Many law professors have developed teaching materials and designed courses that use some or all of the recommendations of the Carnegie Report Educating Lawyers and of the Best Practices for Legal Education (Best Practices) report.    Those who have worked to bring the powerful ideas of these reports into practice may have the false impression that everyone in the legal academy knows about the availability of these materials and resources.  In addition, the 25 law schools that have partnered in the initiative of the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System, called “Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers,” http://educatingtomorrowslawyers.du.edu/  (ETL) may also assume that other law schools are aware of the degree to which these 25 schools have committed to the Carnegie/Best Practices method.   For instance, every one of these schools has revised their strategic plans and curricula to intentionally incorporate the Carnegie and Best Practices recommendations.  But do other law schools know about the progress made in developing teaching materials and in the collaboration fostered by ETL?

Recent blog posts and conversations with law professors have led me to realize that many schools and/or professors have not had the opportunity to appreciate these developments.  Plenty know about Carnegie’s recommendations, but too few know of the steps taken, since the report, to implement it.   Major legal publishers have developed materials to allow professors to teach both skills and value formation in doctrinal courses.  Lexis/Nexis took the approach of providing supplements, in its “Skills and Values” series, which can be used with a traditional casebook.   The co-directors of the Institute for Law Teaching and Learning, Professor Michael Hunter Schwartz and Professor Gerald Hess, developed with Carolina Academic Press a series of casebooks in the “Context and Practice Series” designed to teach in the method recommended by Carnegie    Each of the books includes material to allow for the traditional method of teaching—teaching analytical skills through question and answer, etc.  The casebooks are novel in their integration of a variety of lawyering tasks to reinforce legal concepts.   The task may range from drafting a sophisticated contract to preparing a discovery plan to allow a party to prepare for summary judgment and for trial.    With the leadership of Professors Schwartz and Hess, and the reality that the authors in the series are all those who have written and spoken widely on educational methods, these books provide some of the best ideas for teaching doctrinal subjects in a way that will enhance the classes.   Finally, the Carolina Academic Press series is also unique because every book chapter “professional identity questions” that encourage students to reflect on value questions that arise in specific practice scenarios.  In addition to the Lexis/Nexis and Carolina Academic Press series, West Publishing is reportedly going to be releasing a series that incorporates the Carnegie methods.

Some, perhaps many, professors are wary of moving to a Carnegie method.  Here are some likely questions behind the hesitation:  Won’t everything Carnegie suggests cut into my course coverage?   I already have a method developed for teaching and the Carnegie sounds as if it will require more work?   Are the skills that Carnegie suggests the kind of tasks that would make my teaching more of a “trade” type of class than legal analysis?  Would I be indoctrinating students into my own values by seeking to have them reflect on these professional identity questions?

These kinds of questions are worth discussing. The problem is that those who have the questions often have not spoken with their colleagues who are using the skills and value formation method, and vice versa.   As we move forward, professors who have questions ought to at least inform their decisions by talking to those who have taught using either of the approaches.  And those who have developed experience can be more proactive about sharing it.  As noted, 25 law schools have faculty that are already teaching through one or both methods.  For example, see the course portfolios on the Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers site, http://educatingtomorrowslawyers.du.edu/course-portfolios/, with explanations courses that include one or both of the skills and values approach.    Talking with one of these professors would be a good start for someone who wants to have more information with which to consider the above questions.  Those who ask may be surprised to find that some preconceptions may be inaccurate.   For instance, most professors employing skills as part of their courses are not using “easy” tasks.  Instead, the exercises require sophisticated skills that reinforce students’ grasp of how a legal concept applies to practice, its strategic importance, etc.   I was encouraged, and as a result, encourage others, to start with modest changes in a course during one semester, rather than revamp my course completely.  If the professor finds that these methods make one’s class a better learning experience for the students, and more enjoyable for the professor, he or she can choose as I did to try more changes in a later semester.  Or not.  The point is that a professor, if she has questions, ought to at least make an informed decision by talking with those who have experimented with implementing the recommendations.

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It is December in America.  I am saddened by the violence of and in our world.  I am resistant to the commercialized obligations of “the Hoilidays”. And I long for time to reflect upon the darkness so that I can move forward into the light.

I know that this December frustration and sadness will pass. Although the longest night of the year is just upon us, unlike my ancestors, I do not doubt that the sun will come again and that the days will become longer.  I know that despite my pre-solstice grumblings, I will treasure the exchange of love. friendship and care that accompanies meaningful moments of human connection at this time of year.  I know that from the darkness , there will be light —  whether from a winter sky stuffed with stars, Advent wreaths, Juul fires, Shabbat lightings,  twinkling Christmas trees,  Chawmos bonfires,  or a child’s flashlight (hidden under the covers for continued reading of a favorite gift).

Reflecting on the darkness that seems to surround us in legal education is another matter. I wonder  “ will the students come back?”  Will the pool of those applying to law schools  simply become perpetually smaller?   Certainly, bashing  law schools has continued to have traction over the past year.   And given the grim overall  admissions data the  “trending” message does seem to be   “Why would anyone go to law school?”

