The Kelley Institute of Ethics and the Legal Profession at the Michigan State University College of Law has provided a grant to augment the AALS support for speakers from the legal profession and other disciplines.
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