Courtroom Classrooms

More than 75% of U.S. law school graduates are unready for practice, says Supreme Court Justice William Brennan. They leave school without having confronted "one live man or woman who is immediately in need of legal advice." Most of them know too little about criminal law, to say nothing of trying a case. Yet every indigent U.S. felony defendant is now entitled to free counsel; the Government aims to furnish free legal advice in slums, and the whole country needs able young trial lawyers.

One answer is to get law students out of the classroom and into the court room. Another is to lengthen legal education. Law graduates can find a rich combination of the two at Georgetown University Law School in Washington, D.C. Located in a seedy downtown area far from its Jesuit-run parent campus, the 1,300-student law school (only 46% Catholic) is a few blocks from city and federal courts, and a ten-minute walk from the Supreme Court. The area is a virtually ideal crime laboratory, and the school has made the most of its opportunities. Georgetown now boasts what U.S. Judge J. Skelly Wright calls "probably the most systematic and thorough training in trial advocacy offered anywhere in the country."

Learning from Bondsmen. In 1960, Georgetown launched the E. Barrett Prettyman Fellowships (named for an alumnus U.S. judge), which annually pay up to eleven graduate students an average $7,000, plus fees and tuition, to spend a year defending indigents. So far, the fellows have defended almost 2,500 clients, thus learning trial law while earning master's degrees and providing needed representation in the process.

With the Ford Foundation paying the tab, Prettyman Fellows first spend two months studying some 600 cases, holding mock trials and visiting police stations. They get advice from judges, psychiatrists, even bail bondsmen. By midyear, a typical Prettyman fellow is handling no fewer than five misdemeanor cases, ten felonies, a couple of appeals and a constant series of preliminary hearings--all the while attending night classes at Georgetown and writing research papers.

As one result of their criminal work, the 1964 group produced a new standard manual on federal trial tactics. As another, the fellows have won several important rulings, adding to the protection of criminal defendants. Moreover, the program has just been expanded to two years, adding such civil-law matters as tenants' rights.

Nearly all Prettyman graduates feel duty bound to spend at least a couple of years carrying on with such public service; about half seem committed to it permanently. As one student put it: "I came here interested in corporate practice and good living. I've been made to feel guilty unless I'm defending an indigent."

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