When Shakespeare’s character Dick the Butcher suggests killing all the lawyers, the Bard is not offering a prescription to improve society but rather is warning that anarchy will reign if there is not a vibrant legal profession protecting cultural, economic and political standards as enumerated by law. This inherent conservatism in the law, its practitioners and its teachers is at once a virtue and a vice. While providing structure for social institutions and their inevitable evolution, the law and its practitioners and teachers concomitantly serve to head off rapid transformation. Innovation, then, may not slip easily off the collective tongue of the legal profession. Yet, once every century, innovation is warranted, and legal educators now are rallying to the cause.
During the past few decades, studies have endorsed the need for curriculum reform that integrates theory with practice-based learning. Giving students more than theory in the classroom made sense as opportunities to learn by doing began to proliferate. Clinics, externships, simulations and other hands-on courses and pedagogies became valuable tools to prepare law students to engage in the delivery of legal services. Now, legal educators from more than 30 law schools across the country have joined together to make experiential legal education the norm and not just an afterthought.
