CELL Blog | Center for Engaged Learning in the Law

Today is “Super Tuesday,” a mad Babel of election primaries across the country. I have read that many politicians have hired liguists to help them get out their message. The linguists use sociolinguistic frame theory, which essentially posits that how an issue is framed can impact and significantly affect the dialogue about the issue itself. (e.g., Calling a government program a “war on X” is useful because it creates winners and losers in a context people understand.)

I think frame theory also applies to legal education. From a teacher’s perspective, it would be great to know what other constituencies are thinking about legal education, really how they are framing it. For example,

1. What do law students want from their courses? Do they know what they don’t know? Should we ask them?
2. If practitioners want more “practice-ready” students, do they have ideas about how to achieve that goal efficiently? Does it require a revolution in traditional legal edcation? What skills should be emphasized in creating practice-ready students?
3. Can law schools shift their frame of reference to reward teachers for spending extra time teaching instead of writing? Do law schools want to be known as teaching schools or is scholarship the once and only king?

Just some thoughts about framing the debates about the “future of law schools,” and whether the Carnegie or Best Practices Reports have reasonable chances of being embraced and implemented…..Back to the election returns.

– Steve Friedland