Issue 27(2)
Educating
Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law.
(2007).William
M. Sullivan, Anne Colby, Judith Welch Wegner, Lloyd Bond &
Less S. Shulman. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 240 pp., $40.00,
(hardback). ISBN # 978-0-7879-8261-4
Review
by: John R. Nilsson
Preprofessional
Advising Coordinator, University College
University
of Utah
Educating
Lawyers is the Carnegie Foundation’s
penetrating look at the state of legal education in the United
States and Canada
. The result of an intensive comparative
study of sixteen law schools across the continent, this work is
of interest to all those who will be advising future lawyers and
to those following the interplay between higher education and
the professions. That being said, the work will be most deeply
appreciated by those who have spent some time learning educational
theory and those whose advising caseloads include a substantial
number of law school-bound students.
The book that emerged as the result
of this study concludes that while problems exist in legal education,
there are viable models out there worthy of emulation. Two such
models are mentioned by name: CUNY and NYU. (Readers familiar
with law schools will wish more than these two were mentioned;
the sixteen law schools are never revealed.) CUNY and NYU, while
differing in many institutional regards, are both seen by the
authors as successfully integrating the “cognitive, practical,
and formative apprenticeships in legal education”(p. 58), mainly
by requiring some early clinical coursework where students are
able to learn by working with clients and attorneys in a “real
world” setting.
The authors do a good job in describing
the dialogues which take place between instructors and students
in the sixteen selected law schools, pointing out the pedagogical
strengths and weaknesses inherent in the famous Socratic case-study
method. These dialogues are the best feature of the book and allow
the reader to draw independent conclusions about the educational
impact of the law school on students’ view of the profession of
law, which tends to be case-centered rather than client-centered
and to take a detached view of ethics. Very clearly, “thinking
like a lawyer”(p. 87) emerges from this educational process, but
what does this mean for the legal profession, which is itself
a result of the cumulative student output of these law schools?
Advisors who work with students contemplating
law school would be well-served by having a copy of this book
on their shelf, and reading through one or more of the case-study
dialogues with their student as a means of gauging their student’s
interest in the study of law. This exercise can prove highly engaging
for the student who will enjoy the whirl of this particular brand
of intellectual acrobatics, and illuminating for the student who
will be prompted to reconsider their career choice as a result.
Advisors would also do well to point
out to students that law school may not necessarily teach them
everything they ought to know about being a lawyer. That will
hopefully come as they are mentored by a senior staff member at
their first firm. These insights and others are vital if we are
to do our part in preparing students for a legal education which
will enable them to “uphold the vital values of freedom with equity
and extend these values into situations as yet unknown but continuous
with the best aspirations of our past”(p. 202).
