Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Advice for Chemerinsky

Paul Caron has been asking “various legal luminaries” (including, it seems, everybody in legal education except me, but let’s not go there) to answer the question:  “What is the single best idea for reforming legal education you would offer to Erwin Chemerinsky as he builds the law school at UC-Irvine?”

My friend and former UIUC colleague Tom Ulen says:

[C]reate a required third-year capstone course in which the students would be divided into small groups of 10 – 20 to address all the legal and other dimensions of a model legal issue. The instructors, on whom there would be great demands both before and during the course, would design a complex, realistic problem that would call on the students to bring together all of their skills – negotiation, research, organization, substantive and procedural law, litigation management, client counseling, political sensitivity, and more.

Consider this example. The City of Sandifer has decided to build a new 40,000-seat stadium for the Sandifer Cougars, a reasonably successful Major League Baseball franchise. The student firm has been retained to counsel the City and the Cougars through the process of getting the stadium built. They must acquire a suitable piece of property for the new stadium. They must hire an architect to design the stadium and a prime contractor to build it. They must try to persuade the State government to subsidize the costs of the stadium and then help in preparing the bond issue that will be floated. There will be litigation about some matters, and there will be high political heat.

Interesting. We do something similar here at UCLA with the transactions courses that are the capstone to our Business Law Program, Personally, however, I think live client exercises might be more useful. Why not require all students to spend their last semester of law school in either a clinic or an externship?

Also, my buddy UIUC law prof (and Ideoblog blogger) Larry Ribstein opines:

Real diversity.

We already have about 200 law schools, the vast majority of which try to do pretty much what every other school does, despite their attempts at superficial differentiation. What we need is true intellectual diversity. I have some thoughts on that (and echo Henry Manne’s earlier thoughts on this topic). Chemerinsky’s idea of a law school probably wouldn’t be mine, but the precedent would encourage other flowers to bloom (a Hayek law school?).

A great idea, but somehow I doubt that Hayek is a name that UC Irvine law students hear very often.