factual basis of a case, taking a deposition or negotiating a deal requires more than simply learning by doing. Through their research and scholarship, our clinicians have identified and explicated the techniques and skills used by expert lawyers. They use this scholarship to teach students underlying skills; then, they have them practice the techniques in a simulated setting prior to using them in the real world.

UCLA also offers clinics that respond to the reality that most students will not become litigators, but transactional attorneys. Clinics that enable students to represent local development corporations in starting a business or engage students in simulated mergers and acquisitions provides them with invaluable experience in drafting legal documents, negotiating deals and working in teams. Interdisciplinary clinics with students from other schools such as engineering and business expand the learning by helping students understand that a good lawyer knows more than just law -- he understands the client's business motivations.

COUNSELORS, NOT HIRED GUNS

As the Carnegie Foundation report acknowledges, one of our greatest challenges is to instill in the next generation the norm that a lawyer needs to serve the interests of society at the same time she serves those of her client. Purposeful clinical education can embed within it lessons about what it means for lawyers to be counselors rather than hired guns.

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.

Michael Schill is dean of the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law.