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Legal Education: The Consumers' Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Ronald M. Pipkin
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Extract

This paper is the first in a series on data collected for the Law Student Activity Patterns Project. The project is one of several discrete studies in the research program in legal education of the American Bar Foundation, conducted at the request of the American Bar Association House of Delegates, with the advice and consultation of the Special Committee for the Study of Legal Education. A major purpose of this research is to develop an understanding of the professionalization of law students in behavioral terms, that is, in terms of patterned activities and time use. However, we will first present a series of initial reports analyzing data relevant to other general concerns about contemporary legal education.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Bar Foundation Research Journal , Volume 1 , Issue 4 , Fall 1976 , pp. 1161 - 1192
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1976 

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References

1 The American Bar Foundation's Research Program in Legal Education is under the direction of Felice J. Levine, research social scientist, and Spencer L. Kimball, executive director. The program has been greatly aided by the capable advice of the ABA's Special Committee for a Study of Legal Education (Ronald J. Foulis, Chairman; Robert M. Figg, Jr.; Reginald T. Hamner; Patricia Roberts Harris; R. W. Nahstoll; Edward F. Rodriguez, Jr.; Samuel D. Thurman).Google Scholar

2 James P. White, Legal Education: A Time of Change, 62 A.B.A.J. 355 (Mar. 1976).Google Scholar

3 Id. In 1974, 135,397 students took the LSAT exam. First-year enrollments in 1975 were 39,038—a ratio of 3.46:1. This estimate overstates the ratio somewhat; some students who take the LSAT are double counted as they take it twice in one year; others enroll later than the following fall or at unaccredited schools not included in this census.Google Scholar

Writing as chair of the Prelaw Committee of the Law School Admission Council, Walter B. Raushenbush stated, “I am convinced. that there is a very substantial unmet demand for legal education among well-qualified young people. I believe it to involve annually at least half as many applicants as do find a place.” Walter B. Raushenbush, The Unmet Demand for Legal Education, 1 Learning & L. 12, 15 (Spring 1974).Google Scholar

4 See Herbert Packer & Thomas Ehrlich, New Directions in Legal Education (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1972); Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility, Inc., Selected Readings in Clinical Legal Education (New York: Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility and the International Legal Center, 1973); Bayless Manning, Teaching Law vs. Training Lawyers, 1 Learning & L. 12 (Fall 1974); and Michael Sovern, 2-1-1: The 4th Revolution in Legal Education, 1 Learning & L. 26 (Winter 1975).Google Scholar

5 Barry B. Boyer & Roger C. Cramton, American Legal Education: An Agenda for Research and Reform, 59 Cornell L. Rev. 221 (1974). Also noted by Packer & Ehrlich, supra note 4, at 21.Google Scholar

6 Francis A. Allen, Message from the President, AALS Newsletter, May 12, 1976, at 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Francis A. Allen, Resolving the Tension Between Professors and Practitioners, 2 Learning & L. 50 (Winter 1976).Google Scholar

8 Jerold S. Auerbach, Enmity and Amity: Law Teachers and Practitioners, 1900-1922, in Donald Fleming & Bernard Bailyn, eds., Law in American History (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1972), at 551-604.Google Scholar

9 Notably, John Bonsignore, At the Edge of Law, 11 A.B.L.J. 135 (1973); Peter d'Errico, Law Is Terror Put into Words: A Humanist's Analysis of the Increasing Separation Between Concerns of Law and Concerns of Justice, 2 Learning & L. 38 (Fall 1975); Arthur Kinoy, The Crisis in American Legal Education, in Jonathan Black, ed., Radical Lawyers: Their Role in the Movement and in the Courts (New York: Avon Books, 1971), at 271; Paul N. Savoy, Toward a New Politics of Legal Education, 79 Yale L.J. 444 (1970); Andrew Watson, The Quest for Professional Competence: Psychological Aspects of Legal Education, 37 U. Cin. L. Rev. 91 (1968); and M. J. Zaremski, The Intention Is to Make You Feel Less Than a Human Being, 1 Learning & L. 51 (Summer 1974). Also see Jerold S. Auerbach, Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern American (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), at 275-79, for a nonlawyer's view.Google Scholar

10 See Duncan Kennedy, How the Law School Fails: A Polemic, 1 Yale Rev. L. & Social Action 71 (Spring 1970); Jon Richardson, Does Anyone Care for More Hemlock, 25 J. Legal Ed. 427 (1973); Anthony J. Mohr & Kathryn J. Rodgers, Legal Education: Some Student Reflections, 25 J. Legal Ed. 403 (1973); Lawrence Silver, Anxiety and the First Semester of Law School, 1968 Wis. L. Rev. 1201; and Jeff Thaler, What's Left of You After Law School, 4 Student Lawyer 12 (Mar. 1976).Google Scholar