Here too, however, we should not confuse tough times or dark days with inevitable extinction of all light. The information about law school debt-salary ratio is no longer “newsworthy” despite continued rants .  The “law schools are evil”  narrative is now overused, often exploited , and certainly reductive.   What is more likely to be newsworthy are calls for some balance in the bashing. See Is It Worth It? and Law School Placement Ethics. Attention is finally being given to thoughtful analysis such as that contained in Dean Frank H. Wu’s letter to the ABA Taskforce on the future of legal education. See Practice of Legal Education and The Problem With Legal Education.

Long before the publication of Failing Law Schools, before the filing of  lawsuits over student consumer issues and fraud, and before the media’s heightened if not histrionic scrutiny of law schools,  many thoughtful voices  such as those contained in the 1960’s CLEPR recommendations, the 1979 Crampton Report,  the 1997  MacCrate Report,  the 2007 Carnegie Report and CLEA’s Best Practices for Legal Education had cautioned legal educators.   They warned first  that law schools had lost their way, and second,  that legal education needed to become more innovative, responsive , collaborative and intentional.   Although one could view the litany of reports as proof that the previous report had no effect, that is not the case.  Legal education has changed in many, many ways since 1960. It just hasn’t changed enough.

More than not changing enough, legal education, like most of America and like the legal profession itself,  “lost its way” during the economic boom.  And legal education did so, in my opinion, because it lost sight of its most treasured asset – the responsibility to guide the formation of people who serve as civic professionals and leaders.

Redemption seems to me be a good place to focus for 2013.  And I’m not talking about the Christian definition of redemption or the Christian movement to redeem law schools or law.  I’m talking about the universal concept of redemption  which involves admitting failings, making amends and recommitting to the journey.  The Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s  first definition of “redeem”  involves buying, repurchasing or winning back. The second involves:

2.  to free from what distresses or harms: as

a.  to free from captivity by payment of ransom
b.  extricate from or help to overcome something detrimental
c.  to release from blame or debt: clear
d. to free from the consequence/consequences of sin

It is the third definition that best describes the process of redemption and this Blog’s focus since  it’s inception:

3.  to change for the better: reform

For 2013, I want to hear how law schools are redeeming themselves or plan to do so.  How have we changed for the better?  How are we extricating ourselves from what was harmful and detrimental to students, the profession and society?  How are we “saving our souls”? I look forward to hearing these stories of illumination.   Peace and Joy to all our Blog readers!

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A possible head start for law students
Karen Sloan
The National Law Journal
12-03-2012

