The Goals of Legal Education: A U.S. Practitioner’s Perspective

Abstract

The techniques and content of legal education have not changed much over the years, but the law itself has changed a great deal. There is a clear need for law faculties to rethink their approach to teaching, including students who intend to embark on careers as legal practitioners, and others whose legal studies will take them in other directions. The core of legal training should, in the author’s view, be advocacy: the ability to present a case on behalf of another to a neutral reader or listener in a way intended to inform or to persuade. Obviously, legal education requires mastery of material, but far more emphasis needs to be placed upon how that material came into being, how it relates to other cultural phenomena, and how it can be used going forward. It is, moreover, essential for law teachers to be aware of the demands of globalization: they must expand their horizons to include developments occurring outside their own countries and legal regimes. This article suggests several devices that might serve to broaden law faculty curricula, and to promote the elusive goal of “learning to think like a lawyer” in the contemporary world: a set of skills that should be valuable to all students as they embark on their careers