This Side of Chaos

U.S. legal education has come a long way since the days when Patrick Henry could hang out his shingle in Hanover, Va. after only six weeks of studying law. But has it come far enough? Are law schools really doing their job? Last week, in a special report sponsored by the American Bar Association (Legal Education in the United States] Bancroft-Whitney; $3.50), Dean Albert J. Harno of the University of Illinois law school answered no: legal education is suffering from the same symptoms of constriction and indigestion as is U.S. education in general.

The trouble, says Harno, is that the profession has never made up its mind what the training of a lawyer should be. Instead of worrying about the quality of education, it has concerned itself mostly with quantity--"so many years of pre-legal study, so many of law study, a specified number of books in a law-school library . . . , etc.'' But even these standards are not always met. Of the 164 law schools operating in 1951, 40 failed to meet the approval of the American Bar Association, yet these had about one-fifth of the nation's law students.

Confusion & Patchwork. As for the approved schools, they are still floundering in confusion: they have never even decided what their applicants should know. "Prelegal and legal education are in fact divorced from each other . . . There is no attempt at synthesis . . . Anyone familiar with the huge offerings of fragmentized courses of a university must realize that the student is likely to come through this ordeal with an education that is little more than a patchwork."

In the law school, the main device for legal education is the study of cases, but "case skills," says Harno, are only a part of the knowledge a modern lawyer needs, "The lawyer is no longer primarily an advocate . . . Only a relative few of the profession now devote themselves to court procedure and the trial of cases. The lawyer today is a counselor, draftsman, negotiator and planner ... an adviser to his client not only on legal matters but on related matters . . . Clearly, the lawyer now must be something of an economist. and the better economist he is, the better lawyer he is likely to be."

Particulars & Universals. Indeed, says Harno, many critics believe that the law-school has completely failed to keep pace with the changing role of the lawyer. Actually, "the law pervades all phases of human activity, and ... it cannot be treated in isolation." The modern school is much too concerned with the "particulars of the law ... It ignores the importance of studying law in the terms of universals."

The cure, says Harno, cannot be found in merely adding more courses : too many schools have already tried to broaden their students by adding such subjects as law and society, law and the economic order, law and labor. To provide practical skills, they have added legal writing, legal drafting, legal accounting. "All this the schools ... are attempting to pour into the ancient measure -- the three-year course of study. What is resulting is something just this side of chaos."

The whole profession, says Harno, would do well to re-examine the aims of its education. Among the specific problems it should face: "The conservation of the students' prelegal years, the fusion of legal and nonlegal materials, and the overall length of the period of study in preparation for the bar."

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