Legal Education and Public Policy: Professional Training in the Public Interest

Abstract

A recurrent problem for all who are interested in implementing policy, the reform of legal education must become ever more urgent in a revolutionary world of cumulative crises and increasing violence. Despite the fact that for six or seven decades responsibility for training new members of the "public profession" of the law has in this country been an almost exclusive monopoly of a new subsidized intellectual elite, professional teachers of law, and despite much recent ferment and agitation among such teachers, little has actually been achieved in refashioning ancient educational practices to serve insistent contemporary needs. No critics have been more articulate in lamenting this failure than the professional law teachers themselves. What they think they have done to legal instruction may be recapitulated as a transition from lectures, to the analysis of appellate opinions, to confusion. Not atypical of the common indictment are the words of one eminent self-critic: "blind, inept, factory-ridden, wasteful, defective, and empty."