The Ripple Effect Of ‘Leg-Reg’ on the Study of Legislation & Administrative Law in the Law School Curriculum

Most of the current debates over adding a mandatory legislation-administration course to the law school curriculum rightly focus on the need for and value of such a course, or on what traditional core course(s) the so-called "leg-reg" course might replace. Less often investigated, however-and the subject of this article-is the question of how "leg-reg" might affect preexisting or future upper-level offerings in legislation and administrative law. Also rarely probed is the question of whether the impact on the two fields is the same. Given that legislation is the younger and less-entrenched field, this author has long wondered whether the recently developed upper-level legislation course "survives" leg-reg to the same degree that upper-level administrative law may survive. If it does not, one has to evaluate whether reaching more students through leg-reg is worth what may be lost in the reduction of more complex upper-level offerings. These questions should be of great interest not only to leg-reg's detractors but also to its proponents, who must balance considerations of breadth, i.e., reaching the most students, and depth, i.e., how much can be taught to first-year law students in a course that combines element of two black-letter courses in their own right. Do mandatory leg-reg courses diminish or increase interest in the upper-level legislation and administrative law courses? Does the existence of mandatory leg-reg alter the content or credit hours of the upper-level courses? Do the mandatory courses take needed faculty away from upper-level legislation and administrative law offerings? What portion of leg-reg courses are "leg" and what portion are "reg"?-a question that may determine what topics are left over for upper-level work. This article takes on these questions, reporting the results of a survey of registrars, academic deans and legislation and administrative law professors from the top-ninety-nine law schools' conducted by email over the summer of 2014. Our findings suggest that the addition of leg-reg may have different effects on upper-level legislation than on upper-level administrative law. In the schools surveyed, the traditional upper-level black-letter administrative law course survived leg-reg, but the parallel course in legislation did not. At the same time, both types of courses had "net gains" at the required schools. For administrative law, these gains came through the retention of the upper-level lecture course, but there was a conspicuous absence of other advanced offerings. For legislation, the gains came from new upper-level (but lower-credit) seminar courses and also the addition of leg-reg in schools that had no legislation offerings at all before. In the end, administrative law seemed more firmly entrenched across all schools, leg-reg or not. Every single school that responded has an upper-level administrative law course, compared with about two-thirds for legislation. This is understandable: Administrative law has a longer doctrinal and theoretical pedigree as a field of study But legislation, having established itself as a legal field in its own right, is now entering its second generation, and with it more complexities and nuances are emerging. A critical consideration with respect to leg-reg is thus the potential loss of these new ideas from the law school curriculum.