What Law Schools Need: LEPR Colonies

[Guest post from 2008 New York University School of Law graduate Derek Tokaz]

Eliminate first year Legal Research and Writing ("Lawyering"), and add first year Logic, Ethics, and Professional Responsibility (LEPR), and second year practice-specific Lawyering in its place.

While large lectures with Socratic interrogations may be the most intimidating part of your first year of law school, your Lawyering class may be the most overwhelming (even if it's ungraded, as mine was). In your core subject classes, you're asked only to learn the law, while Lawyering tells you to learn the law and learn how to write at the same time. A great deal of time on first year writing assignments is spent learning legal fundamentals that you'll likely pick up in another class, such as what the elements of a contract are or the requirements for a motion to dismiss. Lawyering in the first year is like giving composition assignments to someone in a foreign language 101 class. They're worthwhile assignments, but wait until the students know some vocabulary and grammar.

Moving Lawyering to the second year would make the assignments more like what students will experience in the real world. They'll have an idea of the general legal landscape, but are doing research in to more specific questions they've not yet encountered.

This leaves a big hole in the first year, and you still need a class with a very small number of students, if only to preserve the sanity of 1Ls (and to help them organize flag football teams). Replace it with Logic, Ethics, and Professional Responsibility.

 Logic is an area in which most law students have had no real training, aside from perhaps one hour of a Kaplan LSAT prep lecture. It's bizarre that law schools are producing people who will form and analyze arguments for a living, but don't even engage in formal logic or analytical philosophy training. How many law students graduate not knowing the difference between a sound argument and a valid one? Or what De Morgan's law is? (I can tell you that the lawyer who wrote my parents' wills didn't.) Undergraduate philosophy programs can teach logic in one semester, and since lawyers won't really need to worry too much about predicate logic or proving theorems using only primitive rules, this can probably be shortened to just half a semester, with the remaining one and a half semesters available for the rest of the material.

The next piece of the class is ethics. Hopefully most people will agree that ethics belongs in law school, but I'll defend its place in this class anyways. The ethics component is here to give students some exposure to forming arguments and writing at a more challenging level. It's specifically a non-legal writing component so that students can focus on their arguments and their writing, without getting bogged down with the law, taking the skills one pant leg at a time.

Then, we move in to professional responsibility. Should be a pretty smooth transition from ethics, but we're now in a legal territory. You have statutes and judicial opinions (or things that look and operate in pretty much the same way), so students will get exposure to doing legal research and making legal arguments. Not as much exposure as they'd get in a traditional Lawyering class, but hopefully enough to make them someone better than completely useless to their first summer employer.

I do realize that I've added a year long class to the law school curriculum, and that consumes a great deal of time that could be spent on electives. Fortunately, the ethics and professional responsibility segments of LEPR will satisfy the professional responsibility requirement, so we get half that time back. Also, having LEPR in the first year may mean that the now-2L Lawyering class can have its hours reduced; mine was 4.5 hours per semester, and it could probably be cut down to 3 hours. Plus, the class will be replacing your last choice elective, not your first, so the harm is minimized; and besides, 2Ls tend to get stiffed in the lottery anyways.

Lastly, moving Lawyering to the second year should come with a major overhaul to that class. Rather than a class that covers a hodgepodge of research and writing topics, schools could offer more specialized classes. Litigation Lawyering, Corporate Lawyering, Family Lawyering, etc. Make each class a semester long, and require students to pick two.

Coming in to their 2L year, students will have some idea of what area they'll want to focus on, and more likely some ideas about what areas they have absolutely no interest in. A student who plans to go in to the corporate department of a law firm isn't particularly well served by dedicating half a semester on an oral argument for a preliminary injunction. Students who have a change of heart after their second summer job, or who simply want more research and writing training, could sign up for more of these classes; no reason they should be exclusively offered to 2Ls (except for the curve).

-Derek Tokaz

Comments

[Leslie Rose]

With no research training, what do you propose students will be doing in their summer jobs after the first year? Law firms no longer have the resources to train students (or new attorneys) and have expressed their lack of interest in doing so.

[Derek Tokaz]

It's not as much research training, not zero research training.

The professional responsibility segment would involve a great deal of research, about the same as a typical lawyering class, but focusing on professional responsibility, rather than a mixed bag of research topics. Also, the earlier segments, where you learn how to form arguments, isn't exactly useless in a law firm setting.

Current lawyering classes (assuming mine wasn't too far from the norm) focus on skills that a first summer student won't be using, such as oral arguments, mediation, negotiation, witness questioning, and client counseling.

The professional responsibility segment of the LEPR class would have enough opportunity to teach students how to use Lexis and West, and how to structure a memo or brief.

You are right that firms (and clients) are less willing to train students. But, that makes this plan even better. Your second summer job is far more important than first summer. With this plan, you're getting most of your skills training in the second year, when you're better able to learn from the class (less stress=more focus), and without a year to forget what you've learned.

[anon]

"With no research training, what do you propose students will be doing in their summer jobs after the first year?"

Are you kidding? You call the westlaw course + two hours of instruction on researching cases "training?"

First of all, Paralegals learn that level of research ability their first day on the job. Students too are writing memos two weeks into the start of their first year.

Second of all the entirety of law school is of no value to firms. I don't hear law firms saying, "Wow I'm glad law school taught these kids so we don't have to." They have to train their associates from scratch.

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Georgetown is currently ofrnfieg some sort of alternative cirriculum in which a great deal of time is spent on legal theory, learning about crits and realists and formalist and whatnot. Obviously I don't go to Georgetown, or I could give you some real information about it.I think it's a little odd, though, that you're proposing to both delay the substantive courss and shorten the program. When will any learning get done?

[Kopmak]

And your second point is aeddrssed at my school; all my classes have student TA's, and although the quality certainly varies, most are quite helpful. My torts TAs are *excellent*. They hold regular office hours, review sessions, and have helped with practice exams as well.

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