Training Lawyers
Interesting op-ed in today’s WSJ arguing (not very controversially, I would imagine) that law schools aren’t really very good at training people to be lawyers. I mostly agree, particularly with statements like:
By reading about the law rather than engaging in it, students end up with the misperception that lawyers spend most of their time debating the niceties of the Rule Against Perpetuities rather than sorting out the messy, somewhat anarchic version of the truth that judges and courts care about.
and
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.
On the other hand, I think that, without the intellectual debate in law school, new lawyers would lack some very basic argumentation skills. While its true that law involves sorting out messy versions of truth, it also involves making the sorts of finely honed doctrinal arguments that the case method teaches. Certainly the current balance, particularly at elite law schools, is skewed very much towards doctrine. But I’m not sure that skewing things in the other direction would improve the situation. I see lawyers every day who have an argument to make, but don’t know how to marshall the existing caselaw to support it.
This is very much apropos of my earlier post on the difference between district courts and appellate courts. Appellate courts are very doctrinally oriented and well-suited to the skills taught at top law schools. District courts are terminally complicated and provide a crash course in “sorting out the messy, somewhat anarchic version of the truth.”
Hat Tip: How Appealing