11 A student at one of the sample schools described a speech delivered at first-year orientation where the dean went to great lengths to disassociate legal education from the apparently amoral traits of the lawyers caught up in Watergate. At this school, the dean claimed, students would be taught to think independently and never give blind obeisance to authority. The student continued that at the first meeting of a course following orientation the professor announced that in his class when students were called on to recite, they should stand up, walk to the rear of the room, and address the class while facing the wall.Google Scholar

12 See Guy R. Loftman, Study Habits and Their Effectiveness in Legal Education, 27 J. Legal Ed. 418 (1976); Patrick B. Bauer, On Producing Intellectual Giants and Moral Midgets, 2 Learning & L. 12 (Summer 1975); David N. Rockwell, The Education of the Capitalist Lawyer: The Law School, in Robert Lefcourt, ed., Law Against the People: Essays to Demystify Law, Order and the Courts (New York: Random House, 1971), at 90; and Eric E. Van Loon, The Law School Response: How to Make Students Sharp by Making Them Narrow, in Bruce Wasserstein & Mark J. Green, eds., With Justice for Some: An Indictment of the Law by Young Advocates (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), at 334.Google Scholar

13 The exceptions are Loftman, supra note 12, who uses quantitative survey data and Silver, supra note 10, who uses qualitative interview data.Google Scholar

14 Seymour Warkov & Joseph Zelan, Lawyers in the Making (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1965), at 70-73.Google Scholar

15 Alan A. Stone, Legal Education on the Couch, 85 Harv. L. Rev. 392, at 407 n.52 (1971).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Id. at 401.Google Scholar

17 Robert B. Stevens, Law Schools and Law Students, 59 Va. L. Rev. 551, 652-59 (1973).Google Scholar

18 Stevens introduced his report by stating:Google Scholar

The four tentative studies discussed in this essay were undertaken between 1969 and 1971. These were not typical academic years in the life of the American university. A series of confrontations over student participation in university administration marked the 1968-1969 school year. In 1969-1970, the year we began most of our studies, the number and seriousness of the confrontations increased, climaxing with the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State. Yet, after a summer of bombings, the mood of the campus changed drastically. When we analyzed our data during the 1970-1971 academic year, in the words of President Kingman Brewster of Yale, an “eerie tranquility” prevailed on the American campus. The studies were edited in the academic year 1971-1972, when the tranquility had lost its “eerieness.” This Article was written during the academic year 1972-73, which seems characterized by a return to the mood of the “golden Fifties.”Google Scholar

Id. at 556.Google Scholar

19 See Mark J. Green, The Young Lawyers 1972: Goodbye to Pro Bono, 5 New York Magazine 29 (1972); Rita J. Simon, Frank Koziol, & Nancy Joslyn, Have There Been Significant Changes in the Career Aspirations and Occupational Choices of Law School Graduates in the 1960's? 8 Law & Soc'y Rev. 95 (1973).Google Scholar

20 Donald W. Jackson & E. Gordon Gee, Bread and Butter? Electives in American Legal Education (New York: Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility, Inc., 1975).Google Scholar

21 The Kelso resource index ranks schools by composite scores based on student body, faculty, and library size. School attributes are scored on eight-point scales and summed. In the 1974-75 ranking, six scales produced scores between 9 and 41 for 158 law schools. Schools are ranked by Kelso into three groups. See Charles D. Kelso, The AALS Study of Part-Time Legal Education (Washington, D.C.: Association of American Law Schools, 1972). The rankings for 1974-75 are in Charles D. Kelso, Adding Up the Law Schools, 2 Learning & L. 38 (Summer 1975). For critiques and response see Adding Up Law Schools Is a Poor Way to Count, 2 Learning & L. 16 (Fall 1975), and Charles D. Kelso, In Defense of the Mathematics of Law School Education, 2 Learning & L. 14 (Fall 1975). The ratings reported for sample schools are from the 1974-75 list.Google Scholar

22 As a matter of historical comparison, Warkov used the median LSAT scores of sampled students entering each school in 1961-62 to construct a prestige ranking of 124 law schools. The eight schools classified as stratum I schools and identified by Warkov as “usually included in the laymen's catalogue of top national law schools,” has a median LSAT score of 572 or higher. Warkov & Zelan, supra note 14, at 55. By this standard all of our sampled schools have student bodies comparable to stratum I schools 15 years ago.Google Scholar

23 Manning, supra note 4.Google Scholar

24 The recently passed rule of the ABA and AALS requiring all law schools to offer instruction in professional responsibility is based on the assumption that legal education can socialize students to ethical behavior. See also, Behaving Responsibly: What Does It Mean for a Lawyer? 2 Learning & L. 41 (Spring 1975).Google Scholar

