Beyond Langdell: Legal Education in a Post-Pandemic World BY BEVERLY PETERSEN JENNISON, ESQ., AND CHRISTOPHER STEVEN JENNISON, ESQ.
As the world deals with the COVID-19 pandemic, legal education institutions, and their Deans and faculty, are currently scrambling to influence where legal education falls in the new world order of academia and life. Being thrown into the realm of electronic lectures, Blackboard exams, and virtual clinics unexpectedly, and now seeing that the tenure of these alternative systems will most likely exceed the short time frame originally anticipated, law schools now must grapple with legal education in a post-pandemic world. An article published in 2013 in The Catholic University Law Review serves as a useful backdrop for the current decision-making and discussion process.1 That article served as a summary of legal education evolution in the United States, from Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell to the present day.2 Most lawyers are familiar with Langdell’s case method for teaching law, even if they did not know he was the one who first propagated it in 1870 at Harvard Law School. Most law schools still subscribe to his method of teaching staple and required courses, referring to it more colloquially as the “Socratic method” due to its emphasis on asking questions to elicit student responses purportedly leading to the ‘correct’ answer.3 The original Beyond Langdell article had a broader purpose, however. Its intent was to focus on the fact that the case method fails to prepare students to be “practice ready” – an essential part of lawyering in today’s world. Using models from medical school, business school, and policy school, the article posited that the legal academy should focus more on training “practice ready” lawyers, fully able to collaborate on cases and projects for their future clients, and less upon the terror-inducing Socratic method still largely employed in its hallowed halls. As noted in the original article, “the ‘case method’ as originally conceived and practiced has enabled generations of students to ‘think like a lawyer’ but it has stifled them in learning how to act and respond like a lawyer to real client situations.”4 To add to this lapse, in the pre-pandemic world, law schools were slow to embrace electronic means of classroom instruction or of conveying information from faculty to students or among students themselves. Even though there were several means in which to conduct group discussions or even classes online,5 few in the legal community utilized these methods prior to March 2020 when the COVID threat emerged. The world has changed. In a post-pandemic world, legal education needs to change, too.6 Any number of suggestions could be offered for that change, but it is useful to examine just a few options that the legal academy should consider now. 1
Beverly Petersen Jennison, Beyond Langdell: Innovation in Legal Education, 62 Cath. U.L. Rev. 643 (2013).
See generally id. at 645 (and accompanying footnotes).
2
The methodology relies upon asking a series of questions based upon reading legal opinions on a particular issue and then having the professor pose hypotheticals related to the subject matter. As lawyers know, often the result in class was a terror-filled few minutes with no answer.
3
Id. at 672.
4
For example, the leading legal research platforms have had platforms for years to convey information to students and even to allow online student-to-student discussion. Additionally, many universities use systems for electronic communication with students, and university-based law schools have had access to those systems for a number of years.
5
While “legal education” is often referenced herein with an eye towards legal educators and legal education institutions, we would be remiss for not also highlighting that legal education accreditors, like the American Bar Association, need to be flexible and grow from the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic.
6
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MSBA.ORG | ISSUE 2 2020
