ABA Issues Final Report on Law School Reform
Last fall, the American Bar Association’s Task Force on The Future of Legal Education generated headlines with its Draft Report and Recommendations. It included proposals to integrate more experiential learning into the curriculum, scale back on licensing requirements, modify tenure practices, and identify models that reduce law school costs to students.
It was an ambitious project, indeed! And it was one destined to become an academic footnote.
This week, those reforms suffered death by committee and public comment. Although the task force released a final report with findings that were very similar to the draft report, the recommendations have essentially been bottlenecked.
The task force originally intended to present six resolutions to the ABA House of Delegates in February. However, the ABA reports that the “Committee on Rules and Calendar, the House gatekeeper, put a stop to that when it rejected the task force’s proposed resolutions on procedural grounds. At that point, task force chair and retired Indiana Supreme Court Chief Justice Randall T. Shepard said, ‘The task force realized that making the necessary changes wouldn’t be feasible.’”
As a result, procedure has taken precedence over contemplation. The task force will now spend its remaining term reaching out to various groups to share the findings and argue the case for change. In July, the ABA Board of Governors will also meet to establish a new task force to offer further recommendations on revamping existing tuition and loan models.
Bottom line: There is additional research, discussion, and committees… but no real action. And maybe that’s just as well at this point. As Chief Justice Shepard notes, “The breadth and depth of testimony the task force heard makes it clear that there are no fast and painless answers for the problems facing legal education, which are created by often complex and interrelated forces.”
In other words, the best action you can take is to stand pat… and let business and social trends make the decisions easier down the road.
To read the full task force report, click here.
Source: ABA, ABA
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