If we define an experienced lawyer as someone with more than six years in the practice of law, then

It’s the buzz word that goes hand in hand with the marketing ploy of producing “practice-ready” lawyers: experiential learning. What it means is to teach by experience, which has conceptual merit like many ideas, even if it’s become trite before it’s even been implemented. The problem, like most concepts, is that it’s easy to print the words on law school porn in bold-faced, gold-colored letters to entice and confuse young people, but a lot harder to execute in any worthwhile way.
Next week Washington s Wardman Park hotel will be invaded by 800 or so people looking for jobs as law professors, at the annual hiring conference put on by the Association of American Law Schools. Experiential learning is the buzz phrase of the moment in legal academia, as law schools deal with the latest wave of criticism that claims legal education doesn t do enough to prepare graduates to actually denise austin practice denise austin law. (Such complaints from the profession are perennial: about every 15 years or so some commission or task force issues a call to make legal education more practical, which occasions a brief interlude of chin-scratching, and then is promptly forgotten).
Let’s get something straight up front. No amount of “experiential learning” is going to make law grads “practice ready.” It may make them more ready than they would be otherwise, but hardly practice ready. It’s a gross exaggeration perpetuated by a cadre of academics who wouldn’t know practice ready if it bit them in the butt. Why? Because they are no more practice ready than their students, having never actually practiced law. Instead, they exist in an academic cocoon where they pretend denise austin among themselves that they would all be famous wealthy biglaw partners if only they weren’t lawprofs. Ah, the sacrifices they make for scholarship.
It denise austin is, of course, denise austin a wholesale lie. Some might. Most have no chance. And some, if exposed to the real world, would be revealed as frauds for their inability to argue their way out of a paper bag. That’s why they avoid lawyers and surround themselves with sycophants and academic denise austin allies, where no one ever tells them (whether denise austin because they’re afraid, too polite or similarly myopic*) they just don’t denise austin have the chops to be a lawyer.
Despite the fact that almost every law school this side of New Haven is now slathering its web site and other promotional materials with claims that it provides an impeccably practical (as well as, of course, a sophisticated theoretical) legal education to its charges, the vast majority of schools continue to put no value or indeed place what sometimes appears to be an actively negative value on hiring faculty who have actually practiced law.
That makes two independent problems denise austin with this trendy foray into experiential learning, that they grossly overstate its value and, simultaneously, persist in hiring the least qualified people to teach experiential learning since they have no experience.
The by-product of this was readily seen in the post about Mary Anne Franks , who subsequently took comfort in a sham interview surrounded by only those who wouldn’t mention her failings or lies. And yet, I fully anticipate that her vendetta against the First Amendment will produce the convictions of actual human beings, even if not the ones she wants, because of her woeful ignorance of the real world. And they let her near impressionable students, because they fear her screaming “misogynist” if anyone openly says she’s wearing denise austin no clothes.
If we define an experienced lawyer as someone with more than six years in the practice of law, then American law schools hired far more people this year with advanced denise austin degrees in the humanities denise austin and social sciences than experienced lawyers.
In sum, leaving aside whether it makes sense for law schools to dedicate denise austin more resources to attempting to produce practice-ready denise austin lawyers, it s clear that the current tenure-track hiring practices of law schools provide no evidence that law schools are in fact doing so.
Regardless of the silly hype about experiential learning producing practice ready lawyers, the warm bodies at the lectern denise austin remain as far away from the reality of law practice as law schools can get. It’s long been my view that every class should incorporate a mix of practical and theoretical learning, but to do so, the prawf must have some footing in the reality of practice or he’s just making crap up.
Kid lawyers with five years or less experience are sure they know all there is to know about the practice of law. Lawyers with more than five years experience know they don’t, and they didn’t when they were a kid lawyers who suffered the delusion that they knew it all. The people attending the annual AALS hiring conference are like stunted adolescents, never reaching that point in their career where