Legal education is in peril. The deepest root of this challenge reaches into the institutional design and culture of law schools. An explanation of this situation starts with the understanding that traditions of thought are fragile collective efforts, permanently under
threat of collapsing along with the lives of those of the latest generation engaged
in them. Unless those traditions are properly supported by
institutions. In the case of the high traditions of legal thought, how well the institutions of contemporary legal academy provide
support for them, and what is at stake in their possibly failing to do so? I argue that law schools fail to provide institutional home for the
continuation and creative expansion of high legal thought, in the process
failing themselves, those who come to them, and the long-term conditions of
possibility of self-governance and justice in complex societies. The immediate
cause of the failure to host legal thought is the prevailing structural bias of
institutions of the legal academy in favor three interconnected attitudes: practicism,
minimalism, and parochialism. Work on legal education explains the nature
and effects of these attitudes before outlining specific proposals for the future
of legal education. N.B. The Open Letter is derived from Institutional Conditions of Contemporary Legal Thought. |