I think, Alex, that there is some value to this more 'academic' training. Doctors, for instance, go through med school where they gain the knowledge necessary to practice, and then they spend a number of years in their residency learning how to put that to practical use.

With that said, I don't mean to imply that a law firm "residency" is the right option for lawyers. I just mean to say that a structure whereby a school focuses on understanding the doctrine from a big-picture, theoretical view and hard training comes after is not bad in and of itself. I think, even, spending time thinking about the material in this way allows us to be more creative lawyers; if our time was spent learning how to draft every motion you might need to know, we can't spend that time mulling over the sort of creative arguments we should be thinking about to be good advocates.

To that end, then, I look skeptically at your argument that better schools train worse practitioners and are only looked upon with favor by firms because they serve as filters. I should hope that the opportunity to learn from creative legal thinkers -- like Eben and the many others we have at CLS -- about more than just the hard tools of lawyering allows us to be better lawyers. Once we learn how to draft contracts and motions, that is.

-- MatthewCollins - 18 Jun 2012