An opening musing on legal education
posted by Frank Bowman
Well, several days later than planned, here I am with my inaugural post as May’s guest blogger here at Concurring Opinions. Thanks to Gerard for the flattering invitation. This is my first venture as a blogger, so I’m not quite sure I’ll strike the right note. But here goes.
I’ve been thinking a good deal about the structure of American legal education lately. This bout of introspection has been prompted by the national mood of unease in the profession, and more personally, by Missouri’s three-year rollercoaster ride in the US News rankings — from 60-something to 100-something and now back up to 70-something — and by my work as chair of a curriculum committee debating whether we have to reinvent ourselves for our own and our students’ sakes. Here, in short form suitable for the blogosphere, are some of my tentative conclusions:
1) So long as US News rankings remain the primary indicator of institutional quality in the eyes of student consumers, the top 20 or perhaps 30 law schools are at liberty to change or stand pat, as suits them. So long as they continue taking in and spending a lot of money per student on whatever it is they do, the combination of reputational inertia and a US News algorithm in which most of the supposed measures of educational quality are actually proxies for money, these schools will remain on top and free to deliver legal education however they like. Their high ranking will guarantee a constant stream of the statistically best students willing to pay top tuition dollar. The raw intellectual talent of their graduates (regardless of how well or badly they were educated) will guarantee employment of those graduates by the most elite employers. And so the cycle will continue, forever and ever. Amen.
2) This model cannot work for the rest of us. In a generally stagnant economy with a legal market offering fewer jobs at less pay, we cannot continue to compete with each other in what amounts to an endless race to drive up per-student costs. Legislatures will not fund perennial increases for state-supported schools like mine. For both public and private schools, philanthropic funding is not bottomless. And trying to fund our academic arms race with ever-rising tuition is neither economically sustainable nor, frankly, moral.
3) Exacerbating the stress on non-elite institutions is the emerging emphasis on producing more practice-ready graduates. I happen to favor this trend. Indeed, over thirty years ago I wrote my third-year paper at Harvard on how to restructure upper-division legal education to achieve this end. But any serious effort to enhance practice-readiness runs head-on into the economics and sociology of law schools:
a) Increasing practice-readiness requires more training in the skills performed by actual lawyers. This in turn requires either more “experiential learning” (basically various forms of clinical education) or more in-house simulation-based skills training or some combination of both.
b) Skills training, whether experiential or simulated, requires much lower teacher-student ratios than doctrinal courses. Therefore, at least if the law school is to maintain quality control and not simply farm the whole thing out to adjuncts, it is probably more expensive.
c) I say that increasing skills training is “probably” more expensive if we conceive of the additional skills training capacity as an add-on to what we already do, and if we assume that the doctrinal faculty of law schools will continue to do what they now do in the same way they’ve grown accustomed to doing it. In other words, if law schools continue hiring the same number of doctrinal tenure-track faculty with the same set of entering qualifications, give them the same teaching loads, pay them in roughly the same way, and set the same standards for type and quantity of scholarship, then adding the staff and programs required to make graduates more practice-ready will necessarily increase the cost of legal education. And I’ve just argued that the vast majority of law schools can’t keep raising costs.
d) There are only two obvious ways out of this box. Either we abandon the objective of making our graduates more practice-ready or we rethink the role of doctrinal tenure-track faculty.
The first option is not crazy. One could fairly argue that law schools should never have gotten into the skills training business in the first place. What was good enough for Langdell should be good enough for us. Teach ‘em basic legal doctrine and the intellectual skill of legal analysis and leave the rest to the first years of practice. Or, less dogmatically, we’ve added a lot of skills training options over the last three decades (legal writing, clinics, trial advocacy) and what we have is enough.
But if you think we could and should do a better job of preparing our students for legal work, then that requires an uncomfortable self-analysis by the tenured and tenure-track class at the top of the law school hierarchy. As a conversation starter, let me suggest several changes in our comfortable lives that would make law schools better for our students, and for matter, for the legal communities of which law schools are a part:
- Reverse the trend toward competing for faculty by offering ever-lower teaching loads to tenure-track professors. I like working less for more money as well as the next guy, but paying law professors premium salaries in relation to virtually everyone else in the university for teaching 11 or 10 or 9 hours per year is increasingly hard to justify. In the Bizzarro World of US News rankings, this practice makes weird sense because reducing professors’ teaching loads requires hiring more of them, which reduces the student-teacher ratio and increases the overall expenditures per student, which raises a school’s ranking. If, however, one is trying to increase skills training without cripplingly raising costs, an obvious means of doing so is by covering the curriculum with fewer faculty and thus freeing budgetary space for the additional staff required for more skills training.
