Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-25wd4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T15:46:16.564Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Too Little Theory, Too little Practice? Stevens's Law School

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Get access

Abstract

Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Review Essays
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1985 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Feldman, Marc & Feinman, Jay M., Legal Education: Its Cause and Cure, 82 Mich. L. Rev. 914 (1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Chase, Anthony, Lawyering Training in the Age of the Department Store, 78 Nw. U.L. Rev. 893 (1983).Google Scholar

3 Carrington, Paul, Book Review: Law School , 72 Calif. L. Rev. 477 (1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Shreve, Gene R., History of Legal Education, 97 Harv. L. Rev. 597 (1983).Google Scholar

5 Menkel-Meadow, Carrie, Legal Negotiation: A Study of Strategies in Search of a Theory, 1983 A.B.F. Res. J. 905; id., Toward Another View of Legal Negotiation: The Structure of Problem Solving, 31 UCLA L. Rev. 754 (1984).Google Scholar

6 Stevens does not adequately explain how the case method came to be linked to the so-called Socratic method; see p. 53.Google Scholar

7 With all the attention to the bar's regulation of entrance standards as a way of keeping undesirables out, there has been little systematic analysis of why the bar did not and has not taken a more active role in policing bad acts once the “undesirable” has actually demonstrated bad professional work.Google Scholar

8 See, e.g., Jerold Auerbach, Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Richard Abel, Why Does the ABA Promulgate Ethical Rules? 59 Tex. L. Rev. 639 (1981); id., Toward a Political Economy of Lawyers, 1981 Wis. L. Rev. 1117; Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).Google Scholar

9 As they did when they met the author at the 1984 Law and Society Association Annual Meeting, Author Meets the Critics, June 1984, Boston.Google Scholar

10 See, e.g., T. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); Morton White, Social Thought in America, The Revolt Against Formalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961); Bruce Watson & William Tarr, The Social Sciences and American Civilization (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1961); Mary Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalism of American Social Science (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1975).Google Scholar

11 E.g., the labor movement, immigration, progressivism and populism, political corruption, industrialization and the accompanying concentration of wealth, urbanization, racism, sexism, red baiting, and automation and accompanying occupational changes. (Stevens does mention the role of the typewriter in increasing the number of law students as women secretaries replaced male clerks, at 75.) Stevens also could have dealt with the concentration of wealth and the growth of the corporate law firm, both of which have been treated in greater depth by Auerbach, supra note 8.Google Scholar

12 Stevens, only whets the appetite with brief mention of the roles of such notable legal scholars as Pound, Roscoe, Calabresi, Guido, Dworkin, Ronald, and Posner, Richard. The best intellectual histories of law to date are Schlegel's histories of the Legal Realists: John Henry Schlegel, American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science: From the Yale Experience, 28 Buffalo L. Rev. 459 (1980); id., American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science: The Singular Case of Underhill Moore, 29 Buffalo L. Rev. 195 (1981); and his more tongue-in-cheek history of the Critical Legal Studies movement, id., Notes Toward an Intimate, Opinionated and Affectionate History of the Conference on Critical Legal Studies, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 391 (1984). For a discussion of the uses of legal scholarship, see Symposium on Legal Scholarship: Its Nature and Purposes, 90 Yale L.J. 955 (1981).Google Scholar

13 I have some trouble believing the case method was used in quite the same way in all places (see at 57). Might Stevens have added to his presentation by interviewing a few persons who had been students in different eras at different schools for at least some sense of what was actually being taught and by what method?.Google Scholar

14 Savoy, Paul, Towards a New Politics of Legal Education, 79 Yale L.J. 444 (1970); Stone, Alan, Legal Education on the Couch, 85 Harv. L. Rev. 392 (1971); Duncan Kennedy, How the Law School Fails: A Polemic, 1 Yale Rev. Law & Soc. Act. 71 (1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 See, e.g., the comparison of the early apprenticeship system with clinical education (at 24) and early criticisms of the case method juxtaposed with later criticisms (at 120–21).Google Scholar

16 I especially liked, e.g., Robert Stevens, Two Cheers for 1870: The American Law School, in Perspectives in American History, ed. B. Bailyn, 1970); id., Law Schools and Law Students, 59 Va. L. Rev. 551 (1973).Google Scholar

17 See Spiegel, Mark, Theory and Practice in Clinical Legal Education (ms., 1983).Google Scholar

18 See, e.g., Gary Bellow, On Teaching the Teachers: Some Preliminary Reflections on Clinical Education as Methodology, in Clinical Education for the Law Student (New York, 1973); Anthony Amsterdam, Memo to Stanford Faculty (ms., 1976); id., Clinical Legal Education–-A Twenty-first Century Perspective, 34 J. Leg. Educ. 612 (1984).Google Scholar

19 Chase, Anthony, The Harvard Case Method Conceived as Clinical Instruction in Law, 5 Nova L.J. 323 (1981).Google Scholar

20 Compare this to Derek Bok, A Flawed System, Report to the Harvard Board of Overseers (1983).Google Scholar

21 Stevens, at 59, quoting from Report of Committee on Legal Education, 15 ABA Proceedings 317, 323 (1892).Google Scholar

22 See, e.g., ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Report and Recommendations of the Task Force on Lawyer Competency: The Role of the Law Schools (1979); see also Burger Urges Curb on Trial Lawyers Not Fully Trained, N.Y. Times, Nov. 27, 1973, at 1, col. 3.Google Scholar

