MATTHEW TODD KIEFER: Legal Education Reform: An Analysis of the Current State of America's Legal Education System Post MacCrate. The thesis examines a wide range of legal reports that focus on the current state of the most important part of the continuum, law schools. Legal Education Reform: A Post MacCrate Analysis of the Current State of America's Legal Education System.
As dean of Harvard Law School, Langdell forever influenced the structure and format of the American legal education system. The MacCrate Report was instrumental in understanding the critical structures, guiding principles and policies, and realities of the American legal education continuum.]. The report, titled “Report of the Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Closing the Gap,” is considered one of the most important ABA documents of the past 50 years.
Finally, the MacCrate Report found and recommended in its review of law schools that there is a need for. Martin, et al, Legal Education and Professional Development - The Educational Continuum, Report of the Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Closing the Gap, ABA Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar. The gender composition of the profession has changed just as dramatically as the number of people participating in the profession.
In the 1870s, This section is a summary of the history of the ABA and Christopher Langdell explored in Chapter II. It is the job of the law schools and the bar to carry into the future the importance of the profession's relationship to the American legal system. Lawyers must have knowledge of the nature of legal rules and institutions and the ability to use the tools of legal research.
Being fully informed from start to finish in the pursuit and practice of the legal profession is a must and is not necessarily easy. The MacCrate Report shows that teaching important skills and values is the shared responsibility of practicing law and law schools. The task force is highly critical of traditional bar exams because they do not encourage law schools or students to teach or learn many of the fundamental lawyering skills previously presented in the MacCrate Report.
The task force encourages all levels of the legal education continuum to reevaluate their systems and processes based on the standards and needs outlined in the skills and values section of the report. One such person defending the current education system at law schools is Professor Anthony V of the University of Miami School of Law. In observation three, the report praises the strengths of the case dialogue method of teaching.
Critiques of the Current Law School Teaching System, Alternative Models, and Recommendations for Better Law Schools According to MacCrate.
Critiques of the Current System of Teaching at Law Schools, Alternative Models and Recommendations for Better Law Schools Post-MacCrate
Years after MacCrate: ABA’s Review of the Current State of The Legal Education Continuum (2013)
The same ABA committee once chaired by Robert MacCrate recently published a follow-up report on the state of legal education in the United States 20 years after the release of their original monumental report.146 This new report has a very different and more defensive tone than the original MacCrate report. The report also consistently devalues any criticism of legal education that originates outside the profession. In order to escape the full criticism of the public, the committee has tried to change the responsibility for legal education.
146 The ABA Committee shall be called the "Division of Legal Education and Bar Admission". 147 “Twenty Years After the MacCrate Report: A Review of the Current State of the Legal Education Continuum and the Challenges Facing the Academy, the Bar and the Judiciary.” Committee on. The ABA Committee Report performs a valuable service in summarizing the views and recommendations of several other major reports on legal education.
Further in their report, the ABA committee enumerates the challenges currently facing legal education and the profession. The NYT article questions some of the educational methods law schools use and makes recommendations similar to the Carnegie Report on how to improve the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of legal education. The real ranking of law schools is based on the quality of legal professionals that each law school advertises and the success that law schools have in helping their graduates pass the bar and achieve legal employment.
The upside of this situation, as noted by the ABA committee, is that law schools look at various predictors of potential success in law school, such as work experience and personal characteristics. Nevertheless, they do not excuse the ABA or the AALS or the schools themselves for making positive changes in legal education today. In summary, the ABA Committee believes that law schools are doing quite well in their job of educating future lawyers and that only minor changes should be made.
It is true that law schools today place more emphasis on skills and professional training than they have in many decades, but they can still do much more to better attract, educate and train law students for the profession. More than any other recommendation, this is key to improving the quality of America's law schools. New York: Clinical Legal Education Association, 2, 2007 (hereafter “Stuckey Report” or “Best Practices”) U.S.
