Refashioning Legal Pedagogy After the Carnegie Report: Something Borrowed, Something New

Debra M. Schneider, University of Richmond

Abstract

The Carnegie Foundation published in 2007 its ground-breaking book titled Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law, in which it pointed out significant pedagogical imbalance in legal education. In particular, the Carnegie report said that law schools should infuse their curricula with more practical and ethical training. How a law school ought to accomplish the Carnegie aim is another challenge, one that this paper squarely addresses.

Traditional legal education is sorely imbalanced. A law student receives rigorous training in legal doctrine and analytical skills—he learns to “think like a lawyer”—but is left with little training in practical skills or his ethical role in society. Moreover, law schools rely almost exclusively on the ineffectual pedagogy of the case-dialogue method. Several factors explain this entrenched imbalance, most notably the academy’s top-down power structure and its budget constraints.

Toward the aim of enriching and improving law students’ educational experience, I advocate implementing into the doctrinal classroom three specific, workable pedagogies long in use in clinical legal education and in undergraduate English classrooms: using group learning models, using writing as a learning tool, and using assessment as a formative and ongoing component of the learning process. These three methods advance legal education toward the Carnegie goal of a balanced curriculum because the methods hone the very skills used in a lawyer’s practice.