A luncheon for third-year law students during spring 2011 got law professor Gabriel Chin thinking. The gathering at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law should have been full of excitement and promise for those about to embark on new legal careers, he thought. The reality was a bit different.
“It really was kind of anti-climactic,” Chin said. “Instead of being the beginning of a new thing, they still had to take the bar. Medical students take their boards while in school, so graduation is a major transformative moment. I thought, ‘Something like that could work in the law school context.’ ”
Chin’s epiphany led to a proposal backed by all three Arizona law schools to allow 3Ls to sit for the bar during the February before they graduate, rather than making them wait until after graduation. The Arizona Supreme Court is slated to consider the proposal on December 5. If the court approves, Arizona would be the only state that allows students to take the bar exam midway through their final school year.
The idea is to move students into practice as quickly as possible, said Arizona law dean Marc Miller. Waiting means more debt for graduates and eliminates them from consideration for jobs that require bar admission. “This will essentially reduce the cost of a legal education by five months,” Miller said. “It’s a direct response to changes not only in the hiring markets but the rising cost of tuition.” Beyond that, the proposal presented an opportunity to experiment with the third-year curriculum, much maligned for its lack of practical training, he said.
Miller and associate dean Sally Rider met with Arizona Chief Justice Rebecca White Berch to talk over the concept not long after Chin, who has since moved to the University of California, Davis School of Law, proposed it. Berch was encouraging but cautioned that any proposal would need the support of the state’s other two law schools. Miller’s next phone call was to Doug Sylvester, dean at Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.
ECONOMIC BENEFITS
“I immediately thought this was a great idea,” Sylvester said. “I knew we would have to think long and hard about how we would admit students [to an early bar program]. For me, the economic benefit for students is great. Anything we can do in a soft market to get more people jobs quickly is something we want to pursue.”
He noted that the Phoenix legal market lacks many of the large law firms that hire students a full year before they graduate; rather, it comprises small and midsize firms that only hire admitted lawyers.
By January, the two public law schools and the Phoenix School of Law had submitted an initial proposal to the Arizona Supreme Court. Students would be allowed to sit for the February bar exam as long as they were due to graduate within 120 days of that date and had been certified by their respective law school as prepared for the test’s rigors. The students would not undertake a traditional course load in January or February; instead, they would take a bar preparation course. The remainder of their time in school would consist of nontraditional courses designed to help them enter practice, including clinics, externships or classes covering law office management or professionalism.
The concept has support from students. The University of Arizona’s Law Student Bar Association wrote to the Supreme Court urging adoption. “We also like the ability to start practice immediately after graduation, rather than having to wait until late in the year to be able to practice or start looking for work,” they wrote.
Erica Moeser, president of the National Conference of Bar Examiners, had endorsed the concept as early as 2009, arguing that students who fail the February exam during their third year would be able to retake it in July, following graduation. She also welcomed the chance to overhaul 3L curricula and ease student debt loads amid a tough job climate.
Not everyone in Arizona was sold on the idea, however. The state Supreme Court’s Attorney Regulation Advisory Committee in May asked the court to reject the proposal, citing concerns that students would be overwhelmed trying to complete school and pass the bar exam at the same time. The committee noted that other states, including Missouri, Oregon and Virginia, had tried and abandoned the idea because they found it “disruptive and distracting.” Georgia, for example, began allowing 3Ls to take the February bar during the 1970s, but ended the practice in 1995 after concluding that students were spending more time studying for the test than attending classes.
“My fear is that it will negatively impact the third year of the educational experience and essentially turn the third year into a bar prep course,” said Arizona assistant secretary of state Jim Drake, who sits on the committee. “I don’t think that’s the right way to go. I see this more as a marketing idea.” Getting students admitted to the bar sooner can only help the law schools’ rate of placing graduates in legal jobs, and thus their U.S. News & World Report rankings, he added.
Both Miller and Sylvester discounted Georgia’s experience. For one thing, law schools there did not modify their curricula to help students balance exam prep and class work. Moreover, the economic circumstances are vastly different. “At that point in time, applications to law school were going up; demand was going up,” Miller said. “Law schools were in a golden era — they could get tuition dollars and outside support. They could hire faculty and give scholarships. This is a wildly different era both for legal education and legal practice, and we think we’re responding to this era, now.”
The Arizona Supreme Court put off the proposal in August and submitted 10 questions to the law schools, seeking clarification about how they would identify eligible students and manage the program. The schools clarified that students would have to have completed 90 percent of their required credits; would be restricted to two semester hours of course work in January and February as they prepare for the exam; and could only have eight semester credits left to complete following the exam. (Typical course loads range between 14 and 17 credits, administrators said, although 3Ls often take fewer hours during their final semesters.) The students consequently would have to squeeze larger course loads into their 2L years.
DOUBTS ASSUAGED
The revised proposal was enough to assuage the advisory committee’s doubts — in November, it endorsed the concept in a 4-3 vote, although Drake said he and three other opponents were unable to attend the meeting.
Even if the court signs off on the proposal, not all students will want to take the bar exam early. The University of Arizona recently polled 2Ls and found that 44 students — 32 percent of the class — would sit for the bar exam in February if that were possible. Administrators at Arizona State likewise anticipate a relatively small percentage of students would opt in.
The fact that Arizona earlier this year became one of seven Uniform Bar Exam (UBE) states creates an interesting angle to the discussion. In theory, 3Ls seeking admission to any UBE state could take the February bar in Arizona, assuming they meet the coursework criteria, and be admitted as soon as they graduate. However, different states have different admissions rules, and not all UBE states would necessarily recognize a bar exam taken before graduation, Miller said.
If Arizona does begin allowing 3Ls to take the exam early — potentially as early as the February 2014 sitting — Chin expects other states to take notice. “I haven’t met anybody who thinks students aren’t ready to take the bar after five semesters,” he said. “Given that, why do we make students incur this additional expense? I think there will be a lot of interest from other states looking to follow suit.”
Karen Sloan can be contacted at ksloan@alm.com.

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Since I was a little girl, the only thing I wanted to be when I grew up was a lawyer. Not just any lawyer either-a trial attorney that was in a court room every day. There was no chance I would be a doctor (I hate needles and pass out when I see blood), a veterinarian (like my little sister who is much better at that science stuff), or even a corporate executive (how does someone even do that?!). Law was my career choice from the beginning, and I have had no problem admitting that to anyone who will listen. Lately, however, I have received the same response from people when telling them what I do with my life and why I wanted to go to law school. Why would I go to law school when I will not be able to get a job and when I will come out with more debt than buying a new home? After hearing it every single time, one has to start wondering if it really is worth the time and the effort.

While reading Dean Lawrence Mitchell’s Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, “Law School is Worth the Money,” I found myself nodding in agreement while reading about how discouraging the media has been when it comes to the prospect of law school. There are entire websites dedicated to lower tier law schools, blog posts that destroy the desire to even google your law school, and op-ed pieces that make students feel they are wasting their time. The article appropriately explains that prospective students believe it is “irresponsible” to attend law school, and that these irrationalities have begun to prevent possible students from even trying to wait it out for the three years. Everyone knows the job market is, for lack of a better word, unfortunate, and everyone knows that graduate school costs money, but that should not discourage prospective law students from even trying to brave the murky waters. To me, that seems like a slippery slope that would never end. Soon it will be “College costs money, so let’s wait it out and see if it’s worth it at some point.”

