I think a teaching law firm is a wonderful idea but sadly something that an institution like Columbia is not going to entertain. The complaints about law school (failure to teach real skills, incredibly high cost of tuition with the hollow promise of a job) are complaints that don't apply to Columbia in the eyes of the administrators here (though they really should). As much as people stress out about getting jobs at EIP and elsewhere, 99% of us will be employed at graduation. The vast majority of us will also be working in jobs where our employers have the resources to make up from the lack of training we may get from the three years spent here. In a similar vein to teaching law firms, I went to the RebLaw? conference at Yale in February and heard about the great work Fred Rooney is doing at CUNY with what he calls "Social Justice Incubators." The idea is that CUNY will give recent grads office space and mentorship over a two-year period to help them start their own practices while simultaneously providing more low-cost legal services to low-income people. I mentioned this program to Dean Chapnick and asked if Columbia ever considered trying to start something like this, and she said there's just no demand for it - in here view, the difference between Columbia and CUNY is that Columbia grads have very little problem in the job market, while CUNY grads can't get jobs and need programs like these as a result. Necessity is the mother of invention, and unfortunately you're not going to get innovation from a school like Columbia that doesn't feel like the status quo is really so bad.

The shame of this is that the status quo is far worse than it appears. Yes, we will all be employed after graduation, but because Columbia doesn't care about leaving after three years with real legal skills, it is very difficult to find employment in jobs in which the employer doesn't have the resources to train you (i.e. non-big firm jobs). Eben constantly tells us to start our own practice after we graduate, and people think it's a ridiculous suggestion, in part because it is. At the moment, Columbia isn't training us to be lawyers but instead merely kicking us down the line to employers who have accepted the responsibility of training us instead. But we're the ones who suffer under that status quo - yes, we get jobs, but we often have to sell our license in those jobs in order to get the training that we should be receiving in exchange for the $150K that we've already paid.

-- JaredMiller - 09 Jun 2012

On a related aside, I submit that, knowing nothing about law school or the legal profession before coming here, I am happy that there is virtually no course choice in the first year. If there was, advantage would be given to sons of lawyers and daughters of professors. You may not know the good "legal methods" classes to take. -- AlexKonik - 19 Apr 2012

The overall structure of 1L year would be "Principles of liability in the common law."

1. Contract Liability

• Contracts is about how to allocate risk with respect to things we expect. It is about protecting our expectations.

• Torts is about how to deal with planning for the things we don't expect. It is about what to do about the public planning for things people don't expect to happen - rat poison exploding, etc.

• Property is interesting as a domain of civil law liability because property mixes contracts and torts and therefore should be taught in the second semester or should be dealt with as a way of checking the understanding of the first two. It is the combination of "one day my son this will be yours" and "you can't build a tannery next to a schoolyard"

Professors should teach all of this at once and later have a series of courses about more specific doctrinal areas - commercial transactions, mass torts, etc. The central spine of the thing could be articulated best by separating it from the other parts.

-- SkylarPolansky - 18 Apr 2012

I think this is a great idea as well and would love to be involved. I do think, however, that the Wiki would be a great place to share it, at least for the rest of the semester. I find that e-mail lists end up being very cloistered and exclusive. I think the really nice thing about the Wiki is that anyone can glean ideas/thoughts/etc. in an open space without any restrictions, and I would be surprised if Eben would be mind if we used this space to expand the number of opportunities we have to get involved. -- JaredMiller - 02 Apr 2012