Pathways, Integration, and Sequencing the Curriculum

Abstract

Law school course offerings have proliferated in recent decades. From the perspective of the individual student, an expanded curriculum may create exciting educational opportunities while posing trade-offs between a generalist education and specialization. Law schools face two key challenges. First, they must structure the curriculum so that the experiences of individual law students have some coherence. Second they must incorporate the full range of formal knowledge, professional skill, and values. This section of the forthcoming book Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World (Lexis 2015) identifies three approaches – not mutually exclusive – to structuring the law school curriculum: provide course advising with structured pathways through the curriculum and concentrations; integrate the curriculum: connect the individual courses that a student takes, both those taken concurrently and across the years the student is enrolled in law school; engage in a particular type of integration: sequence the curriculum by structuring offerings from introductory to intermediate to advanced, so that later classes build on the concepts and skills learned in earlier ones.

The content of this SSRN posting is material that was published in the book Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World, Maranville, et al., Lexis Nexis 2015. The content has been posted on SSRN with the express permission of Lexis Nexis and of Carolina Academic Press, publisher of the book as of January 1, 2016.