Legal education is at a crossroads. Amid increased competition for faculty, students and prestige, public institutions could become permanent second-class citizens in the law school hierarchy, signaling an end to a great experiment in social opportunity and multicultural democracy.

We therefore need to reconceive what it means to be a public institution by expanding access and opportunity while rising to new heights in scholarship, academic excellence and global contribution.

This is a daunting task facing any dean, but it is one that we at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law are tackling with enthusiasm and determination.

Three initiatives can help. First, we need to broaden the scope of legal education, encompassing populations beyond the traditional JD student. Second, we need to revitalize the curriculum to better train lawyers, policy makers, activists and corporate leaders. Third, we need to recruit faculty and create programs that are transdisciplinary, collaborating with scholars from elsewhere in the university.

Broadening the scope: Historically, law schools have focused exclusively on training lawyers for practice. But today, legal training is useful for a variety of fields -- business, health care, real estate, science, architecture, journalism, urban planning, and so on. Our College of Law -- through its celebrated programs in law, science and technology, in Indian law, and in real estate planning and development -- is establishing master's degrees, certificates and online courses to serve these fields.

A new Institute for Executive Legal Education will also offer a series of retreats and summit meetings for CEOs, CFOs, general counsel, policy makers and scholars who will meet annually to discuss cutting-edge issues of law and policy.

In addition, because law is a crucial U.S. export, we must seek to serve populations abroad through expanded foreign LL.M. programs, partnerships with foreign universities, satellite campuses abroad and distance education.

Finally, we must see law in a broader liberal arts framework, integrating undergraduates and Ph.D. students into our educational mission.

Reshaping curriculum: Although the traditional law school curriculum has long been criticized, schools have mostly tinkered around the edges, often because of institutional inertia.

We are exploring ways to break through this inertia by allowing students to design their own legal education and choose among larger conceptual "schools" or tracks within the College of Law. Such tracks would potentially offer bundles of courses taught in a thematically coherent way. For example, while one track might emphasize hands-on legal skills training, another might combine students and faculty from law and other disciplines working on specific policy problems (including a semester in Washington, D.C.). Still others might emphasize law and social theory, law and business and so on.

Engaging in transdisciplinary legal education: Legal education everywhere has become increasingly interdisciplinary, but we are going further by partnering with schools and institutions across campus to engage in scholarship and teaching that sits not within a particular school but between them.

For example, we are creating the legal academy's first integrated program in law and sustainability, including scientists, planners, political scientists, designers and legal scholars as part of multifaceted undergraduate and graduate curriculum. Students would also work with countries, states and municipalities around the world to develop sustainability strategies and enact legal reforms to implement them. Imagine a gathering of world leaders, scientists and legal scholars on campus, modeling long-term consequences of possible science or policy choices made today. Now imagine law students, along with science and planning students, helping to facilitate those sessions, and you have some idea what a transdisciplinary approach to legal education may mean not just for students but for the world.

The challenges that face public legal education are significant, but we can provide opportunity for a variety of students, stress excellence and ensure that a law school has an impact on its communities. Only by doing so will the public law school remain a dominant institution in preparing for the globally competitive, multicultural environment of the new century.

Paul Schiff Berman is dean of the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University in Tempe.