23 Recent skirmishes on ABA control of accreditation standards foreshadow a possible confrontation in the future. The latest battle resulted in a compromise in the language of accreditation standard 405(e) on tenure standards for clinical faculty. The bar favored mandatory language. The AALS executive committee favored precatory language. The AALS prevailed.Google Scholar

24 Auerbach, supra note 8.Google Scholar

25 Abel, , supra note 8; Abel, Richard, The Rise of Professionalism, 6 (1) Brit. J. L. & Soc'y (1979); Larson, supra note 8.Google Scholar

26 First, Harry, Competition in the Legal Education Industry, 53 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 311 (1978).Google Scholar

27 John P. Heinz & Edward O. Laumann, Chicago Lawyers: The Professions of the Bar (New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Chicago: American Bar Foundation, 1982).Google Scholar

28 See, e.g., Carrington, supra note 3.Google Scholar

29 See p. 191 and the “typical” story of Montana.Google Scholar

30 At last count I have been to more than 50 U.S. law schools for one reason or another. I do not see the same uniformity of curriculum, faculty, or student selection that Stevens describes.Google Scholar

31 Indeed, there is very little in the way of intellectual biography for any of the leading characters in this story.Google Scholar

32 See supra note 12.Google Scholar

33 Stevens, Robert, American Legal Scholarship: Structural Constraints and Intellectual Conceptualism, 33 J. Leg. Educ. 442 (1983).Google Scholar

34 Frank, Jerome, Why Not a Clinical Lawyer-School 81 U. Pa. L. Rev. 908 (1932).Google Scholar

35 See Munger, Frank & Seron, Carroll, Critical Legal Studies Versus Critical Theory: A Comment on Method, 6 Law & Pol'y 257 (1984), for an argument that more empiricism would be useful to the Critical Legal Studies movement, and David Trubek, Where the Action Is: Critical Legal Studies and Empiricism, 36 Stan. L. Rev. 575 (1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 Lasswell, Harold & McDougal, Myres, Legal Education and Public Policy: Professional Training in the Public Interest, 53 Yale L.J. 203 (1943).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 See Schlegel, , supra note 12; Robert Gordon, New Developments in Legal Theory, in D. Kairys, ed., The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).Google Scholar

38 Calabresi's work is described briefly at 272.Google Scholar

39 This is one of Stevens's favorite characterizations of the new legal theories or “neoconceptualisms.” He complains of “monocausal vision” at 272 of the book and makes the same point in a speech to the AALS, cited supra note 33, at 447.Google Scholar

40 Trillin, Calvin, Harvard Law, New Yorker, Mar. 26, 1984, at 53–56.Google Scholar

41 Stevens, at 264, quoting Bergin, Thomas F. Jr., The Law Teacher: A Man Divided Against Himself, 54 Va. L. Rev. 646 (1968)).Google Scholar

42 Stevens cites with approval the substantive treatise scholarship of Williston and Corbin, to name two.Google Scholar

43 Stevens, supra note 33, at 447.Google Scholar

44 Id. at 448.Google Scholar

45 Didion, Joan, The White Album (New York: Pocket Books, 1980).Google Scholar

46 Schon, Donald, The Reflective Practitioner (New York: Basic Books, 1983).Google Scholar

47 Galanter, Marc, Reading the Landscape of Disputes: What We Know and Don't Know (and Think We Know) About Our Allegedly Contentious and Litigious Society, 31 UCLA L. Rev. 4 (1983).Google Scholar

49 Richard E. Nisbett & Lee Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980); Amos Twersky, Daniel Kahneman, & Paul Slovic, Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.Google Scholar

50 See Spiegel, , supra note 17; Bellow, , supra note 18; Amsterdam, supra note 18; and Carrie Menkel-Meadow, The Legacy of Clinical Education: Theories About Lawyering, 29 Cleve. St. L. Rev. 555 (1980).Google Scholar

51 Henry Hart & Albert Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in the Making and Application of Law (Harvard Temp. ed. 1958).Google Scholar

52 See Symposium: Critical Legal Studies, 36 Stan. L. Rev. (1984); Kairys, , supra note 37; Kennedy, Duncan & Klare, Karl, A Bibliography of Critical Legal Studies, 94 Yale L.J. 461 (1984).Google Scholar

53 Kennedy, Duncan, The Structure of Blackstone's Commentaries, 28 Buffalo L. Rev. 205 (1979).Google Scholar

54 Kennedy, Duncan, Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy (Cambridge, Mass.: Afar Press, 1983).Google Scholar

55 Yet another Harvard product, the Michaelman Report of the Harvard Curriculum Study Committee of 1983, attempts to deal with this problem. See also Duncan Kennedy's dissenting report.Google Scholar

56 Those schools that have experimented with unusual continuing education programs that attempt to introduce practitioners to the new developments in law schools have generally met with success. I know of such programs as the Harvard Negotiation Project's summer courses and alternative dispute resolution courses offered by Vermont Law School and the University of Missouri–Columbia, as well as lawyering skills courses offered by such diverse schools as Berkeley, Northwestern, and the University of Alabama.Google Scholar

see also Heineman, Ben W., Law Professors Must Break Out of Ivory Tower, Legal Times, Nov. 14, 1983, for one view that law professors could speak to practitioners by “thinking big” and being “a major source of vision about the kind of society America ought to be in its third century.”Google Scholar