Recent media coverage has focused attention on the challenges facing legal education. One longstanding criticism is that law students graduate unprepared to practice law. Equally loud voices assert that law school should be shortened to two years, a viewpoint that President Obama, a former law professor, offered last month.
We can’t be the only ones to see a tension between these two claims. President Obama is right that law schools can educate lawyers more effectively. But if too many law graduates aren’t ready for practice after three years, how will shortening legal education to two years make these graduates, or their future clients, better off?
