Law Commons^™

Will Legal Education Change Post-2020?, Heather K. Gerken

Michigan Law Review

The famed book review issue of the Michigan Law Review feels like a reminder of better days. As this issue goes to print, a shocking 554,103 people have died of COVID-19 in the United States alone, the country seems to have begun a long-overdue national reckoning on race, climate change and economic inequality continue to ravage the country, and our Capitol was stormed by insurrectionists with the encouragement of the president of the United States. In the usual year, a scholar would happily pick up this volume and delight in its contents. This year, one marvels at the scholars who …

Affirmative Inaction: A Quantitative Analysis Of Progress Toward “Critical Mass” In U.S. Legal Education, Loren M. Lee

Michigan Law Review

Since 1978, the Supreme Court has recognized diversity as a compelling government interest to uphold the use of affirmative action in higher education. Yet the constitutionality of the practice has been challenged many times. In Grutter v. Bollinger, for example, the Court denied its use in perpetuity and suggested a twenty-five-year time limit for its application in law school admissions. Almost two decades have passed, so where do we stand? This Note’s quantitative analysis of the matriculation of and degrees awarded to Black and Latinx students at twenty-nine accredited law schools across the United States illuminates a stark lack of …

Letting Go Of Old Ideas, William D. Henderson

Michigan Law Review

Two recently published books make the claim that the legal profession has changed (Steven Harper’s The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis) or is changing (Richard Susskind’s Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future). The books are interesting because they discuss the types of changes that are broad, sweeping, and dramatic. In suitable lawyer fashion, both books are unfailingly analytical. They both also argue that the old order is collapsing. The Lawyer Bubble is backward looking and laments the legacy we have squandered, while Tomorrow’s Lawyers is future oriented and offers fairly specific prescriptive advice, particularly to those lawyers entering …

What Ails The Law Schools?, Paul Horwitz

Michigan Law Review

In January 2012, law professors from across the country arrived in Washington, D.C., for the annual conference of the Association of American Law Schools ("AALS"). It was an opportune moment. The legal economy was struggling. Graduates were begging for jobs and struggling with unprecedented levels of debt. The smart talk from the experts was that the legal economy was undergoing a fundamental restructuring. For these and other reasons, law schools were under fire, from both inside and outside of the academy. Judges - including the keynote speaker at the AALS conference himself! - derided legal scholarship as useless. Law school …

Becoming A Legal Scholar, Samuel W. Buell

Michigan Law Review

What does it take to become a law professor? With the publication of Brannon Denning, Marcia McCormick, and Jeffrey Lipshaw's Becoming a Law Professor: A Candidate's Guide, we can now say-as academics do that there is a literature on this question. Previously, much of the advice on this topic consisted of postings to blogs and other websites, which comprise probably the most detailed set of writings law professors have created in that medium. The arrival of a monograph pulls this body of advice together, organizes it, adds substantially to it, and supplies a handy tool for the kit of any …

Against Practice, Anthony V. Alfieri

Michigan Law Review

This Review examines the theory/practice dichotomy in legal education through the prism of the Carnegie Foundation's Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law. Descriptively, it argues that the Foundation's investigation of law school curricular deficiencies in the areas of clinical-lawyer skills, professionalism, and public service overlooks the relevance of critical pedagogies in teaching students how to deal with difference-based identity and how to build cross-cultural community in diverse, multicultural practice settings differentiated by mutable and immutable characteristics such as class, gender, and race. Prescriptively, it argues that the Foundation's remedial call for the curricular integration of clinical lawyer …

A Tribute To Theodore J. St. Antoine, Jeffrey S. Lehman

Michigan Law Review

The University of Michigan Law School was ninety-five years old when Ted St. Antoine first entered Hutchins Hall in 1951. In half as many years, he profoundly influenced the institution, its traditions, and its character. Ted came west to Michigan after studying philosophy and theology at Fordham College in New York City. He came with the proven abilities of a summa cum laude. He came ready to engage what he considered a more practical challenge: he wanted to become a lawyer.

Ted St. Antoine: An Appreciation, Benjamin Aaron

Michigan Law Review

In seeking to encompass the many facets of Ted St. Antoine's complex life and career, one thinks of other persons to whom he can be compared. John Maynard Keynes comes immediately to mind. Although Ted may never attain the worldwide renown and influence of the great British economist, the two men share several significant traits. Like Keynes, St. Antoine is an internationally prominent and respected scholar in his own field. Like him, also, Ted is a bon vivant and a lover of the arts. He can generally be relied upon for information about the best places to eat, especially in …

Professor Theodore J. St. Antoine: A Legendary Figure, Harry T. Edwards

Michigan Law Review

Ted St. Antoine's career as a law professor started more than three decades ago, in 1965, just after I had graduated from the University of Michigan Law School. I never had the good fortune to experience Ted in the classroom and I have always regretted that, for he has been a legendary teacher at the University of Michigan Law School. Indeed, even among those of us who graduated before his arrival at Michigan, Ted quickly gained a reputation as one of the finest classroom teachers ever to deliver a lecture in Hutchins Hall. He has graced his classes with brilliance, …

