Washington & Lee to Put 3rd-Year Students to Work
In the wake of a study that says law schools aren’t doing enough to educate their graduates for the real world of legal practice, the law school at Virginia’s Washington & Lee University is changing its third-year curriculum.
Students in their final year of law school will spend their time in practicum courses learning to be lawyers rather than repeating the traditional classroom lessons of the first two years, reports the Associated Press.
For example, “Robin Fretwell Wilson has begun teaching a pilot class in family law along the lines of the new model and said the differences are substantial,” the news agency writes. “It’s an entirely different approach that focuses on navigating the intricacies of an actual prenuptial agreement, for example, and the questions students will need to understand—like what it really means when an agreement calls for ‘best’ efforts instead of ‘reasonable’ ones.”
As an earlier ABAJournal.com post also notes, a study by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has called for a greater emphasis on teaching practical skills in law school. Like Washington & Lee, the University of Dayton School of Law earlier revamped its curriculum in an effort to teach students real-life legal skills. It has won kudos for a new program that teaches students how to practice in a specific area.
“There are a whole series of forces coming together to recognize that the curriculum in law school is in need of more professionalism and more lawyering-centered education,” says Southwestern Law School professor Catherine Carpenter, in an ABA Journal article last year about practical legal skills training. “There is the notion that a continual, doctrinal Socratic method of instruction may not be the only way to go.”
