Title

"A Suggestion of a Fundamental Nature": Imagining a Legal Education of Electives Taught as Discussion Sections

Abstract

The article offers a proposal for reforming American legal education. Commentary about legal education is rich with sharp criticism of the dominant model for law schools, a set of institutions and pedagogical assumptions that date to the nineteenth-century innovations of Harvard Law School Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell. The picture of modern legal education that emerges from these commentaries is one of missed intellectual opportunities, student disengagement and passivity, hostility to women and minorities, and declining academic rigor. Unfortunately, most of the literature either stops short of prescribing specific solutions or descends into a vague incrementalism, failing to come to a complete reckoning with the extent of the identified problems in law schools still operating within Langdell’s paradigm. Yet, the article argues, no matter how unlikely any particular proposal’s adoption, the legal academy should not shrink from taking steps to reform itself at least as bold as Langdell’s own “big ideas.”

Aiming to improve law student outcomes and invigorate the process of legal education with the intellectual energy that it now tends to lack, the article describes a dramatic alternative to Langdell’s law school. In short, the proposal calls for discarding Langdell’s pedagogy and his architecture in favor of oval wooden tables, uniformly smaller classes of about twelve students, and complete freedom of curricular choice for students during all three years. Recalling the history and practice of discussion section teaching at Phillips Exeter Academy, a high school that has institutionalized deep participatory and collaborative norms into its curriculum, the article proceeds to analyze the benefits and costs of adapting the model to legal education and addresses how such a transformation would impact students, faculty, and the practicing bar.

Disciplines

Law and Society

Date of this Version

August 2004