Skip to content

Bricks without Straw: The Sorry State of American Legal Education

Summer 2011

While many law students and recent grads have come to feel that legal education is an expensive waste of time now that the job market for lawyers has collapsed, some seasoned law practitioners have their own concerns about the worth of a legal education. Their concerns, however, relate to product quality rather than product marketability. Newly-minted lawyers don’t seem to write as well as they used to. Other complaints are more nebulous. In a recent edition of The Economist, Cravath, Swaine & Moore’s presiding partner was quoted to the effect that law schools spend too much time and effort teaching students to think like lawyers and not enough inculcating the practical skills of lawyering. He decried “the difference between what law schools teach and what lawyers do.”1He is in good company. Judge Harry T. Edwards’s “The Growing

Continue Reading

Get access to this article, plus the entire archive, by subscribing.

Subscribe