The Chaotic Pseudotext, Paul F. Campos

Michigan Law Review

This article tries to get away from the traditionally epistemological (and instrumental, and normative) focus of the case method. In what follows, I will introduce two interrelated ideas designed to elucidate the problematic nature of contemporary legal interpretation: the concept of law as a chaotic discourse, and the problem of the legal pseudotext. These ideas will be presented and explored while we undertake a close reading of an appellate court opinion; however, the purpose of this reading is not the traditional one of attempting to determine if the case · is "correctly decided." Rather we will consider various questions that …

The Case For (And Against) Harvard, Robert W. Gordon

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Logic and Experience: The Origin of Modern American Legal Education by William P. LaPiana

Law School: A Survivor's Guide, Benjamin C. Bair

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Law School: A Survivor's Guide by James D. Gordon III

Toil Of The Firestarters, Peter A. Alces

Michigan Law Review

A Review of In the Company of Scholars: The Struggle for the Soul of Higher Education by Julius Getman

Making Elite Lawyers: Visions Of Law At Harvard And Beyond, Daniel A. Cohen

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Making Elite Lawyers: Visions of Law at Harvard and Beyond by Robert Granfield

Poised At The Threshold: Sexual Orientation, Law, And The Law School Curriculum In The Nineties, Jane S. Schacter

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Law by William B. Rubenstein

Students As Teachers, Teachers As Learners, Derrick Bell, Erin Edmonds

Michigan Law Review

Judge Edwards divides his analysis of the cause of the crisis in ethical lawyering into an overview and three parts. The overview and first two parts deal mainly with the role of law schools and legal curriculum in what he views as the deterioration of responsible, capable practitioners. This article takes issue with some of the assumptions, analyses, and conclusions those sections contain. The third part of Edwards' article analyzes the role of law firms in causing that same deterioration. This article agrees with and will elaborate upon that part of Edwards' treatment.

We approach Judge Edwards' article, we hope, …

Plus Ҫa Change, Paul Brest

Michigan Law Review

Harry Edwards and I both finished law school in 1965, and his article presents an occasion to consider how much the legal academy has changed during the intervening years. Animating Judge Edwards' complaints about the contemporary legal academy is a nostalgia for happier days. His images are of decline - of a growing disjunction between the academy and practice, of law schools' abandoning their proper missions, of their movement toward pure theory. My own view is quite different. Except for some noteworthy demographic transformations and a healthy broadening of the academic agenda, legal education has changed little during these almost …

Judge Edwards' Indictment Of "Impractical" Scholars: The Need For A Bill Of Particulars, Sanford Levinson

Michigan Law Review

I can summarize my response as follows: Although Judge Edwards' article certainly seems to be leveling a heartfelt indictment, it lacks a sufficiently precise bill of particulars to know exactly whom he has accused of doing what. Nor does one know exactly what penalty Judge Edwards would exact from the miscreants. Unless he supplies such a bill, his indictment should be dismissed, though, presumably, without prejudice to its reinstatement should he wish to do the hard work of supplying evidence for the charges he set out.

The Growing Disjunction Between Legal Education And The Legal Profession: A Postscript, Harry T. Edwards

Michigan Law Review

In this essay I offer a postscript to "The Growing Disjunction." It is not possible for me to "respond" directly to the other participants in this symposium, because I had no opportunity before publication to read what they have written. I will therefore limit myself to two tasks. First, I will briefly discuss several issues raised in the article. Second, and most important, I wish to share a representative sample of the responses I have received regarding the article. These responses, I think, provide good evidence of the magnitude of the problem that we face.

Pro Bono Legal Work: For The Good Of Not Only The Public, But Also The Lawyer And The Legal Profession, Nadine Strossen

Michigan Law Review

I agree with Judge Edwards that "the lawyer has an ethical obligation to practice public interest law - to represent some poor clients; to advance some causes that he or she believes to be just." I also concur in Judge Edwards' opinion that "[a] person who deploys his or her doctrinal skill without concern for the public interest is merely a good legal technician - not a good lawyer."

Rather than further develop Judge Edwards' theme that lawyers have a professional responsibility to do pro bono work, I will offer another rationale for such work, grounded in professional and individual …

Clerks In The Maze, Pierre Schlag

Michigan Law Review

It must be very difficult to be a judge - particularly an appellate judge. Not only must appellate judges reconcile often incommensurable visions of what law is, what it commands, or what it strives to achieve, but judges must do this largely alone. What little help they have in terms of actual human contact, apart from their clerks, typically takes the form of two or more advocates whose entire raison d'être is to persuade, coax, and manipulate the judge into reaching a predetermined outcome - one which often instantiates or exemplifies only the most tenuous positive connection to the rhetoric …

The Deprofessionalization Of Legal Teaching And Scholarship, Richard A. Posner

Michigan Law Review

The editors have asked me to comment on Judge Edwards' double-barreled blast at legal education and the practice of law. This I am happy to do. It is an important article, stating with refreshing bluntness concerns that are widely felt but have never I think been so forcefully, so arrestingly expressed. Nevertheless I have deep disagreements with it.