Dean Mitchell asks in his article, “What else will these thousands of student who have been discouraged from attending law school do?” and I think that is an excellent question. For students like me, it was law school all the way; I would not have been happy anywhere else. Where else will these students go? Are they destined to walk the earth without purpose or in dead end jobs? Dean Mitchell explains that this is an investment in your future. Being a lawyer is not a first job at Bloomingdales selling expensive jeans to customers (Yes, at one point I did that!), it is a career that will always be a necessity. Everyone has a crazy uncle who has a few too many speeding tickets, or a grandparent who needs their will drafted. If anything, law school is teaching you invaluable skills that cannot be measured by the amount of money on the tuition bill.

Walking through the hallways during finals time seems to be something I can only describe as stressful. Students are worried about doing poorly on an exam, which will cause them to get a bad grade, which will cause them to not get an interview, which will cause them to not get a job. I can absolutely see how this would be discouraging to someone who was considering studying the law, but there is something to remember. If you want to be a lawyer, BE A LAWYER. GO TO LAW SCHOOL. In twenty years, you do not want to look back and say, “Hey! Maybe I should have gone to law school to become a lawyer!” There is nothing more satisfying than the first time you get to stand up in a courtroom and say, “Yes, your Honor.” That feeling is something I hold on to every time I think about finals or debt, and that is exactly what I think that Dean Mitchell is talking about in his article. It is not “irresponsible,” it is exactly what you are supposed to be doing, and if that is what you want to do, then law school it is!

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During my Thanksgiving break,  I had the opportunity to reflect on some similarities in situation of my students and my almost 80 year old father.   Fifty-nine years ago, on  Thanksgiving Day, he emigrated to NYC and arrived earlier than expected and at the wrong airport.   A stranger, a military man, extended kindness, direction and coins for a telephone call so that my father could properly connect with his immigrant family in the Bronx.  I only heard the details of this lonely and unsettling arrival recently.  Usually, my Dad  emphasizes how he thought all the fuss of parades and bounteous food were in his honor or that “Americans always ate like kings.”

Like my father, my wonderful students persevere, dream and work hard despite the consistent dire predictions from “johnny-come-latelies” and panic-inducing  pundits that legal education and the profession will never recover and go back to “the good old days.”  My Dad left poverty-ridden Ireland because there were no jobs or prospects.  He had  little in his pocket but similar hope ,  a loving immigrant family in the Bronx,  love of new ideas,  and appreciation of humanity, both in  its goodness and frailty.   My Dad’s world, America and the globe itself has changed drastically since 1953, just like legal education, the legal profession and the global economy have changed drastically of late.  So what lessons could I derive from one Irish immigrant’s experience of change in America?  My Dad is suprisingly open to cultural change, to difference , and to new ideas, despite his age and orthodox upbringing.  Change brings him  not only the understandable reactions of  uncertainty and some trepidation, but excitement.  He knows that how one responds to change  is ultimately determinative of happiness.  That perspective I can certainly share with my students,  and perhaps work with them more on acquistion of skills related to adaptability.

In addition, my thanksgiving musings led me to  meditate a bit on how to join my Dad’s wisdom with lessons for those of us facing what seems like negative change in legal education in the United States.    Here’s some good things to be grateful about potential changes in legal education:

1.  It forces us to define the “value added” that students obtain from a legal education.

2. It forces us to be more organized and thoughful about what we hope to do for students in our classes, our curriculum and our institutions.

3. It demands that students play a more mature and active role in determining what they hope to gain from law school and how much they are willing to pay for it.

4. It gives faculty the opportunity to learn new methods of instruction, new theories about learning, cognition,  and the  brain as well as new ideas about what a modern legal education could encompass.    (think about legal ed reforms current rise in popularty including by elite institutions – the johnny come latelies.)

5.  It  can help redeem the profession — by shaking out the old elitist, untested assumptions and force the profession to become more connected to its justice and civic roots.  (Think the rise of pro bono and preparation of folks who serve people instead of simply sorting students for corporate or corporate law  hiring and leaving all other students to learn at the expense of the interests of their early career clients …..)

6.  It has married the interests of those who wish for a more inclusive profession with those who ask for more accurate and scientific gatekeeping to the profession through the LSAT and the Bar.  (think the Schultz-Zedeck study and its pervasive appeal).

7.  It has forced legal educators to focus on preparing students for the new economy instead of the old economy.  (think Bill Henderson’s work at Indiana!)

While I am hopeful and see opportunity in the crisis, I am not Pollyanna.  Thus, I must mention the newest press releases from the ABA Accreditation work.    The latest news from the ABA Standards Review Committee (SRC) process  is that rather than having the SRC submitt a package of revisions that interlock  and make sense as a whole to the Council of the Section, it seems now that individual  issues and sections will go up in an arbitrary piecemeal fashion. Those of us following the proposed revisions will have to be vigilant as each new proposed revised section gets sent up.  At first blush, it seems that this will make it even harder for law schools in a difficult economic climate to plan and budget to meet the unconnected, evolving, and  ever changing standards.  Do you agree? Am I missing the good news here?