25 The models underlying this scale and the others are not based on measurement of the norms at each school. We accept as a testable hypothesis that faculty may endorse or fail to endorse these models to the same degree as do students. Consequently, questions of whether students' attitudes parallel faculty attitudes or whether they are in some sense good or bad are left open for others to address.Google Scholar

26 Questions used to form the four discrete scales were selected to provide multidimen sional measurements within each evaluative area. However, no item was included unless its intercorrelation with the other items in the same scale was.30 or higher.Google Scholar

Responses that indicated strong support for the model were coded 4 and those rejecting the model were coded 0. The pedagogy scale, for example, includes five items. The scores on these items were summed, divided by the maximum value (20), and multiplied by 100. The scores, then, are a percentage of the maximum possible score for all items within each scale.Google Scholar

27 These may be stated as rules (e. g., “failure to attend class regularly may cause reduction in grades, loss of credit for courses, additional remedial work, or other appropriate sanction”); as institutional expectations (e. g., “it is the student's role to carefully prepare course assign ments, to fill out his knowledge by use of the library, and to attend class prepared to actively work with the assigned materials”); or as institutional values (e. g., “the faculty recognizes the educational value of the exchange of ideas, and encourages all students to discuss legal concepts and problems among themselves and with the faculty, members of the community and the bar. The faculty, however, recognizes its responsibility to the bar, to the community and to the students to evaluate each student upon his or her own merits”). Examples taken from sample schools' catalogues.Google Scholar

28 Items on the pedagogy scale (five-point response, strongly agree to strongly disagree):Google Scholar

29 The law is taught here in a systematic, ordered fashion, with progression from course to course.Google Scholar

30 It is possible to get just as good a grade on an exam by “cramming” at the end of the term as by regular study and review throughout the term.Google Scholar

31 The primary function of grades in law school is to aid firms in hiring, not to provide feedback to the student.Google Scholar

32 Briefing cases is essential to analyzing and learning the subject matter of a course.Google Scholar

33 It is possible to get good grades here without attending class very much.Google Scholar

34 Items on the preparation scale (five points):Google Scholar

35 Law school has given me a good sense of the professional tasks that lawyers perform.Google Scholar

36 Law school has not yet taught me the skills necessary to handle most simple legal problems that clients might bring.Google Scholar

37 I can probably learn more law by working summers for a law firm or government legal agency than I can in most courses.Google Scholar

38 Items on the teaching scale (four-point response, very to not at all):Google Scholar

How do you rate the faculty in general on the following:Google Scholar

39 Interested in teachingGoogle Scholar

40 Knowledgeable about subjects they teachGoogle Scholar

41 Available to students outside classGoogle Scholar

42 Items on the morality scale (four-point response, very to not at all):Google Scholar

How do you rate the faculty in general on the following:Google Scholar

43 Concerned with issues of justiceGoogle Scholar

44 Concerned with issues of professional ethicsGoogle Scholar

45 Concerned with problems of minorities and disadvantagedGoogle Scholar

46 The ideal type is a model presumed to describe reality only in a normative, not objective, sense. Through the individual evaluation of normative adherence a relative measurement of respondents' perceptions of that reality is created. Presumably these beliefs are closely associ ated with the socialization process.Google Scholar

a Range = 0-100.Google Scholar

48 It should be noted that these data are cross-sectional, not longitudinal, i. e., the survey was not a series of successive change measurements on the same people over a three-year period. Rather, simultaneous measurements were taken on students in all three years. In order to infer the likelihood of developments in time from cross-sectional observations, we must assume that there are no systematic differences (i. e., only randomly distributed differences) between the cohorts (groups of students in each class year) except for those associated with the stimuli for development. In other words, we assume that advanced students in the sample were not generally different from less advanced students in the sample at the comparable point in their law school careers. Differences in attitudes between class years therefore are attributable to experiences occurring during the time while in law school. For a test of this assumption, the scale scores were correlated with age controlling for year in school. With year controlled, no relationship between student's age and scores was found on any of the four scales. Therefore, the effects appear to be developmental rather than a consequence of cohort differences.Google Scholar

49 Boyer and Cramton note: “From the standpoint of competitive success, the first year is undoubtedly the most crucial because the first-year grade-point average is generally determinative of status and rewards, including law review, summer employment and research assistant positions.”Supra note 5, at 263.Google Scholar

50 E. Gordon Gee & Donald W. Jackson, Following the Leader? The Unexamined Con sensus in Law School Curricula (New York: Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility, Inc., 1975).Google Scholar

51 David F. Cavers, Legal Education in Forward-Looking Perspective, in The American Assembly, Columbia University, Law in a Changing America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968), at 139, and Kelso, Part-Time Legal Education, supra note 21.Google Scholar

