on the road to reforming legal education
My posts here, here and here (among others) discuss how law schools today are missing the opportunity to teach key skills practitioners need to build career success and satisfaction. Given my interest in this topic, I was glad to find ambivalent imbroglio's post on student efforts to address, and dialogue about, the current state of legal education. I also came across this recent article weighing in on the subject. It concerns a call for curriculum reform sounded by Pace Law School’s new dean, Stephen Friedman. Recognizing the need for a “powerfully different way of looking at what we're doing as law schools,” Friedman puts forth the “revolutionary notion” of creating happier lawyers by better aligning legal education with “the needs of law firms.” To Friedman, a happy lawyer is a productive lawyer. And newly-minted lawyers will be productive sooner if they’re educated in a trade school mode – that is, if they’re trained to see how the various areas of law they study interface in a given legal matter. I’m all for technical proficiency, but that’s not what breeds happiness in our profession. Nor is it what law schools fail to impart. As law students, we learn how to translate human relations into rules, rights and responsibilities – the three “rs” of legal education. As a result, we’re well-versed in transforming complex situations into a dry set of facts and applicable laws. But, we gain little to no insight into meeting the needs of the people behind the legal matters we take on. Law schools will go a long way towards fostering happier lawyers and a healthier profession if they recognize and teach the human relations skills that are so vital to optimal lawyering.
