Law Commons^™

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.

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, …

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 …

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 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' …

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 …

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 …

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.

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 Scholar As Advocate, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

Academic freedom in this country has been so closely identified with faculty autonomy that the two terms are often used interchangeably, especially by faculty members who are resisting restraints on their freedom to do as they please. While there may be some dispute as to whether or how far academic freedom protects the autonomy of universities or of students, the autonomy of faculty members seems to lie close to the core of the traditional American conception of academic freedom. As elaborated by the American Association of University Professors, this conception of academic freedom calls for protecting individual faculty members from …

Letter To Judge Harry Edwards, James J. White

Articles

Dear Harry: I write to second your statements concerning the disjunction between legal education and the legal profession and also to quibble with you. By examining the faculty, the curriculum, and the research agenda at Michigan, your school and mine, I hope to illustrate the ways in which you are right and to suggest other ways in which you and your clerk informants may be too pessimistic.