It has been twenty-five years since Tony Amsterdam observed that we repeat one lesson over and over again in an effort to teach our students how to do the many tasks lawyers need to do. He reminded us that while all lawyers need to parse doctrine, they also need to develop a range of other skills, talents, and habits. More recently, the Carnegie Report has reinforced this insight by observing that legal education today is essentially one-dimensional, effective in addressing the “apprenticeship” of cognitive development but underdeveloped in two other “apprenticeships” essential to professional education – teaching students about the actual practice of law and what it means to be a part of the legal profession. The problem may be even more acute for part-time students, whose competing demands on their time affect their learning and for whom the “traditional,” one-dimensional way of teaching law may not be as effective.
Contemporary research on intelligence, assessment of lawyers, development of expertise, and professional excellence suggests that success in a complex endeavor like lawyering flows from diverse combinations of independent problem-solving abilities that have both cognitive and affective elements and must be developed through different kinds of rigorous work over time. Theories of adult learning suggest that teaching less content, while exploring the stories behind casebook appellate opinions, can help students learn practice skills and professional identity and, at the same time, allow part-time students to engage more thoroughly and learn more effectively, despite those competing demands. This panel will explore these and other ways that we might improve part-time legal education and, simultaneously, begin to improve the under-developed apprenticeships of legal practice skills and professional identity.
Business Meeting at Program Conclusion.