On Bill Henderson's thoughts on the life of law schools

Via Jonathan Adler at the VC, I came across this interesting post on how legal education is out of touch with current practicioners' needs. It might serve as a valuable addendum to my series of advice posts on whether libertarians should go to law school.

Like most of what Henderson writes, it's well worth reading. Still, I am not sure I agree entirely. Though I admit that the Archer/Pnin household has a vested interest in the structure of legal academia not changing much. With respect to his first point about the nature and cost of civil litigation, it's really quite... easy... to name people who work on these issues. All the tort reform types; David Bernstein and other people who have written on Daubert; and, really, wide swaths of the law and economics movement appear to be using economic tools to explain why the civil litigation system may be inefficient or excessively expensive.

I suppose "reduce costs" and "improve access" are also in tension; the people that I listed above are mostly right of center types concerned with minimizing costs, whereas there are plenty of left-leaning academics who write extensively about ways of improving access. I'm less familiar with work by the latter, admittedly because of my own biases.

Granted, I am probably far less well read than Henderson on these issues. Still.

Regarding Henderson's rules, I am also skeptical. I am not really a Burkean conservative... except, well, when I am a Burkean conservative, and I fear that I am one when it comes to university education generally and legal education specifically. Most "bold" or "outside the box" thinking attempts that I encountered in my own legal education cratered spectacularly. See, e.g., the Legal Methods course I had to take in first year, which, despite a fantastic professor, was an unfortunate melange of sixth grade Study Skills ("This is how to brief a case, and also, how to use different colored highlighters effectively!") with watered down versions of Jurisprudence and Administrative Law thrown in for good measure. I liked the latter enough that I had the good sense to sign up for real Admin Law with the same prof, from which I actually learned something useful, so I suppose all was not lost. Ditto whatever the professionalism series thing we had to do in first year was called, which involved sitting around awkwardly in small groups, led by faculty we didn't know, discussing our relative willingness to narc on our law school classmates. I am somewhat kinder to my law school's Trial Advocacy course, which was at least sort of fun. But I have at least some interest in litigation, and I imagine I would view the program far less warmly if I'd always thought I wanted to do transactional work. So, given that track record of innovation, I would politely discourage my law school from further attempts to think outside the box.