CUL DE SAC
The discussions regarding the state of law schools are ever livelier. The discussions I’ve seen so far remain rather shallow, looking primarily on the monetary aspect: is the investment in the expensive few years of a law school going to bring a return on an investment to a lucky person who passes a bar exam tunnel at the end of the drill. This completely misses the point, as the problems why the investment is becoming questionable is to be sought at a deeper level. The societies seem to be noticing it sooner than the legal profession is – the role of law in modern societies seem to be shifting.
Legal education does not seem to know where the problem with educating position based thinkers is. Our societies are expressing it clearly in our faces, but the lawyers wouldn’t listen: we don’t need position based resolution methods in modern societies and the legal thinking are ever more perceived as a burden rather then contributing to solutions the societies need. This is worrisome, but consequential to what legal education is trying to achieve. While it might have been true that stability resulting from the inertia inherent to the legal systems used to be an advantage in the times when change was seen as a threat, today our survival depends not only on embracing the change but on harnessing the change by its deliberate creation. Law schools seem to have completely missed that and I am not sure I would recommend anyone to follow my path into legal profession anymore.