Chasing the Kardashians

Written by Hazel Weiser

Here’s where I disagree with Professor Tamanaha.  It’s not that SALT has been silent or callous about the rise of student debt.  As Dean Van Cleave so passionately...

A More Practical Approach to Teaching Law

The New York Times recently declared, “American legal education is in crisis.” One cause, the editorial argued, is legal education’s traditional preference for theory over practice: “In 2007, a report by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching explained that law schools have contributed heavily to this crisis by giving ‘only casual attention to teaching students how to use legal thinking in the complexity of actual law practice.’” Widely publicized calls to reform legal education have come from Best Practices; its blog; and other blogs, e.g., “Room for Debate – The Case Against Law School.”

What law do you want to teach?

Judicial vacancies restrict access to the federal courts, make litigation more expensive, and insidiously undermine the credibility of government. And a confirmation process that prevents qualified candidates of an elected president’s party from taking office sways the judiciary further to the right despite an election where voters said civil liberties, clean air, privacy, reproductive rights, social justice, and corporate accountability were important issues for our federal government to maintain and safeguard.

The Alliance for Justice has created a fantastic resource to help educate voters and civic leaders about the state of judicial nominations. The Judicial Selection Project has a running count of vacancies in the district and circuit courts, along with profiles of all of the current nominees. It’s a great lesson in the advise & consent function of the Senate, or at least what can go wrong with it.

Moneyball As a Metaphor for Restructuring Law Schools

I just finished reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis, although I haven’t seen the film yet, which is up for six Oscars on Sunday night. As someone uninterested in sports (except for basketball), I couldn’t quite understand why I was so intrigued by a book about baseball and statistics. And I mean engrossed in this book, reporting like an eager third grader every night at dinner as I delved deeper into the Oakland A’s dugout. Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt in the film, decides to use a different schema for recruiting and retaining ball players during the 2002 baseball season. Breaking all of the rules of what matters about a player’s stats, Oakland’s general manager Billy Beane, with the help of Peter Brand, a Harvard educated math wonk, played by Jonah Hill, methodically holds fast to a new set of statistics to assess the value of any player. This is called sabermetrics. Beane throws out 150 years of baseball wisdom in a single baseball season.

A totally different way of assessing the value of a player, um, that sounds intriguing.

It’s Almost Time to Dream About What We Would Like Law Schools to Look Like— Last Installment on the History of Legal Education

It’s hard to imagine that in 1950, roughly half of the practicing attorneys in the United States were not college educated, but had gone to law school from high school or less. Post World War II brought with it an influx of students, thanks to the GI Bill, and most of those students were men. That wartime anomaly—twenty-five percent of law school students being women—ended quickly. Standardization won out, too, according to Robert Stevens in Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s, (the basis of this series of articles on how law schools developed into what they are today). There was not that much difference in the content of the curriculum offered at a local or regional law school and that offered at Harvard, Yale, or Stanford by the late 1940s.

The ABA and AALS won: four years of college and three years of full time law school was mostly needed to sit for the bar with the noticeable exception of California (and a few other states), which still had state-accredited law schools and an apprenticeship avenue into practice. What did law school look like: large classes, the case method, and no written work apart from a final examination in each course. This was the time when law schools were the cash cows for many universities. There had been some “reform” in the 1950s and 1960s, mainly, introductory law classes, teaching fellows for tutorial help, the introduction of legal skills courses using the problem method, a few specialty seminar classes, and finally, clinical education. The biggest innovation, of course, was the acquiescence that negotiation, drafting, and counseling needed to be taught even if the case method couldn’t be instructive here.