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/aba_committee_approves_proposed_changes_in_law_school_accredition_standards/?utm_source=maestro&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly_email

So how do I react with wisdom to this latest news?  I remain grateful for my inspiring Dad and students who fill my life with richness, purpose and reward.   I am going to try hard, as my Dad would want, to be hopeful  and understanding of what the heck is happening with the ABA Standards work, but that might take a “Holiday Miracle” worthy of the Lifetime Channel!

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The following post comes to us from Professor John Lande, Isidor Loeb Professor Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution, University of Missouri School of Law:

The University of Missouri’s Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution recently held a symposium, entitled “Overcoming Barriers in Preparing Law Students for Real-World Practice.” The symposium focused on what law firms and clients need from lawyers and what law schools can do to better prepare students to fulfill those needs. Lisa Kloppenberg, the former dean at the University of Dayton, gave the keynote address, entitled Training the Heads, Hands and Hearts of Tomorrow’s Lawyers, which described Dayton’s robust curricular reforms and includes suggestions for other schools. Prof. Clark Cunningham presented what may be surprising findings from multiple studies about what clients do and do not want from lawyers. Judge Solomon Oliver Jr. and attorney John Philips gave their perspectives from the bench and bar about the most important skills for lawyers to have. School of Education Professor David Moss gave a broad overview of curriculum theory and the “hidden curriculum” that law schools implicitly teach. Prof. Judith Welch Wegner focused on the process and elements of curricular reform, using analogies to architectural features of cornerstones and curbcuts. Prof. Barbara Glesner Fines talked about the importance of focusing on what instructors believe is critically important for students to learn and, particularly on integrating legal research instruction in upper level courses.

The symposium website includes draft papers, powerpoint presentations, and videos from the symposium. The symposium will be published in the University of Missouri’s Journal of Dispute Resolution.

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This next post comes to us from a new blogger on the Best Practice’s Website, Benjamin Madison, a Professor of Law at Regent University School of Law:

In The Bramble Bush (1930) Karl Llewellyn observed: “It is not easy to turn human beings into lawyers. Neither is it safe. For a mere legal machine is a social danger. Indeed, a mere legal machine is not even a good lawyer. It lacks insight and judgment.” Over seventy-five years later, two studies—Best Practices for Legal Education and the Carnegie Institute for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning’s report, Educating Lawyers—reached remarkably similar findings. Both studies concluded that law schools’ preoccupation with the analytical side of lawyering has produced a growing number of “legal machines.” The recent studies do not label modern law graduates “legal machines.” However, their description of the modern graduate—analytically sharp, but jaded and indifferent about values—sure sounds like the same type of lawyer Llewellyn feared.

Llewellyn goes on in The Bramble Bush to explain how the last two years of law school should be used to return students’ “common sense” and to “bring [their] ethics out from ether.” He apparently assumed that, by studying more specialized areas, students would naturally move away from strict logic to a blend of legal reasoning and social concerns. Llewellyn did not explain how law professors should cultivate this transformation. And the question of how to do so, though at times raised previously as an issue in for instance the ABA’s McCrate Report, has not been thoroughly addressed until the publication of the two 2007 reports. The Carnegie Institute in Educating Lawyers and the Clinical Legal Education Association’s in Best Practices for Legal Education comprehensively examined and surveyed law schools, students, lawyers, and judges about the state of legal education. The reports echo each other in many respects, particularly on the need to cultivate in law students the need to develop as whole persons.

Unfortunately, the reports conclude, law schools are failing in this goal—and have been failing for some time. Educating Lawyers and Best Practices describe empirical studies describing interviews with law students when they entered school, at regular intervals thereafter, and finally when the same students graduate. These studies reflect that most law students enter law school with ideals, passion, and goals aimed at helping others. These values, however, are steadily excised as the student progresses through law school. The primary reason students’ ideals, values, and passion are lost, the reports note, has to do with law schools’ exaggerated emphasis on legal analysis. The prevalent method of emphasizing logic and dismissing students’ concerns about justice and principles as, at best, less significant and, at worst, irrelevant to legal analysis leads law students to an obvious conclusion—they should value legal analysis as their “key” to success and abandon their ideals and values as naïve dreams. The reports explicitly recognize that an educational approach that produces such results—intentional or not—damages students, sometimes irretrievably, and clearly affects the manner in which they practice law. To be sure, the reports do not urge schools to dispense with legal reasoning. They do, however, encourage law schools to balance the emphasis on logic and analysis with a recognition that formation of a professional identity will be as important in law school as developing analytical and lawyering skills.

