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. Curriculum Change

The first change law schools need to consider is a curriculum change – and along with that, a shortening of the time that students spend in obtaining their legal degrees.7 There are some basic principles of law all lawyers should be familiar with – but literally, these courses could and should all be taught within the first year of law school. This would more closely emulate the medical school model.8 Why should law schools teach these basic principles of law? Because when a client comes into your office to tell you their story, they do not preface it with “I have a contracts problem.” Practitioners need to first be able to identify the category of their client’s problem in order to help that client.

2. Online Classes

The legal academy has already forded this river – now it’s time to do an assessment of how that could work in real life post-pandemic. Although legal academics bemoaned the loss of the Socratic method when classes switched to online formats in March, the reality is that the classes still went on and presumably students still learned the material that they had to learn. If the required course load was winnowed down, professors could focus on teaching those courses in a more practical, less Socratic way. Notwithstanding ABA accreditors,9 online formats can work with this practical instruction, and in fact, these courses can work synchronously or asynchronously in order to impart information to students which they can then master. It is the knowledge that students need – and the format can follow.

3. More Internships

Like the medical, business and policy school models discussed in Beyond Langdell, learning while doing is an incredibly effective way of teaching students.10 Yes, they need some basic information – and that could be solved as set forth above – but then they need the practical experience of learning how to solve a client’s problems, working with a client, and seeing the outcomes of their efforts. Of course, all of this should be done under some sort of supervision. What this does not require, though, is placing students exclusively in in-house clinics that may or may not reflect their interests for future practice areas. Internships outside of academia, in the real world, are extremely valuable experiences for law students because they are in the real world and students then get real world experiences.11

4. More Practical Exams

The exam system in law schools needs some serious revision. Currently, it requires students to not only issue spot amongst the inserted “red herrings” but to have memorized large amounts of information in order to take an exam and get a decent score. What lawyer in this world relies upon memorized information? She would more likely figure out the area of law and then research the particular problem by analyzing statutes, regulations, cases, administrative decisions, etc. Similar to the Multistate Performance Test (MPT) part of the bar examination, where test takers are provided with a case “file” consisting of a set of facts and applicable law, law school exams could enhance student learning by moving away from memorization. This is so much more like real life in practice and would provide better training.

In short, the post-pandemic world gives the legal academy the opportunity to do more, and to do it better. The legal academy still needs to get it right, and this imposed change to electronic learning and Zoom student conferences and Blackboard discussions should be viewed as a springboard for educational enhancement in the legal academy rather than as a temporary setback in the “fullness” of legal education. The legal academy is ripe for change. It was ripe for change before the pandemic. The pandemic can provide the academy with the ability to move ahead to better serve clients in the real world.

BEVERLY PETERSEN JENNISON is a member of the Maryland and the D.C. bars. She practiced health care administrative litigation and transactional work after graduating from the Columbus School of Law of The Catholic University of America. She has just retired as a Visiting Associate professor from the University of Maryland Carey School of Law after a 25-year career teaching at area law schools.

CHRISTOPHER JENNISON is a member of the Maryland and the D.C. bars. He practices employment and labor defense for the Federal Aviation Administration, in Washington, D.C. He is active in the Maryland State and American Bar Associations, having served as Chair of the MSBA's Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar and as a member of both bars' Board of Governors.