1. Mike - September 28, 2009 at 5:30 pm

   Yet many law professors resist curriculum reform. Students are graduating without an employer to train them. What are these law grads supposed to do? Most are clueless – no thanks to 3 years of legal education.

2. dave hoffman - September 28, 2009 at 6:00 pm

   Mike
   I know very few professors that “resist” curricular reform. The question is what kind, and what we ought to give up when we insert new classes/techniques into the classroom.

   Your comment was a little unclear whether you think we ought to be teaching new grads how to develop their own legal practice, or (the more traditional claim) that we should teach more professional skills? If the latter, which substantive classes do you think you took that were disposable?

3. A.J. Sutter - September 28, 2009 at 6:53 pm

   Wow, indeed. I had done some temp paralegal work in the 1970s, and a bit of contract work in the 1990s, but my experiences were very, very different (and profitable). I also recommend that those readers who are profs follow some of the links in the posts and see the “your own choices are to blame” rhetoric that’s aimed at your former students. Consider transposing the same arguments to immigrant laborers who are exploited: exploitation is justifiable because they were losers who couldn’t make it in their home countries, they chose to come to the States, and, after all, they could have chosen to open up fruit stands instead of working for someone else. Is that acceptable these days?

   I’m surprised that apparently none of those affected has thought to unionize temp lawyers. I think that might be a worthy project. Here in Japan, even homeless temporary factory laborers have unionized (with some help from left-leaning university grads).

   A friend of mine who’s a senior bankruptcy partner at a moderately big firm (70’s-vintage law school grad) told me recently that Law and Economics didn’t have any relevance to his practice, other than the predilections of a judge here and there. But considering that many managing partners and litigation partners were taught in the 1980s and 1990s, the exploitation of temp attorneys might be the real intellectual fruit of the L&E movement. (Again, see some of the comments to the post linked above, with their compliant acceptance of economic rationality and globalziation as justification.) Perhaps the ethos many law students have learned during the last couple of decades has been weighted too much toward economics and not enough toward justice.

4. Mike - September 28, 2009 at 9:15 pm

   If the latter, which substantive classes do you think you took that were disposable?

   It is not the classes so much as what is taught. There is a nearly 30-comment post discussing, e.g., the time spent on non-practice Civ Pro subjects like Erie and personal jurisdiction. Everyone concedes that those issues are non-issues in real life. How many weeks, however, are wasted discussing those non-issues?

   Contracts is a valuable class. Except — I never read a contract during an entire year of Contracts. In Criminal Law, I never read an indictment or information. In Criminal Procedure, I never saw a suppression motion. Law is taught as free-floating abstractions.

   There should also be 1 year of upper-division Legal Research & Writing. These 2L LR&W classes should be devoted to legal skills like drafting a complaint; writing responsive motions; preserving issues for appeal; writing an appellate brief. Moot Court is simply an exercise in writing about the sexy con law issue of the day. Not especially valuable.

   With even some minor tweaks, a law grad will have actually seen legal documents; have some clue what is going on; and will be less likely to annoy people with stupid questions like, “What’s a motion for summary judgment?”

5. dave hoffman - September 29, 2009 at 10:47 am

   I’m really surprised that you finished a class in contracts without seeing a contract — at the very least, the one one the final? I can’t speak for civ pro, although I 100% disagree that PJ isn’t a live issue in real life. My first day as a district court clerk we dealt with PJ, and there was at least one Erie problem in the year. (As a commercial litigator, these issues are more rare, to be sure.)

6. dave hoffman - September 29, 2009 at 10:55 am

   Reading deeper into that blog, incidentally, I get a sense that the posters have two main villains: law schools for not warning/teaching them appropriately; and the ABA for permitting outsourcing. In other words: more and better guild walls, please!

7. Relatively Recent Grad - September 29, 2009 at 2:31 pm

   Mike, gotta agree with you. Law schools should add some reality to their syllabus and stop using a teaching method that’s a 120 years old.

8. Mike - September 29, 2009 at 5:40 pm

   I get a sense that the posters have two main villains: law schools for not warning/teaching them appropriately;

   I’ve read that blog before, and the guy’s ABA article. It’s hard for me to feel sorry for a white-collar worker – even if the work sucks. I’ve done manual labor, and would choose the drudgery of document review over digging ditches. Your life might feel pointless as a worker drone; that beats the agony and fat fingers of a life of manual labor.

   Still, employment and salary stats are exaggerated. Full disclosure should be the norm.

   PJ isn’t a live issue in real life.

   Sure, it comes up – as many legal issues do. But not nearly enough to warrant the attention paid to it. In law school, time is scarce. Pay more attention to the issues that matter. My Civ Pro professor wants to turn PJ into a 4-to-6week Con Law Lite course. Silliness.

9. Dave Hoffman - September 29, 2009 at 5:53 pm

   Mike,
   I agree 100%: employment and salary stats are reported in a misleading way. Full disclosure should be mandated. (Though I think it’s easy to discount how hard some of that information is to collect once a person graduates).