Indeed, perhaps the boldest of the proposals is Carnegie’s recommendation that law schools spend one-third of the law school experience helping students explore their values and how those values will translate into the way they practice law. Developing a “professional identity” is Carnegie’s term for the process that would then take place as law students (a) develop a sensitivity to the profession’s values and to their own values and (b) engage, in the law school setting, situations that will test their adherence to the values to which they aspire. Their professors can foster students’ efforts to form a professional identity by presenting the students with practical legal scenarios that raise a conflict in values, and then by encouraging students to explore and resolve the value conflict. Reflection, it seems, is a key to the process of forming a professional identity. Without such encouragement, many students will go into practice with a vague sense of “what a lawyer should be.” Conversely, with intentional cultivation of students’ values and identity, a student can decide “what kind of lawyer the student wants to be.” In short, the process of cultivating a professional identity will lead students to emerge from law school not only with a sense of the profession’s values and their own values, but also with an awareness of the situations that will tempt them to compromise their values.

As Mary Lynch observed in her 10/21/12 blog, organizations such as Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers (headed in part by William Sullivan, the lead author of Carnegie’s Educating Lawyers) are helping law schools and professors engage the process of encouraging students to develop a professional identity. Moreover, we are now seeing more teaching materials designed to allow professors to integrate teaching methods that address professional identity formation into their courses. Anyone interested in this development in legal education should contact Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers and consider joining that consortium or, at the least, discussing with professors in the member schools how one can begin the process of helping students maintain their values and ideals, even as they learn to think like lawyers.

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The following post comes to us from Tom Guernsey:

In the early 90s, as an associate dean at the University of Richmond School of Law, I attended the first Conclave on Legal Education held by a state bar association. The conclave brought together leaders in the bench, bar, academy, and bar examiners to discuss the future of educating lawyers. The setting was spectacular, Wintergreen, an upscale ski/golf resort in the western part of Virginia. The setting was perfect: serene, isolated, informal, just what you would want for a serious conversation about the status and future of the education of lawyers among the four major players. I joked later that it was fun. The practitioners dumped on law schools, the law schools dumped on practitioners, both dumped on the bar examiners. Everyone was polite to the judges.

Fifteen years later, in the spring of 2007, having been a dean for 11 of those years, I attended another conclave at an airport hotel in Chicago, organized by the American Bar Association’s Council on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar.

The conversation was depressingly similar. Law schools were not teaching students to practice law; faculty scholarship was impractical; new faculty did not have enough practice experience, yada, yada, yada.

This conversation is still going on and law schools are taking the brunt of the criticism for failing. The reality is, however, that the bench, the bar and the bar examiners are equally to blame for law schools not making the innovative changes needed. Brian Z. Tamanaha’s Failing Law Schools is especially critical, of course, of the faculty and two parts of the bar that regulate legal education. Surprisingly, at least to me, there is scant attention in Failing Law Schools, or anywhere else, to what is one of the biggest impediments to curricular reform – the bar examination and the related matter that state high courts requirements make meaningful curricular reform difficult.

The ABA may accredit  law schools for Department of Education purposes, but it is typically the case that state high courts, separate and apart, that have delegated to the ABA the accrediting function for the purpose of who can take the bar examination. In some state, such as New York, the high court also imposes regulations more strict than the ABA.

The fact is, no matter what else a law school sees as its mission, its students and alums see the primary goal as preparing students to pass the bar examination. I think this is reasonable. What I think is unreasonable is to create bar examination requirements and additional state high court regulations that stifle creativity that everyone seems to be demanding from “failing law schools.”

The most obvious example is the number of subjects tested on the bar exam. I am not arguing that we do away with the bar exam, or substitute some other credentialing process (though I could). My point is simply that given the continuation of the typical bar exam, subject matter coverage is too broad, resulting in serious constraints on meaningful curricular reform.

In New York, 19 subjects are tested on the exam. Because the six multistate topics are also covered on the essay, students must learn both New York law and general principles (or federal rules). For example the multistate tests the Federal Rules of Evidence while the essay portion tests New York evidence law. Students not surprisingly feel the need to take these courses (and in many instances are required to take the courses). At Albany Law School, to cover all of this material requires taking courses that at a minimum total 65 credit hours. In addition, students need to take at least 10 additional credits to cover mandated writing and skills courses. So what are we left with to be creative? Somewhere between 10 and 15 credit hours, depending on how many minutes in excess of the ABA required 58,000 the school requires.

I’m just suggesting that you don’t need 19 subjects (six of which you have to learn twice) to test an applicant’s ability to do doctrinal analysis, especially when it means law schools end up with precious little time to do other things we are criticized for not doing.

 

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I am sitting in Denver on a beautiful sunny Saturday and not wishing I was outside hiking.  That is because the energy, ideas and information being shared and built upon at the Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers (ETL) Conference is givng me hope and optimism about the way out of the “crisis” in  legal education.

For those of you who are thinking, what is ETL?  Basically, the University of Denver’s Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System has the mission of advancing the civil justice system so it is a more accessible, efficient and accountable system.    One of their projects is Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers (ETL)  http://EducatingTomorrowsLawyers.du.edu .  ETL was  launched in august of 2011 and intends to “leverage the Carnegie model … to align legal education  with the evolving needs of the profession by providing a supported platform for shared learning, experimentation, ongoing measurement, and collective implementation.”   ETL fills a  vacuum for those of us who have attempted to implement the 2007 initiatives of Best Practices and Carnegie and have been faced with questions such as : What data is available to guide decisionmaking? Are there models out there? Can groups of law schools provide financial and structural support for collaboration and sharing of ideas?

