Flourish or Founder: The New Regulatory Regime in Legal Education

I. INTRODUCTIONThere is a new regulatory regime in legal education, a consequence of decades of dissatisfaction with the professional education provided in American law schools. Those of us in the legal academy have a decision to make. Will we resist regulatory reform as we have in the past, making only cosmetic changes to meet the letter of the law, or will we embrace change, recenter student learning, and by doing so revitalize legal education? If we engage and join with the bench and bar we will flourish. If we fail to engage with the reforms or to listen to those outside our walls, we will founder and our students will suffer the consequences.There is a history of critique from the bench and bar, as well as from within the legal academy itself that law schools fail to prepare students for the professional practice of law.1 However the critism has grown more insistent in the past forty years2 and recently spilled over into the public sphere with newspaper articles decrying the failure of law schools to teach "lawyering,"3 blogs warning students away from law school, and books touting one or more failures of the legal academy.4 The major areas of critique are directed at the lack of skills and professionalism education in law schools, the antiquated curriculum, and the limited pedagogical methodologies employed.American legal education is a hybrid institution, born of the legal profession and the modern research university.5 It is an institution long criticized for failing to meet the needs of its graduates, of the profession, and of society.6 In part this is because it is perceived as identifying with and thus favoring one parent-the academy-over and to the detriment of the other-the profession.7 As law schools have become firmly ensconced in the academy, whose coin of the realm is scholarship and research productivity, faculty focus on education for practice and the profession has been radically de-emphasized.8Unfortunately, law schools have fallen away from their university heritage as well, distancing themselves from the educational reforms to improve student learning adopted in undergraduate and professional education. Law schools now find themselves isolated: untethered from the profession, unmoored from higher education, and beset by unrelenting calls to reform. Those seeking reform have become convinced, with reason, that change will not come from within the legal academy.9 While agreeing that law schools are attempting to respond to the new environments in which they find themselves, the American Bar Association (ABA) and others see the academy's response as fragmented, lacking in coordination, and ineffective.10In response to this perceived resistance, outside regulators, be they accrediting bodies or state licensing authorities, are compelling curricular and pedagogical change. Over the past forty years," those with the power to do so have gone from urging law schools to reform to taking concrete steps likely to lead to broad and fundamental changes in legal education in the United States. They have done so primarily to address the accusations that law schools' graduates are neither equipped to practice law nor understand what is required to be a professional.12However, while the regulatory changes focus on improving the practical education and professionalism training law students receive, they also provide an opportunity for reviewing and re-organizing a law school's pedagogical methodologies and curriculum to better prepare students for success in an evolving economic and employment atmosphere. Regardless of an individual school's mission, creating a more intentional and sequenced learning environment will recenter student learning, creating a more effective education program.This Article explores where we as legal educators find ourselves, how we got here, and then posits how we can move forward and flourish rather than founder. I suggest law schools embrace the regulatory changes and attempt to leap ahead of the regulators. …