Among the most important factors for hiring new faculty members at most law schools is the promise of future scholarship. Once hired, law faculty members spend about half of their time writing articles for journals, usually on interesting topics related to their teaching. In addition to promoting the school’s reputation, this scholarship serves to inform decisions on promotion and tenure. While law schools prefer to have excellent teachers, it is fair to say that they make important decisions based more on scholarship than teaching effectiveness. With so much effort and importance placed on scholarship, it is worth asking, as we do today, what a research agenda looks like in an era of reform, which seems to be where we are at this moment. There is currently a significant amount of criticism aimed at legal education and a growing feeling that what has become the standard law school experience does not fit very well in our times or does not readily lend itself to practice. It is common to hear that law schools must change or risk finding themselves out of business or irrelevant. It seems perhaps inevitable that part of such a change will involve new directions for scholarship.
This Essay suggests that such changes offer the opportunity to reassess what legal education intends to accomplish. As law schools place greater emphasis on the practice and application of law than has historically been the case, legal scholarship will likely change as well, with increased emphasis on defining effective teaching methods that develop the skills needed to practice law in the twenty-first century, and with particular focus placed on the development of the professional as a core part of the law school experience. Change, however, is not a good in itself. Ultimately, the focus of legal education is to develop capable, adaptive professionals who will effectively remain members of the profession long enough to justify the investment of time and money that is demanded from law schools. The practical shift in legal education, with an increased emphasis on skills that align with practice, provides an opportune time for scholars to consider how well students are prepared to assume the role of a lawyer following the training they receive over three years.
