Balkinization  

Monday, December 05, 2011

The Lost Lawyer

Guest Blogger

Bruce Ackerman

Balkinization has been the site of three responses to the New York Times’ harsh critique of modern legal education – all largely apologetic. Come to the modern law school, David Levi and Jason Mazzone tell us, and you will see that the Times’ critique is out-of-date -- proliferating clinics and internships provide precisely the sophisticated practitioner-training that the newspaper is calling for. We live in (almost) the best of all possible worlds.

Sandy Levinson adds a characteristically iconoclastic note by putting Milton Friedman onto his list of intellectual heroes. He suggests that law schools be stripped of their monopoly on bar admission: it should not be necessary “to invest in three years of legal education” before a professional should be licensed to engage in “basic areas” like “uncontested divorces, simple wills, basic landlord-tenant,” among (how many?) others, which don’t require a three year “investment.”

This collective apologia represents a striking confirmation of Tony Kronman’s brilliant Lost Lawyer, and its diagnosis of the decline and fall of the lawyer-statesman ideal in America. My Kronmanian dissent, published as a letter in today’s Times, serves as a counterpoint. The truth is that, even in elite schools, it is astonishingly easy for law students to lose themselves in clinical work and avoid the sustained, and multi-disciplinary, course-work that should be required for the leaders of the next generation. We are adapting all-too-well to the temper of the Times – generating increasing numbers of anti-intellectual lawyers to express the growing anti-intellectualism of American politics.

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