Law Schools and Law Students

Abstract

ONLY a few years ago, some commentators seriously predicted the end of law schools as we now know them. Yet the traditional law school is still with us and in some ways seems stronger than ever. Meanwhile student demands for poverty law and other "relevant" courses have come and gone, and the clinical movement has flooded and is now ebbing. Hysterical outcries against the socratic method and praise for law schools as places where affluent middle-class children might "relate" seem strangely dated now, although the leading articles supporting these positions are at most four years old. It would be wrong, however, to lapse into· a complacent assumption that the reform movement is dead. The demands of the late 60's_ and the early 70's were more strident than their predecessors, but the notion that something is wrong with legal education is scarcely of recent origin. The strident students and faculty members of recent years are successors to fifty years of dissatisfaction with both the structure and the process of legal education as enshrined in the Harvard of Langdell.