Workshop: Legal Education in Crisis? Bringing Researchers and Resources Together to Generate New Scientific Insights

American Bar Foundation, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

U.S. law schools have recently become the focus of intense criticism and increasing economic pressure. Books, newspapers, blogs, and other media have announced a growing crisis in legal education. Despite all this publicity, the nature and causes of this crisis remain poorly understood. Certainly, the number of jobs for law graduates has dropped along with the number of students applying for admission. At the same time, in the wake of a critical report by the Carnegie Foundation, pressure on law schools to change how they train students has been mounting. The American Bar Association itself has moved to alter its requirements, pressuring law schools to add more practical training to the core curriculum. Some attribute the crisis to straightforward economic causes, while others argue that a crisis in confidence has long been building because law professors and law schools have failed their consumers (students). While a number of researchers are currently studying different aspects of U.S. legal education, they have not coordinated with each other. As a result, it has been difficult to develop an overarching, systematic view of the changes in legal education and the causes of those changes. This workshop will assemble researchers studying changes in legal education together and bring social science evidence to bear on the perception that legal education is in crisis and on recommended reforms. This will not only help us understand the current crisis better, but will also allow researchers to pool data and avoid duplication of research efforts. At a time when there are urgent calls for reform, along with external pressures on the legal education system, coordination of research efforts will help reformers assess how best to allocate increasingly meager assets. There is a vast array of different kinds of law schools in the U.S. alone -- and increasingly, U.S. law schools are being drawn into networks involving law students from around the world. Social science theories regarding differentiated institutional structures and cultures, markets, global legal influences, and effects of race, gender, class, and historical trajectories in legal education have not yet been put to effective use in analyzing what is happening in legal education. Working together across disciplines, workshop participants will generate a sophisticated picture of law schools and their impacts on differently situated students (as well as of different segments of the public and of the market for legal services). Such scientifically based research is essential to understanding whether the myriad currently proposed solutions to perceived problems in U.S. legal education can address the actual situation (or whether such solutions are likely to have the hypothesized effects).