Remaking Lawyering: From A Profession To A Trade?
The legal profession appears determined to avoid real change by focusing on diversity over intellectual rigor at law schools.
* Judiciary officials in several states on 11/28/23 announced the formation of a Committee on Legal Education and Admissions Reform to conduct an 18-month study on the state of legal education and bar admission processes in the United States. The committee acknowledges the legal profession is failing to meet the public’s needs, resulting in an access-to-justice gap that undermines public confidence in our legal system. The chair is New Hampshire Chief Justice Gordon J. MacDonald.
When I attended law school a couple of decades ago, I “graded on” to law review, an elite association of students who earned the highest grades in their first year class.
A law review is an academic journal that contains articles by scholars on legal topics, such as an analysis of a new U.S. Supreme Court decision or the impact of a state law development. These journals host a marketplace of ideas about the law. They are distributed to law school libraries around the country.
If you can’t “grade on” to law review, applicants can still attain membership by submitting a winning writing sample.
My duties on a law review were mundane and involved substantial unpaid work editing article submissions by law professors from around the country. I also wrote a law review article.
I was reminded of this interlude when I read about a lawsuit filed by a first -year law student at New York University who claims the NYU Law Review is flouting merit by “using race and sex preferences to select its members and editors.”
U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero of New York recently granted the plaintiff, a white male, the right to sue NYU without disclosing his identity.
The push for diversity on law reviews is symptomatic of a trend to make the legal profession the equivalent of a trade, like horseshoeing or chimney sweeping.
Starting in May, law students in Oregon will no longer have to pass a state bar exam to practice law in Oregon. Instead of the traditional standardized test, students will have the option to partake in the Supervised Practice Portfolio Examination. They can submit a “post-graduation” portfolio of legal work to the Oregon State Board of Bar Examiners, which would determine whether it is sufficient for admission to the bar. California is considering a similar measure.
And the American Bar Association’s legal education arm is considering extending accreditation to fully online law schools, marking a major shift from its longstanding prioritization of in-person teaching. This would allow would-be lawyers to get a degree without enduring the Socratic method of questioning by law professors or presumably even leaving their bedrooms.
Missing the Point?
There is a dire need for change in the legal profession. Most Americans cannot afford a lawyer and must go it alone in facing life-changing legal disputes, such as divorce and child custody. But this has little to do with law review membership diversity and the bar exam.
Stanford Law’s Center on the Legal Profession recently blamed state bar associations for blocking innovation in the delivery of legal services to preserve the profits of big state law firms.
(cont.)
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