Is it Really Worth Having a Third Year at Law School?

Law schools are required for the structured learning they offer, but that learning needs to be disseminated at a pace in keeping with professional needs of the students, and not inordinately lengthened to suit the 18^th century pace of 21^st century law schools.

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Critics around the country have often criticized the third year at law school to be added burden that does nothing more than delaying students by a year from getting to be lawyers. Against criticisms that the third year is meaningful only for law schools to earn useless tuitions, Nora V. Demleitner, the Dean of Washington and Lee School of Law chose to speak out on the law school’s website.

Opining that the criticisms aimed at law schools for continuing to add a third year in their curricula are misconstrued, the dean of W & L published an article titled “Eliminating Law School’s Third Year Misses the Mark.” And she opens with the observation, “Legal education struggles with one major issue: cost for value provided. But suggestions that doing away with the third year of law school miss the mark.”

She says, “The value provided in that third year internalizes many of the costs previously absorbed by law firms, which used to train young lawyers but are ever less willing to provide that service because of cost pressures.”

Apparently sound logic, only it does not explain why the third year was still needed when law firms were more than willing to train young lawyers, and it also does not explain the cases where big law firms still maintain rigorous re-orienting and training courses for new law graduates.

She also raises other arguments for keeping the third year in law schools that might seem off the mark by themselves.

Given that the avowed purpose of law schools is to help students enter the practice of law, she argues that the third year is beneficial for students who do not want to practice law.

She says in defense of the controversial third year, “It also allows law students who discover that the practice of law does not suit them — in contrast to their previous educational experience — to seek out other non-legal careers that present them with opportunities to use their legal skills, albeit in different environments.”

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I thought that was the job of career offices at universities and career coaches – why waste a year of life and bear a full year of the costs of law school for that?

However, she does make a point, though of questionable value, “In a time where ever more knowledge is available, when navigating society and business are more complicated than ever, when law is more sophisticated and more all-encompassing, decreasing the length of legal education by 33 percent seems curious and ill-advised. If this development is merely based on cost, it misses a major point — the increasing lack of professional training in practice.”

Actually, costs are only a part of the arguments against having a third year, though they do matter greatly. The costs of a third year increase student loans to an extent where the odds become stacked against a new law graduate, thus denying him/her any real ability to choose between alternatives.

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The real arguments are that clinics can never substitute for gaining genuine work-experience at courts and law firms, where the learner is actually there and doing it. The existence of a third year at law school keeps students from early initiation into reality, shortening their productive work-life by an unnecessary year.

There are schools in developing countries like India, which take the W & L School of Law’s argument further to have law courses stretching across five years. If what is done in five years in India, can be done in three years in the U.S., then what took three years in the U.S. in the 20^th century, can be done in two years in the 21^st. The changes in the economy are taking place because businesses and processes are becoming aware of the horrible and overriding need to shake off old work patterns and optimize all resources, including money, time, and social capital. It is this reality that law schools are choosing to ignore from self-serving motives.

Law schools should start considering how to provide their part of value to a would-be-lawyer within two years, rather than three years, for graduating from law schools is only the beginning of starting to learning and understanding law – you do that during professional practice.

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