The Study of Law: More than Just Few Years

There will be a dangerous tendency to impose narrowly professional courses on law schools. These may be of immediate value to employers, but of dubious long range benefit to students. If anything, law schools should give more attention to courses which seek to broaden the perspective of law students.

Or, on what subject matter they're trying to teach:


It is neither possible nor desirable to teach the contents of the great body of statutory law, judicial opinion, and agency ruling that exists in the United States.

This casebook on securities law has been prepared primarily for law school use, but we have been heartened that securities lawyers and Judges have also found it valuable as a reference work.

Again, let's ignore these contradictions, and simply assume that law schools are trying to teach their students what they'll need to be good lawyers. That's a tall order. It includes a couple of different elements, and I'll break them out under separate headings now to keep things clear.

When I started law school, I expected to have an opportunity to take courses that would give me knowledge of the law. But I also thought I'd be learning academic skills, especially research and writing, and that there would be a great need for the study of practical, non-academic matters. I don't remember which practical issues concerned me at the time, but nowadays I see magazines, seminars, books, and other devices to help lawyers deal with such managerial-type topics as how to avoid malpractice suits, how to market your services, and how to set up the books and records for your own law office.

Courses in Law Practice and Academic Skills

I was partly right. Law school did offer many academic courses. But I saw very few practical courses, or courses designed to develop our skills in research and writing.

It's not that those topics are somehow un-important. On the contrary, attorneys who have good interpersonal skills, for example, have been shown to appear more trustworthy and capable to non legal observers. If you graduate from law school without practical skills, you can forget about hanging out a shingle, and you'll be embarrassed to discover that you don't know how to handle ordinary legal problems for your family and friends. Frankly, you won't even be as useful as the "Be Your Own Lawyer" collection in your local public library, or the neighbor who has already gone through a particular kind of legal problem firsthand.

Studies indicate that practicing lawyers wish their law schools had focused more on such academic skills as legal writing and research. In one study, 84 percent of attorneys said that their law school educations were "only fair" or "poor' in giving them "the ability to conduct a law practice on a businesslike basis." Only 40 percent said that law school had been "good" or "excellent" in teaching them "to diagnose clients' problems and needs and to provide counsel."

When discussing the place of skills training and practical courses in legal education, researchers typically make comments like these:

The skills rated by questionnaire respondents as the most important to the practice of law were apparently learned outside law school.

There was substantial criticism of law schools failure even to make their students aware of the importance of some of these competencies to the actual practice of law.

I guess that leaves one possible goal for law school: to give you academic knowledge. We've skipped a lot, but, thank God, at least we've finally figured out what you're supposed to be getting out of law school. Armed with that insight, we must try to believe that there is so much academic knowledge to teach, and the goals of that academic teaching are so clear and so important, that it was worthwhile and even necessary to ignore the practical side.

Mainstream Academic Courses

Before we start to talk about the academic knowledge you get from law school, it's important to realize the limits. The best law libraries have millions of volumes. Legal scholars produce many careful books of new thought each year. You can't expect law school to do more than skate across the surface of the law's academic depths.

It's tough to know how to narrow it down. You can't just teach federal law. There are often 1,000 pages in a volume of federal court decisions, and thousands of those volumes on the shelves. Nor can you simply teach the law of a particular state. Even in minor states, the books of laws and cases can take more than 100 feet of shelf space.

It's hard to teach even an introduction to subject areas in the law. A casebook in constitutional law, for example, might contain as many words as the Bible, and will be much tougher reading. People spend years learning their Bibles, but a two-semester, six unit course covering that casebook will give you the equivalent of a mere six weeks of full time study.
The simple fact is that law school could go for two years or 20 years, and unless you organized it well, you'd still be getting a mere introduction. You can't just sit down in the law library and start reading. You have to have a goal. So here's the question: What academic knowledge is law school trying to impart?

Law schools sometimes say that they're teaching you things you won't appreciate for many years, but that someday you'll look back and thank them. You doubted your parents when they said this kind of thing to you, though, and there's at least as much room to doubt the law schools.

Personally, I think it's a crock. Look at lawyers. What entitles them all to be called "lawyers"? Certainly not something’s that they experience only after long years of labor. The thing that makes them all part of the same profession is that they all started the same way, with law school and the bar exam. After sharing those early experiences, they all go in separate directions. Law schools never could, and never will, have the vaguest idea of what will be useful to all those varieties of attorneys 20 or 40 years from now.

And anyway, if law school doesn't do a good job of training you in the skills you'll need during your early years of practice, the long-term training will be irrelevant. You'll never last that long. Your incompetence will ruin you long before you reach any silver anniversary.