Empirical Research and Legal Educational Reform
Recent years have seen renewed interest in reforming law school education. One source of this renewed energy is the 2007 report issued by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Based on a two-year investigation of the current status of legal education, the Carnegie Report recommended that U.S. law schools change their approach to training lawyers. It contrasted common practices in legal education with educational research about effective teaching methods, and concluded that much could be done to improve law school pedagogy.
At the same time, a number of law schools -- including some of the most visible elite institutions, along with many others -- have altered aspects of their curriculum. Some of these changes attempt to take account of the real-world contexts in which lawyers today must operate. For example, traditional first-year law school training did little to address the role of statutes in legal reasoning, and it almost never considered the way global interconnections affect the practice of law. Similarly, law schools have generally done little systematic teaching about the realities of legal careers. Clinical training in law schools does help to remedy this gap, but it is rarely integrated into the core law school curriculum.
The social sciences have a great deal to contribute on both of these issues -- what makes teaching more effective for students, and what law practice actually looks like. New Legal Realist approaches to legal educational reform involve assessing and incorporating what social science can offer in both arenas. Research both on educational techniques in general, and law school training in particular, can help law professors develop more effective teaching techniques. Social science studies of the legal profession, and of law in action, can inform efforts to make law teaching more relevant to today's world.
CARNEGIE REPORT:
Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law. William M. Sullivan, Anne Colby, Judith Welch Wegner, Lloyd Bond, Lee S. Shulman. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007.
|
