Teaching the Law

Posted by lukegilman

February 9, 2007

On the University of Houston Law Center Faculty Blog Professors Crump & Bush have been debating Cameron Stracher’s recent piece in the Opinion Journal - Meet the Clients: Law schools rarely teach students how to be lawyers.

Stracher uses the recent Brian-Valery-paralegal-posing-as-lawyer debacle and a recent report critical of law school teaching methods to trot out the hoary “law schools don’t teach students how to be lawyers” horse carcass of a debate.

Sigh. I’m tiring of it. Perhaps I’m on the shady side of the bell curve, but I don’t really expect law school to teach me how to be a lawyer. I expect to learn how to lawyer by becoming a lawyer; law school, I hope, will lay the necessary foundation, but is there really an alternative to bootstrapping on the job? I have never yet gotten a degree which on its own qualified me to do something useful, so I don’t really find anything to bemoan in this fact.

I’m also a little skeptical of the assumption that law school actually is all that fixated on intellectual debate. Nearly all the professors I’ve had have been primarily concerned with teaching the law as it’s applied. It’s discussed at a theoretical level to be sure, but it’s theory with a purpose. No feminist-marxist-postcolonial-deconstructive-semiotic mumbo-jumbo yet, thank God. But perhaps I’m deluded and was never meant to be driven to law school in the first place -

By giving students the false idea that being a lawyer is all about intellectual debate, we also drive the wrong students to law school in the first place. The hordes of English majors who fill our classes might think twice if they knew that economics and mathematics–with their emphasis on problem-solving–are the best preparation for a career in law. Flowery prose is seldom valued by an overburdened judiciary.

Silly me. I spent all that time as an English major learning how to write flowery prose, my only goal of my studies to learn how to devise methods of making my prose more florid and baroque. Of course that is the sole purpose and goal of studying the English language. Now I learn I should have majored in math because math is about problem solving and studying English teaches one nothing of problem solving and only how to be flowery. Thou dost protest too much Mr. Cameron “M.F.A. in creative writing” Stracher.

Despite those irksome presumptions, Stracher is right to call for raised expectations in the need for law students to learn practical skills before they are thrust upon unwitting clients. Though I wonder if law schools are really the people to pull this off? I chose a part-time program precisely because I can’t stand academia. I worked full-time throughout undergrad and found the work/school dichotomy to be an immensely enriching and rewarding experience. The same has proven true in law school. Evening students are accepted and valued at Houston; this is not true at very many institutions from what I’ve heard. This gives us the opportunity however, to get a challenging academic education AND practical experience. Many of us work in the same paralegal jobs that gave Valery the wherewithall to pass himself off as a lawyer. Instead of reinventing the wheel, perhaps law schools could simply recognize what’s already going on in their evening programs.

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