This weekend’s conference focused on  formation of Professional Identity.   DU Law’s David Thomson challenged us on the need to create situations and spaces where that reflection and formation can occur.  He posits that we can’t TEACH another to form THEIR identity but we can design structured experiences in doctrinal courses which engage students in the reflective process from which formation occurs. Bill Henderson of Indiana’s Maurer School of Law tackled head on the structural changes occurring in the legal profession in a historical and data driven analysis which suggests there is indeed opportunity for future employment in the new economy.  However, we need to  expand our conception of legal education and re-prioritize  if we hope to   provide the equip our students with the tools for “making a living” in the new economy.  Daisy Floyd focused participants on how to start (in the first year of law school)  engaging students in a process geared toward the development of practical wisdom and the lifelong pursuit of further professional wisdom.

One interesting reflection: I got the sense that religious and mission-driven schools had less trouble engaging their communities on the issue of formation as an explicit curricular goal.  A knee jerk liberal reaction (of which I have some)  could be that such schools are really just proselytizing  instead of teaching professional secular values.  However, the dialogue and exchange was so rich at the conference that I am leaving with a renewed sense of how important it is for secular schools also  to profess their  intention or mission with respect to value formation and commitment to a curriculum in which students engage  in the practice of acquiring practical wisdom.   Developing practical judgment in an ethical context seems tied to  identifying and reflecting iupon  one’s own moral as well as ethical reactions and also listening to and understanding the reactions of others.

I’d love to hear the thoughts of others who attended and will also note when video or other materials are available from the conference.

UPDATE: Please find the materials for the conference here

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Lippman Unveils Rule Detailing Bar Admission Pro Bono Mandate, New York Law Journal

By Joel Stashenko and Christine Simmons

Details of the new 50-hour pro bono requirement for applicants to the New York bar were unveiled yesterday by Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman.

Specifics of the program announced in May were eagerly awaited by law schools, public interest groups, bar associations and other members of the bar. They were announced by Lippman at a press conference at New York University School of Law.

The first-in-the-nation requirement will take effect immediately for first- and second-year law students, who will have up to 34 months to fulfill the mandate. Current third-years are exempt.

Starting Jan. 1, 2015, every applicant to the bar will be required to fulfill the requirement.

“I firmly believe that this will set the pace in the country,” Lippman said in an interview. “On every level it makes sense, for new lawyers, for the profession as a whole, for the legal services providers, for the judges. So I am really upbeat about it.”

Under the rule, 22 NYCRR §520.16, qualifying pro-bono work must be law-related.

“If you build houses for Habitat for Humanity, that doesn’t count,” Lippman said. “But if you do legal work for a non-profit like Habitat for Humanity, that could count.”

Approved pro bono work includes legal services for people of “limited means”; not-for-profit organizations; individuals or groups seeking to promote access to justice; and public service in the judiciary and state and local governments.

The work must be performed under the supervision of a law school faculty member; an admitted attorney in good standing; or, in the case of a court system clerkship or externship, by a judge or lawyer employed by the court system. Participation in law school clinics for which students receive credit would count.

“We believe the clinics are the best places to get that experience and it would be foolish to ignore the one place where you know you have the supervision that you need in well-organized programs,” Lippman said. “To ignore that, to us, it would have been sheer folly.”

Services may be completed in any state or U.S. territory, the District of Columbia or any foreign country.

“It is logistically too difficult to require everyone to come into New York and to mandate them to do it here,” Lippman said.

Recommendations for the operation of the new requirement were developed by an advisory committee chaired by Court of Appeals Judge Victoria Graffeo and Alan Levine, a partner at Cooley.

‘User-Friendly’ Requirement

While most of the required pro bono work entails civil legal services, Lippman said donating time to providers of criminal legal services would be acceptable.

“We didn’t want to have a plan that raised tremendous obstacles,” he said. “We wanted to make it user-friendly while keeping with the purpose of this, which is to close the justice gap in New York.”

Hannah Arterian, the dean of Syracuse University College of Law, who was not at the press conference, said the requirement is likely to create more work for law schools who will be expected to expand clinics and other pro bono programs.

“Given what is on everybody’s plate and pressures that law schools are under with respect to the tuition issues, this is a whole other level of responsibility that the law schools have to take on,” she said.

Lippman said one reason why the requirement is not applicable to third-year students is to give the schools “a little bit of time to make sure the opportunities were there.”

Anthony Crowell, dean of New York Law School, announced yesterday that his school has created a new Pro Bono Initiative to put New York Law’s clinical and experiential learning programs in line with the new mandate.

“Expanding clinical and experiential opportunities has been a priority of mine since joining the law school,” Crowell said in a statement. “Our new Pro Bono Initiative provides NYLS with an excellent opportunity to showcase its ability to be nimble and build best-in-class programs to further the goals of access to justice as we train the next generation of lawyers.”