52 Perhaps the elements in the scale model are reinforced more by faculty at regional schools than at national schools. See note 25 supra.Google Scholar

a All correlations significant at §.001.Google Scholar

54 The correlation between level of interest and level of satisfaction is.672, which suggests a convergence between intellectual stimulation and satisfaction with law school, but still the two are not isometric. In group interviews some students revealed that they answered the question of satisfaction based on a relative assessment of the anticipated vocational benefits of attending law school compared to their prospects without this education. For them, merely passing by the gatekeeper to the profession outweighed their assessment of the intrinsic character of the experience. In partial correlations between interest, satisfaction, and the four scales with year controlled, the same relationships were found with all partial correlations having a statistical probability §.001.Google Scholar

55 It should be noted that the spread of political self-labeling in the sample is quite narrow. Only 8 percent of the students classified themselves as far right or conservative; 23 percent middle of the road; 57 percent liberal; and 12 percent far left.Google Scholar

Stevens reported in his study that legal education “caused a movement to the political left” although he left open the question of whether this was a consequence of professionalization or environmental influences due to the student unrest concurrent with the period of his study. Stevens, supra note 17, at 681-85. We found no correlation between year and political orientation. But it is notable that such a large proportion of these aspirants to a profession often characterized as politically conservative were themselves left to center. (A recent study of the Chicago bar suggests that perhaps this popular image should be revised. Only 22 percent of the sample of 772 lawyers indicated preference for the Republican Party nationally and 10 percent for the party locally. John P. Heinz, Edward O. Laumann, Charles L. Cappell, Terence C. Halliday, & Michael H. Schaalman, Diversity, Representation, and Leadership in an Urban Bar: A First Report on a Survey of the Chicago Bar, 1976 A.B.F. Res. J. 717.)Google Scholar

56 Walter Gellhom, The Second and Third Years of Law Study, 17 J. Legal Ed. 1, 12 (1964).Google Scholar

57 Class rank was found to be correlated with “level of involvement in terms of hours studied.” In the second and third years, lower ranked students studied more than others. And positive correlations were found between class rank and number of faculty contacts, and between class rank and perceptions of warm faculty relationships. Stevens, supra note 17, at 656, 680-81.Google Scholar

58 Grades were correlated with Thielens's barometer of professional self-image. The higher the academic performance, the higher the students ranked themselves on a scale of layman to lawyer. Higher ranked students were also more likely to participate in formal school activities (e. g., moot court, legal aid, law review, and legislative drafting) and obtain law-related outside employment. As well, higher ranked students were likely to express less interest in their course work than students with lower grades. Wagner P. Thielens, The Socialization of Law Students (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1965), at 329-54.Google Scholar

59 Patton found that, among first-year students, students with higher class ranking differed from students in the lower ranks by using time more efficiently, studying more productively, having more confidence in exam taking, and being more comfortable with ambiguity and the Socratic method. Michael J. Patton, The Student, the Situation, and Performance During the First Year of Law School, 21 J. Legal Ed. 10, 21-29 (1968).Google Scholar

60 See p. 1164 supra.Google Scholar

61 The exceptions are the following: (1) the change most desired by students at regional schools was “more assistance in getting outside legal employment,” mean = 1.77; the mean for this item was substantially lower for students at national schools, mean =.96; (2) students at regional schools also rated the collateral item “more information and advice for career planning” as more desired, mean = 1.64, than students at national schools, mean = 1.17; and (3) students at regional schools rated “better law library” as increasing satisfaction, mean = 1.26; whereas students at national schools did not consider a better library to be needed, it received the lowest score, mean =.21.Google Scholar

62 Law school competition is portrayed vividly, and probably as most destructive, in the novel-movie, The Paper Chase (1971). Also see Roy E. Rickson, Faculty Control and the Structure of Student Competition: An Analysis of the Law Student Role, 25 J. Legal Ed. 47 (1973).Google Scholar

63 Notes 10 and 12 supra.Google Scholar

64 Karl Bemesdorfer, On Being a Law Student, 15 Harv. L. Bull. 18 (1965).Google Scholar

65 Boyer & Cramton, supra note 5, at 263. Also see Vic Fleming, Sudden Death Exams, 5 Student Lawyer 18 (Sept. 1976).Google Scholar

66 Practicing lawyers' perspectives on their legal education is the topic of another ABF study under the direction of Victor J. Rosenblum and Frances Kahn Zemans.Google Scholar

67 Stevens reported from his survey of law school alumni (class of 1960, six law schools): “When asked to consider those aspects, if any, which had harmful effect on their legal education, more respondents identified large classes than any other factor.”Supra note 17, at 591.Google Scholar

68 Kennedy, supra note 10, at 76.Google Scholar