It is time to strike a new balance between teaching and scholarship in legal education. This new balance does not require law schools to abandon their scholarly focus and concentrate solely on skills. The scholarly enterprise is, and should be, vital to the future of legal education and legal practice. Instead, law schools must make fundamental changes in how they value the teaching and scholarship of all full-time faculty who prepare their students for legal practice.
True legal education reform must re-form both the teaching and the scholarly missions of the law school by engaging all full-time faculty in both. Unless the ABA finishes the job of reform by mandating equal treatment for all full-time faculty, educational reform will be piecemeal and scattershot, with token courses meant to dot the i’s and cross the t’s being taught by low-caste faculty who don’t have the power to take the next steps in educational reform. Legal education will continue to be a segregated system, a system that stifles scholarly voices that might generate new knowledge about teaching, practice, or legal policy.
This Essay will first describe the current ABA Standards on status, particularly as they relate to legal writing faculty, explaining how these Standards contradict the ABA’s diversity and inclusion standards and result in a segregated underclass in the legal academy; this underclass inhibits not only gender, class, and racial inclusion but also student learning. Second, this Essay will identify the formal and informal barriers to academic freedom for legal writing faculty. Third, this Essay will explain how “disrespected” skills scholarship underlies the current reforms, and how this scholarship is already expanding its focus to generate knowledge about other issues of legal practice and legal theory. Finally, this Essay will discuss next steps that the law schools, the ABA, and the AALS can take to ensure the continued viability of law schools by embracing current and future reforms.
