Why attend? Major changes in the legal profession raise important questions about the future of legal education. These changes in the legal profession reflect both long term trends, such as increasing globalization and cross-border practice, advances in technology, and a shift from internal to external sources of regulation and policing of professional misconduct, and recent developments, such as a worldwide economic recession and a global political situation that has heightened both national security and civil liberties concerns. In turn, these changes raise important questions about the future, not only regarding how law will be practiced and what professional skills our students will need, but also how law schools will operate and how professionals dedicated to legal education will teach and otherwise conceive of their missions.
Among the questions these many developments raise: What new or different kinds of training will the law schools of the future need to provide? How can law schools better serve students seeking to develop critical skills in the areas demanded by changes in legal practice, including advanced problem identification and problem solving, entrepreneurism, legal judgment, creativity, and complex case management? How can and should law schools respond to critiques from both practitioners and educators (such as in the Carnegie Foundation report) urging an expansion in the range of cognitive skills addressed through legal education and a broadening of the scope of law school pedagogy beyond traditional methods?
A second set of questions focuses on changes in the legal academy: What innovations are currently underway in law schools to respond to changes taking place in the legal profession and in legal education? How will projected changes in the economics of the legal profession affect law students= priorities and law schools= budgets? Most fundamentally, what could and should members of the legal academy be doing to plan for the future in response to the many changes currently underway and to be expected in the near future in both the legal profession and in legal education?
The 2012 AALS Annual Meeting Workshop will take up these and other related questions. This one-day workshop aims to stimulate thought and the sharing of ideas throughout the legal academy about the many interrelated issues raised by change in both the legal profession and legal education. Participants will have the chance to hear from expert observers and to offer their own ideas, in frank and open exchanges featuring a wide range of perspectives and approaches.
The Workshop will involve a series of discussions organized around two plenary sessions. The first plenary will be held in the morning and is entitled AChanges in the Legal Profession and Regulation.” Featuring experienced observers of the profession, including both practitioners and law professors, this plenary will explore and link together the many facets of change currently underway, addressing topics including developments in large firm practice, public interest practice, legal regulation, legal education, and regulation of legal education. A second plenary, to be held in the afternoon, is entitled “Innovations in Legal Education,” and will focus on legal education and innovations currently underway that respond to the changing conditions of law practice or point the way towards the future of legal education in other respects.
After each plenary session, workshop participants will be invited to choose among a range of concurrent sessions that will explore in more depth particular aspects of the general themes raised by the plenary sessions. These sessions will include both morning and afternoon panel discussions on innovations in teaching, which will feature some invited speakers and some speakers selected from proposals submitted in response to an AALS Request for Proposals (RFP) seeking descriptions of innovative teaching currently taking place. Another panel will focus on innovative work of many kinds currently being done at the intersections among teaching, scholarship and service, and will also include speakers selected through a RFP.
Other concurrent sessions will address topics related to changes in the legal profession, such as globalization, access to justice, technological innovation, innovations in delivery of law and law-related services, and government lawyering, with time reserved for audience discussion. Still other sessions will focus on subjects related to legal education, including the innovations in teaching and scholarship panels already mentioned as well as a session on financing and organizing law schools of the future. Participants especially interested in either "side" of the interrelated subjects of change in the legal profession and change in legal education should find ample choices to pursue the topics of most interest to them during both the morning and afternoon concurrent sessions.