The Growth Of Interdisciplinary Research And The Industrial Structure Of The Production Of Legal Ideas: A Reply To Judge Edwards, George L. Priest

Michigan Law Review

This brief response will attempt to repair these various deficiencies, though only in part because of the difficulty of the subject. It will try to explain more fully the rise of interdisciplinary legal research and will sketch the broader structure of the production and dissemination of new ideas about law and the legal system. The relationship between legal education and legal practice implicates an understanding of the "market" for legal ideas. To describe ideas as the subject of a "market," of course, has become conventional. In my view, however, the market metaphor most typically distorts our understanding of the issue, …

A Response From The Visitor From Another Planet, J. Cunyon Gordon

Michigan Law Review

In order to admit, as I do, that the related planets of practice and academia are conjoined, one has to realize, as I have, that the legacy of the heavily doctrinal education Edwards wants to preserve may be precisely the lawyers he upbraids - lawyers who generally do not live, work, and behave ethically (with fairness, compassion, and creativity) in a complex, heterogeneous society. This recognition in turn compels the conclusion I reach that the outsiders - with their challenges to the status quo's values, their upstart theories and innovative pedagogies, and even their Star Trek-and-the-law scholarship - may help …

Lawyers, Scholars, And The "Middle Ground", Robert W. Gordon

Michigan Law Review

The Judge seems to be arguing that both teachers and firm lawyers have been seduced from their real vocation by the fatal attraction of neighboring cultures: the practitioners by the commercial culture of their business clients, the academics by the disciplinary paradigms and prestige of theory in the rest of the university. The "deserted middle ground" is the ground of professional practice - practical, yet also public-minded. Perhaps without straining his thesis too far we could ascribe to Judge Edwards a "republican" view of the legal profession, in which legal scholars, practitioners, judges, legislators, and administrators - despite their separate …

The Disjunction Between Judge Edwards And Professor Priest, Louis H. Pollak

Michigan Law Review

With characteristic vigor, Judge Harry Edwards, in his essay The Growing Disjunction Between Legal Education and the Legal Profession, has censured the law schools and, secondarily, the bar, for what he sees as profoundly disturbing trends pulling academics and practitioners farther and farther apart. Judge Edwards' censure is not proffered off the cuff. He has carefully polled his former law clerks on their perceptions of their law school years and of their postclerkship professional experiences - whether in private practice, in government, or in teaching. In the text and footnotes of his essay, Judge Edwards quotes his law clerks' …

Stewardship, Donald B. Ayer

Michigan Law Review

While I agree with much that Judge Edwards has proposed, I thus submit that his formulations of the problem are partial - a bit like those of the blind men examining different parts of the elephant. The law's current unhappiness is only partly described as that of law schools and practicing lawyers going in different directions, of law practice becoming too commercial, or of law schools failing to serve the needs of the practicing lawyers and judges with practical teaching and scholarship. All of these observations, while correct as far as they go, miss the root of the problem, which …

Commentary On Judge Edwards' "Growing Disjunction Between Legal Education And The Legal Profession", James L. Oakes

Michigan Law Review

Perhaps this little piece should be entitled Grace Notes rather than Commentary because I agree with so much of what Judge Edwards had to say in the Michigan Law Review. When I first read his piece, I have to say I was quite skeptical of his methodology, namely, running a survey past a group of former law clerks who, by virtue of their own super achievement, primarily in so-called elite law schools, quite easily could have ethereal points of view. But in typical Edwardsian fashion, the judge made appropriate disclaimers, and the clerks' comments seemed to me, for the most …

The Mind In The Major American Law School, Lee C. Bollinger

Michigan Law Review

Legal scholarship is significantly, even qualitatively, different from what it was some two or three decades ago. As with any major change in intellectual thought, this one is composed of several strands. The inclusion in the legal academic community of women and minorities has produced, not surprisingly, a distinctive and at times quite critical body of thought and writing. The emergence of the school of thought known as critical legal studies has renewed and extended the legal realist critique of law of the first half of the century. But more than anything else it is the interdisciplinary movement in legal …

Mad Midwifery: Bringing Theory, Doctrine, And Practice To Life, Barbara Bennett Woodhouse

Michigan Law Review

I share Judge Edwards' concern about the health of legal education and about lawyers as a force in society. I differ, however, in defining the sickness and prescribing the cure, at least when it comes to teaching. In my view, we need to integrate, not to dichotomize and polarize further, the practical and the impractical, the doctrinal and the theoretical. His critique, and my intuitive response to it, challenged me to examine and articulate where we disagree, based on what I have learned in my five years in the classroom and what it is I hope to accomplish in my …