Recent critics of legal education, fueled by the declining market for lawyers and the increasing cost of law school, have advocated wholesale changes in legal education and the legal profession. These range from transforming law schools (at least the "non-elite" ones) into places where part-time faculty, consisting primarily of practicing lawyers, teach students the skills they will need as attorneys, to following the example of Washington State in licensing non-lawyer legal technicians to provide limited legal services to the public (as a recent editorial discussed).
When considering the proposals of these critics, one might think their analyses and recommendations are novel, if not revolutionary. But when one reviews the history of legal education over the last 100 or so years, the current controversy reveals itself as another chapter in a long running debate. A brief review of that history may be enlightening.