Steven Banks, attorney-in-chief of the Legal Aid Society of New York City, said at the press conference that “a whole crew of people” at his agency were waiting to manage participants in the program.

“Is it going to be perfect? Probably not,” he said, adding, “We’re going to proceed and try to make a difference in our clients’ lives.”

William Kransdorf, director of the NYC Bankruptcy Assistance Project at Legal Services NYC, said the requirement will not create additional burdens for his group, but he predicts it might for other legal services providers.

“Very commonly the lawyer who wants to give pro bono time needs training to be able to do something useful. So people who want to provide these pro bono opportunities are often scrambling to provide training, supervision and in this case they now need to provide certification of hours,” he said.

He said if the 50 hours are spread out during three years, around 16.5 hours a year, it may not be enough, considering the time spent on supervising and training.

“You’ve got to look at how much time is spent supporting that pro bono work,” he said.

Two law students who spoke at the press conference praised the new requirement. But another had some concerns.

Jacob van de Velden, an L.L.M student at NYU Law, asked if a student-driven mediation program, in which students report to other students on their work, would qualify.

Levine said it would not.

“What you’ll find is the law schools that have student-driven programs will be connecting law professors or adjunct professors to those programs in order to provide the level of supervision that will comply with the rule,” Levine said.

New York City Corporation Counsel Michael Cardozo Corporation counsel said yesterday in a statement: “I am very pleased that in Judge Lippman’s commendable continuing efforts to encourage pro bono work, he has recognized that ‘pro bono service’ should be broadly defined to include work at government law offices. Given the difficult economic realities faced by municipalities, pro bono law students working for the government can make a big difference, while at the same time gaining valuable hands-on experience.”

Benefit to New York

About one-third of the 10,000 new lawyers admitted in New York each year are educated in one of the state’s 15 law schools; another one-third in law schools outside the state; and one-third come from outside the United States, according to the advisory committee’s report.

The requirement will not apply to the approximately 160,000 lawyers the American Bar Association said are already admitted in the state. It also does not apply to lawyers seeking admission through motion who are already admitted in another state and do not take New York’s bar exam.

The rules expressly prohibit partisan political activities.

It is estimated that civil legal services providers in New York turn away as many as eight of every nine people seeking their assistance due to a lack of resources, according to a task force on legal aid formed by Lippman.

Even with the allowances for out-of-state pro bono work, programs in New York will abe the biggest beneficiaries of the new plan, Lippman predicted in an interview.

“I think the vast majority of it will be done in New York,” he said. “So many of the students are New Yorkers or are in New York law schools. So many of the kids who are residents and who go to out-of-state schools want to work here so they come back each year.”

The New York State Bar Association did not take an official position on the requirement.

Seymour James Jr., president of the state bar, said in a statement that the new requirement will benefit low-income New Yorkers by making more legal services available to them while also giving law students practical experience and an appreciation for “doing the public good.”

James said that since the new requirement will demand a coordinated effort by law schools, legal services providers, the court system and the students themselves, he was pleased the plan will not be fully implemented until 2015. He also praised Lippman for giving prospective lawyers flexibility by allowing them to fulfill the new mandate with pro bono programs in other states and territories and foreign countries.

Lippman said the bar has been “generally supportive” of his initiative, but he acknowledged that some members “were worried that the rules could be a harbinger of the future,” when a pro bono requirement would be imposed on practicing lawyers.

Lippman said New York lawyers already do their share of pro bono, donating more than 2 million hours providing legal services to the poor. He said he opposes mandating pro bono participation.

Mandatory pro bono “is difficult, if not impossible, logistically because of all the many kinds of lawyers in New York, and some of them are just getting by,” Lippman said. “To me, this is the best guarantee against mandatory pro bono because you are instilling that culture in a new generation of lawyers. They will have it from Day One.”

Several members of the judiciary attended yesterday’s press conference, such as Bronx Supreme Court Justice Douglas McKeon.

While not all the mechanics of the program have been worked out, McKeon said in an interview, the requirement is needed.

“The significant part of this morning is that we now consider a legal education as one that embraces and includes programs that bring the justice system alive to those who would ordinarily be without legal representation,” he said.

The particulars of the new rule were approved Sept. 13 by the Court of Appeals, as well as by the court system’s Joint Administrative Board.

Lippman first revealed his intention to institute a pro bono requirement during his State of the Judiciary address in May (NYLJ, May 2).

Applicants to the bar after Jan. 1, 2015, must file an affidavit of compliance demonstrating that they have met the pro bono requirement.

It will be the responsibility of the character and fitness committees within the Appellate Division to verify that applicants have met the requirements, Lippman said at the press conference.

For questions on the new requirement, contact ProBonoRule@nycourts.gov or 1-855-227-5482.

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As a generally optimistic person, I avoided using terms like the “lost generation” for law grads since 2008 because it seemed such a defeatist term.   In addition, I thought I started to see some signs of employers being more partriotic and brave by embracing opportunities to hire my students and former students.   However, an August ABA Journal article gave me  pause.  What do you think?

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