Studies of Legal Education: A Review of Recent Reports

Authors

Thomas L. Shaffer, Notre Dame Law SchoolFollow
Robert S. Redmount

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1977

Publication Information

1 Nova L.J. 9 (1977)

Abstract

Early in 1972, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education published its report on legal education. It is the most prominent study of legal education in the last decade, and typical of discourse in and about law schools—urbane, speculative, unempirical, conceptual, rarely student-centered. The authors of the Carnegie report were articulate law teachers. They wrote with their feet up and their pipes lit, without attention to facts which did not come from their considerable experience. The value of such reports is the thoughtfulness of the people who write them, and their predictive accuracy is due to the fact that people who are powerful in legal education deal in self-fulfilling prophecy. Reports on legal education are therefore characteristically thin on new information, well informed about yesterday, incisive on tomorrow, and weak about today.

Comments

Reprinted with permission of Nova Law Review.

Recommended Citation

Thomas L. Shaffer & Robert S. Redmount, Studies of Legal Education: A Review of Recent Reports, 1 Nova L.J. 9 (1977).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/255