10. MJ - September 29, 2009 at 7:18 pm

    Prof. Hoffman,
    At least as of a few years ago, we never saw a real contract in your class until the final (maybe- the exam’s a bit of a haze now). I believe your finals only had a few terms excerpted from a contract to analyze. Either way, your point about seeing a contract for the first time on an exam is not a defense against complaints about the lack of practical experience in law school.

    AJ,
    Contract attorneys have tried to unionize. The result is that they get blacklisted. Especially at a time like this when the temp market is being flooded by new attorneys and laid off ones, projects are few, and the average hourly wage is dropping, I can’t see anyone in the temp market wanting to take the risk.

11. Dave Hoffman - September 29, 2009 at 7:21 pm

    MJ: Hazy indeed! I ordinarily teach Baby M the first week of class, and distribute the actual contract from that case on BB.

12. Dave Hoffman - September 29, 2009 at 7:31 pm

    MJ – though you are right that law schools should (and do) teach contract drafting and should (and do) teach courses in how to take and defend depositions. It’s a little bit different to say (which I don’t think you aren’t saying) that contract drafting ought to be taught in the first year, or that the civil procedure class ought to geared entirely to people who are going to be filing complaints for a living. The question, as always, is what you give up to get that great stuff.

13. MJ - September 30, 2009 at 3:53 am

    Prof. Hoffman,
    Indeed, I wasn’t really criticizing the curriculum. When I look at the problems in the industry today, I don’t think the curriculum is the problem since there are many avenues available to learn the skills, such as skills courses and internships.

    My concern is the high cost of law school. Previously, the thinking was that if it took a while to find a job, there was always doc review/ temp work available to pay the bills (and the caution that you shouldn’t do it for too long). Now, however, temp work is in no way assured. I think the first year out of law school is particularly tough right now if you’re not employed by the bar exam. The new attorneys are getting hit with loan repayment, bar dues (which don’t care that you’re barely employed or unemployed), and networking/ job hunting costs. Yes, these costs are standard, but are aggravating when trying to pay rent by working in the highly unpredictable temp market where wages are still dropping and you might go weeks before finding a project.

14. John Steele - September 30, 2009 at 9:55 am

    Dave says, “The question, as always, is what you give up to get that great stuff.” As I suggested in a comment to an earlier post here, we might want to reformat that question to, “Who decides what you give up to get that great stuff?”

    Some possibilities . . . . (1) Students select their probable courses over the next 3 semesters and the school administration meets the projected need. If the students’ choices don’t match what the profs would prefer to teach, students prevail. (2) Students’ elected representatives, armed with polling data, meet with the faculty curriculum committee and hammer out an agreed-upon curriculum for the next several semesters. (3) A committee of practicing alums, sitting judges, profs, and students look at student demand data, assess industry trends, and choose a curriculum. (4) Faculty members choose what they want to teach, subject to some arm-twisting by the assistant Deans so that 1L and basic courses are covered, and if the profs’ choices don’t match student demand, profs prevail.

15. James Grimmelmann - September 30, 2009 at 10:14 am

    I’m generally a fan of providing courses to meet student need, rather than professorial desire, but I do fear that if the process is wholly driven by expressed demand, you end up with four sections of Sports Law and none of Conflicts of Law or Remedies.

16. John Steele - September 30, 2009 at 11:34 am

    My guess is that students listen to reason. They have lots of incentives to choose carefully, and if profs, deans, lawyers, and judges provide thoughtful suggestions I’d expect the students to choose pretty wisely. If there were a panel at the school and sitting judges and law firm partners strongly suggested Remedies for students heading into litigation, I’d imagine you’d have plenty of takers.

    Of course, we won’t know if there is a gap between demand and supply, and won’t know how to think about that gap, if we don’t systematically ask the students to plan their ideal next few semesters carte blanche, without regard to the current line-up of courses and typical waitlists.

17. John Steele - September 30, 2009 at 11:39 am

    I should have also answered by saying that we might also criticize the profs choices (e.g., four sections of jurisprudence and/or critical studies, with just one heavily waitlisted section of depo/interviewing technique), but shouldn’t do so until we’ve gathered the data to see if there is a gap and if so where the gap is. That is, criticizing a projected misjudgment by students isn’t grounds to validate the current line-up of courses or to decline gathering good data about the gap.

18. James Grimmelmann - September 30, 2009 at 12:19 pm

    Students do listen to reason; the reasons they listen to are mostly those of older students at the same law school. 1Ls sign up for classes that 2Ls tell them to take because they’re “on the bar.” (Sometimes they’re not.) Law schools don’t do a great job, by and large, of helping students figure out what courses will be useful for them.

19. John Steele - September 30, 2009 at 12:55 pm

    James,

    then by all means let’s get them the info they need. they ought to hear from profs, deans, lawyers, and judges. my sense is that the bursting bubble is still just arriving at the law schools, and that this sort of project — both giving students info and letting students have far greater say over curriculum — will be inevitable (if not long overdue).

20. James Grimmelmann - September 30, 2009 at 2:12 pm

    Agreed. One culprit is decentralization; if the law school doesn’t recommend courses, it’s hard for professors to get angry that their favorite wasn’t recommended. Another is the lack of contact with practicing lawyers; the more of them that a school brings in, the more rooted-in-practice perspectives students will have. And a third is that students, being students, trust other students, which creates an echo chamber.

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