Making the Grade

October 20-26, 2014

One law school dean’s thoughts on the future of legal education and the profession 

By Michael Hunter Schwartz

This week, William H. Bowen School of Law Dean Michael Hunter Schwartz guest writes on the future of legal education.

A few years ago, a close friend was interviewing for a job at a law school. The interviewers included faculty members who were familiar with my latest scholarly work.

During the interview, one tenured and influential faculty member asked my friend, “You aren’t going to be using the work of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, are you?” My friend understood that this odd name was a reference to me. (For those of you who have no children of the right age, the professor was comparing me to Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter series, a wizard so evil that the other characters dare not even speak his name.) My friend, either out of courage or foolhardiness, replied that she would indeed be relying, in part, on things she learned from me. To her and to my surprise, she nevertheless got the job. And she recently earned tenure there. 

Unlike Voldemort, I have never killed anyone, and I guess being called He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is better than some possibilities I could imagine. 

The interviewer’s assignment of this label to me reflects two things about me that are relevant to my planned contributions to this column: (1) I am an advocate for change in legal education, and (2) my views make some law teachers very uncomfortable. I must confess that I have been a little obsessed with my efforts to improve my profession. In the past 13 years, my preoccupation has resulted in 10 books, more than a half dozen law review articles and book chapters, and more than 150 presentations at conferences and as an invited speaker at law schools throughout the United States and to law professors from Chile, Germany, Iran, the Republic of Georgia, Taiwan, and Turkey.

Here’s why. Legal education has changed astoundingly little since Christopher Columbus Langdell invented the law school, case-based, Socratic-style questioning method at Harvard in the late 19th century. Meanwhile, our understanding of brain science has exploded, studies of best practices teaching methods and how humans learn now number in the thousands, the legal profession has changed about a half dozen times (and technology promises to accelerate the speed of change), and legal education has received a steady dose of criticism from both insiders and outsiders. Even President Obama has chimed in.

Other fields, of course, have moved past 19th century approaches. I am glad, for example, that my doctors use 21st century surgical methodologies and prescribe 21st century medications. I am enjoying using my 21st century laptop to write this essay. I even appreciate the 21st century proliferation of television channels because it has allowed me to indulge my embarrassing addiction to the various iterations of the “Law and Order” franchise.

In my intermittent contributions to this column, I hope to share my thoughts about law schools and legal education reform, about collaborations between law schools and the bench and bar, and about changes to the profession. Here are a few topics I am planning to explore:

• law schools’ duty to produce balanced, healthy graduates;

• ideas for bench, bar and law school collaborations in areas such as curriculum development, professionalism, and access to justice;

• what law schools do well;

• what law schools should be doing; 

• the duty of law schools, the bench and bar to diversify the profession; 

• how legal educators can contribute to the improvement of the profession by, for example, training lawyers in best practices in supervision, mentoring, feedback, and evaluation; and

• some changes to the profession for which I believe we all should be working.

As this list reflects, not all I will write will be critical. Legal education does many things well, and I came to UALR Bowen because I was convinced that Bowen does things better than most law schools. Thus, as I share my views, you will read a lot of ideas for improving legal education (and for improving our profession), but you will not read an argument that we blow up the model and start over. Nor will I assert that Bowen was anything other than a terrific law school long before I arrived. 

I do hope you read what I have to share and even decide, on occasion, to share your thoughts with me. I even hope I write something that you choose to discuss with your colleagues. If you do so, I won’t care whether you call me by my name, use another label to refer to me, or don’t credit me at all.   

Contact Dean Schwartz at mhschwartz@ualr.edu