Rethinking 'Like a Lawyer': An Incrementalist's Proposal for First Year Curriculum Reform

Abstract

Law education, like the common law itself, develops incrementally. Thus the notion that law's rationality makes it amenable to scientific inquiry — the so-called Langdellian revolution in which law is seen as a science, the library its laboratory, case study its method — took some three-quarters of a century to become the dominant form of legal pedagogy in Canada. And while there have been other cross-currents, pedagogical movements and forms of instruction, the dominant mode of teaching students how to "think like a lawyer" is still the study of common law doctrines and the manipulation of rules within those doctrines.

This is unsatisfactory for producing either first-rate practitioners or legal scholars. As law schools enter the 21st century and as new conceptions of law and lawyering emerge, we need a first-year course that, in an integrated fashion, aims to instill a culture of professional competence and ethics while at the same time laying the foundation for reflective and critical thinking about law. The course envisioned here — one that would supplement, rather than supplant, doctrinal analysis — aims to nurture both types of competency.

The course content falls in three broad subject categories: philosophy of law and jurisprudence; history and development of the justice system and the legal profession; and law practice. The categorization is hardly unique, though the grouping of subjects in a single course may seem novel. The idea is to provide the foundation for both a scholarly, thoughtful professionalism and an approach to scholarship that is confident about its ability to critique the legal community because it knows something of what lawyers actually do. Moreover, it aims to build this foundation at the outset, when students are impressionable, excited about starting law school, and keen to learn.

Keywords: legal education

JEL Classification: K00