- Rethink the constellation of preferred qualifications for entry-level tenure-track law professors. Right now, we tend to hire young people with high grades from a handful of elite law schools whose work experience consists of a judicial clerkship and a couple of years at a fancy big-city law firm. With all these youngsters’ potential, in practice, no sensible senior lawyer would entrust them with unsupervised responsibility for any matter of real importance. But law schools confer on them the mantle of wisdom that comes with the title “professor” and not only ask them to educate students about a world they themselves have barely experienced, but also to write authoritative “scholarship” about that world. Because they are surpassingly talented people, newby law professors figure out their jobs, teach well enough (and sometimes brilliantly), and churn out law review articles as required. In a Langdellian model of legal education, this approach to hiring works well enough since the core subject matters are legal doctrine and legal reasoning, subjects those in our hiring pool have self-evidently mastered. And if the legal scholarship produced by professorial rookies is not profound, well, no one is much hurt. But if law schools are reimagined as institutions devoted to producing practice-ready graduates, then the practical inexperience of most of the professoriate becomes a problem. Professors with little real-world experience are ill-suited either to teach skills-rich courses themselves or to supervise or assess the content of such courses taught by others.
- Reconsider the role of “legal scholarship” in American law schools. An immediate (and horrified) objection to the suggestion of increased teaching loads will surely be the decreased time available for scholarship. And the idea of hiring more tenure-track faculty with real practice experience will surely be rejected by those who view exposure to the law in action as an irremediable pollution of the mind of the young scholar. To which I say, “Fiddlesticks!” There is far too much “legal scholarship” now. Most of it is mediocre or worse. Much of its mediocrity stems from the naivete of inexperienced professorial authors. Even if it were far better than it is, the sheer number of law review articles spewed forth each year means that only the tiniest fraction of them will ever be read by anyone other than their author’s immediate relatives or P&T committees. In saying this, I cast no aspersions on the talents of my academic fellows. To the contrary, law schools are brimming with brilliant minds, but the odd conventions of our trade often force them to opine too soon about subjects of which they know relatively little and to channel much of their creative energies into the writing of law review articles — an exercise customarily equal in practical effect to shouting down a well. As a class, law professors should probably write less, not more. If possible, they should write about subjects they have some practical familiarity with. If professors come to the academy without such familiarity, they should find ways to gain it. This means we should hire more people with more real-world experience and encourage those already hired to gain it, not only to assist in producing practice-ready graduates, but in order to improve legal scholarship. And, finally, we should most often write with a conscious view to influencing real-world legal actors.
In short, the move to restructure law schools so their graduates are better prepared to practice presents a fundamental challenge to the existing comfortable world of the tenure-track law professor. I think that is a good thing, one that would make our students and the legal profession a good deal better off. But I imagine others may differ…
Frank Bowman
May 6, 2012 at 5:03 pm
Tags: Legal Education
Posted in: Education, Law Practice, Uncategorized
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Responses (5)
A.J. Sutter - May 7, 2012 at 9:38 am
Great post. Maybe it’s a little too optimistic about a couple of minor points, though.
First, where you say that it’s not a crazy option to teach doctrine and analytical skills, and “leave the rest to the first years of practice,” you forget about the economics of law firms. Clients don’t want to subsidize on-the-job training of associates anymore. And law firms obviously lack the financial competence to know how to absorb those costs themselves (witness the financial whizzes at Dewey), even if they wished to.
Second, this managerial hubris may eventually weaken your premise that grads from the top 20 or 30 schools don’t have to worry — things will catch up with them in either the short term or the long term. When I graduated in 1983, being a big firm partner seemed the obvious road to happiness, and was a lot more accessible than it is now; yet how many folks in our cadre have had their lived upended by the Deweys, Brobecks, Hellers, Thelens etc. etc.
And finally, while hiring more people with real-world experience would be a terrific start, it’s in no way sufficient for improving legal scholarship. At least for transactional practitioners, student-edited law journals simply are not credible. A comprehensive reorganization of the organs of legal scholarship would also be necessary to achieve your goal (though maybe a big step in the right direction could be as simple as giving more weight in tenure decisions to articles published in bar-sponsored journals).
Jeff Lipshaw - May 7, 2012 at 12:23 pm
Yes, nice post.
I haven’t exactly commented, but more like riffed off of this at The Legal Whiteboard.
Doug Richmond - May 7, 2012 at 1:47 pm
You are the rare faculty member with substantial practice experience. Regrettably, law school faculties as a whole will never re-think the constellation of preferred qualifications for entry-level faculty in any material fashion. I do not begrudge law professors their salaries and, in my opinion, the salaries at some schools are too low. As you point out, however, teaching loads are also too light at many schools–and that is before we even get to the value of some of the courses being taught.
Jack - May 8, 2012 at 12:57 am
Professor Bowman has been cited over 1,000 times in articles and dozens of times in state and federal courts. By any measure, his scholarship has been meaningful and influential. For the group of law professors to which Professor Bowman belongs, why would it be socially useful to write less? Whatever might be true of some other profs, his work has nothing to do with shouting down wells. There are many other like him, whether you think it is 15% or 50% of the professoriate. The problem is not that there is too much scholarship, it is there is not enough assurance that every faculty member does a full measure of useful work.
BL1Y - May 9, 2012 at 9:43 am
The solution to the teaching load problem is to base the student:teacher ratio on credit hours taught rather than tenure status.
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