How Legal Education is Changing

From Glenn Reynolds, at the University of Tennessee College of Law, "Legal Education: It’s Not Like ‘The Paper Chase’ Anymore":

Now more than forty years old, the movie The Paper Chase—and the hit television series that it spun off—still embodies the way many people think of legal education. But for better or worse those days are long gone. Today’s law students have to deal with a world in which legal education is more expensive—and high-paying jobs are scarcer—than they were back then. That’s also putting a lot of pressure on law schools.

The movie opens with an enormous classroom, holding a large number of students anxiously awaiting the arrival of Professor Kingsfield, who proceeds to perform what he calls “brain surgery” using no more than Socratic dialogue and a chalkboard. The students are anxious to make good grades, because with good grades they can get jobs at big law firms on Wall Street and elsewhere, where the pay is high and making partner is a guarantee of lucrative lifetime employment.

Today, most of that has changed...

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