'Innovation' redux
Here is the “innovative curriculum” at the new UC Irvine Law School. It’s not really very innovative, even though it has different names for the courses, but it does scrap the traditional curriculum and try something different. One thing that looks interesting about this curriculum is that it seems to repeat the what-do-you-think-and-how-do-you-feel-about-this-court-opinion method a little less.
Here's the outline:
FALL SEMESTER 2009
Law 507A - Legal Profession I (2 units)
This course, which will be part of both semesters, will teach students legal ethics and professional responsibility. It also will provide instruction in the economics, psychology and sociology of the profession. In this way, it will provide interdisciplinary instruction, which is often so important for the practice of law. This course will include a speaker series in which lawyers from many areas of practice will describe what they do so that students can gain a sense of the different kinds of work the profession offers.
Law 506A - Lawyering Skills I (3 units)
This course, which will be part of both semesters, will focus on teaching skills that all lawyers use, such as fact investigation, interviewing, legal writing and analysis, legal research, negotiation and oral advocacy.
Law 500 - Common Law Analysis: Private Ordering (4 units)
This course will focus primarily on the common law of contracts to teach this method of analysis, in which the law is derived from judicial decisions rather than statutes or the Constitution.
Law 504 - Procedural Analysis (4 units)
This course will use civil procedure as the foundation for teaching students about areas of law in which there are procedural rules, and how analysis and arguments are made in such contexts.
Law 503 - Statutory Analysis (3 units)
This course will use criminal law as a basis for teaching students the methods employed in all areas of law for analyzing statutes.
SPRING SEMESTER 2010
Law 507B - Legal Profession II (2 units)
Continuation of fall semester course.
Law 506B - Lawyering Skills II (3 units)
In the spring semester of this two-semester course, all students will have gained experience in a legal clinic setting, where they will conduct intake interviews of actual clients for the Legal Aid Society of Orange County.
Law 501 - Common Law Analysis: Government Regulation (4 units)
This course will use torts as a way of further examining the common law, and how lawyers reason and develop arguments in this area.
Law 502 - Constitutional Analysis (4 units)
This course will teach students basic areas of constitutional law such as separation of powers, federalism, and individual liberties. It will focus on how constitutional arguments are made, and how courts and lawyers analyze constitutional issues.
Law 505 - International Legal Analysis (3 units)
This course will introduce students to international law and the ways that analyses in this area are similar to and different from analysis in other areas of law.
Is there a place at UH for a student interested in the study but not the practice of law? I read Dean Nimmer's decanal missives and while interesting they are almost always about how well the school is preparing students to practice law (as opposed to learning and thinking about legal theory and issues related to the role and place of law in society).
I enjoyed my three years at the Law Center in the 1980s (well the first two anyways and then began to get bored). But I really never planned to practice law. The best parts were being Articles editor of the Law Review which facilitated reading many fascinating manuscripts and serving as a research assistant for several professors. Anyways, I just wonder if in designing curriculum you think about those students who are there to think about the law in these ways and not necessarily preparing for a trade (I know I should write profession...)
The changes seem to aim at preventing either side--the purely intellectual or the purely practical from getting too much hold. I'm new to this, so probably wrong, but the gestures toward the intellectual go earlier in the curriculum, and we have students who know zip about the field thrashing around in pure theory without many occasional checks until the second semester.
As a way of example, my father was a soldier in the Cold War and he raised me on stories of questioning people caught in strange situations--one guy in a Soviet special force uniform with some sort of advanced body armor, but whose leg got stuck under the Berlin Wall; or a guy with a truckload of battery-operated rabbits trying to get out of Finland. These American soldiers generally had a high school diploma, but many had even less. The training they did receive, mostly scenario driven and all-non-swimmers-to-the-deep-end-please, but the programs produced tough-minded people who through observation and questioning, in the falling snow, with no knowledge of the language determine the guy in the body armor isn't a threat and the guy with the truck full of rabbits is smuggling replacement parts for small arms.
We're talking about difficult, emotionally charged, and sometime very dangerous situations where a particular type of training shows practitioners how to do their job and do it well.
My dad also told me about the after-action reviews they'd always have post-contact. These were the small, objective assessments of what went right, what went wrong, what was suprising, and what could've been different? That's the intellectual side once the participants had a chance to see and feel exactly what they were in for.
It'd be heresy to suggest, so I'll use a fake name, but curriculum revision will take more than just practice skills/traditional model debates, which frankly are less exciting to watch than the last season of Night Court. Big changes in inertial places like universities happen slow, but one could have a worse plan than shaping the future of law education in tandem with the rise of one's own.