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Law School Examinations, Philip C. Kissam

Vanderbilt Law Review

This Essay explores the values, limits, and adverse effects of our system of law school examinations. Law school examinations encourage or require students to acquire certain knowledge while measuring a kind of knowledge as well. Importantly, this process occurs within a context of political relationships between law schools, law firms, the legal profession, and the state, as well as between law school administrators, faculty, and students. This system of "power/knowledge"relationships constitutes the law school's basic mechanism of self-regulation or, more generally, a mechanism of social control over legal education. In this era of substantial uncertainty about purposes and methods in …