At the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools (the “AALS”), the Real Estate Transactions Section hosted a program entitled “Keeping the ‘Real’ World in Real Estate Transactions: New Ideas, Best Practices, and Partnership Opportunities to Strengthen Teaching and Scholarship.” This program was inspired by the Wake Forest Law Review’s Fall 2015 Symposium entitled “Revisiting Langdell: Legal Education Reform and the Lawyer’s Craft.”
Law school courses on real estate transactions and related upper-level real property courses are taught by one of three kinds of instructors: (1) faculty with teaching experience and experience practicing real estate law; (2) faculty with teaching experience but no experience practicing real estate law; and (3) faculty with little teaching experience but deep experience practicing real estate law. The focus of the AALS program was on identifying, understanding, and meeting the needs of the latter two categories of instructors: full-time faculty with ready access to academic resources, but little access to professional resources, and adjunct faculty with ready access to professional resources and networks, but little access to academic resources. Although the needs of these two groups are very different, the program focused on forging partnerships between the academy and the practicing bar that address both.
