First step, Alan, is that this has to stop being 1,691 words long, and become less than 1,001 words long. You can and do write clearly. Now you have to write shorter, by structuring as clearly as you write. The first requirement is the outline. It is possible to write a 100,000-word book without an outline, but an essay of 1,000 words must be carefully outlined. Each point, usually down to the paragraph and in some places to the sentence level, has to be placed in relation to the others, and the transitions, or white spaces, between points must be carefully filled. Sequence is the most important kind of order: it brings the rest in its train. Here you begin in an orderly fashion and then the sequence breaks down.

Put this inside the limits of the assignment and then we can both go to work on it.

ON A PRACTICAL LEGAL EDUCATION

In the essay The Use of Knowledge in Society, Friedrich Hayek wrote "The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess...to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality." I believe this statement is true for now but with technology evolving, human beings may finally have the ability to fix Mr. Hayek's problem of determining a rational economic order (e.g. this wiki brings together some of those dispersed bits of knowledge by efficiently allocating resources to all minds and by maximizing time regardless of space). This great technological change will surely bring with it great shifts in power. It will be our jobs as the lawyers of our generation to assist others in adapting to this change and adapting to these shifts in power. However, law schools around the country are not yet taking advantage of technological possibilities and not sufficiently dealing with the effects of technological change. Our whole education system is stuck in the past and I propose that together, we should build a better legal education.

We should transform the law school experience because we do not need to learn the law as we learn it today. We need to learn the law so that we can create appropriate laws to govern the present and adapt to the incredibly different future that is coming our way. It takes only a single glance at our current legal regime to see the disastrous effects caused by our being stuck in the past. When a disaster strikes, one needs to start from scratch while fixing past mistakes. As the brightest law students in the country, we have the power to rebuild the legal education, fixing past mistakes and building on old and new ideas. This wiki is convenient for such a collaborative endeavor.

For the most part, law school courses do not ask us to think. They instruct us to read and ask us to spit back the information we read rather than allowing us to think about what we learned and develop skills necessary for contributing to the legal field. We hope the professor gives us a good grade but those grades are quite limiting, as they force our great minds to compete. When we finally get passed our grades, we are graded by a paycheck. I have no problems with competition per se. I have a problem with competition without progress and that competition is the basis of our current legal education. Progress comes from building on thoughts, not from getting a check+ on a paper nor a check signed by a law firm. Those things are restraints on our collaborative abilities. At the level of intelligence we have all shown by now, competing for a grade is worthless to ourselves and to society.

I am interested in the law but not in the laws of today. The laws of today do not pertain to my life or my future. They are the laws of yesterday, stuck in the past and not forward-looking in any way. We need laws for today and we need laws for tomorrow. In this course I was asked to think and express my thoughts. Those thoughts were challenged. I was not told that I was wrong but just asked to make them coherent, for my own benefit and in turn, for society's benefit. For once, my thoughts on, and education in, a topic were not going to end with the receipt of a grade. This truly educational course could be used as the basis for our future legal education.

Let’s combine all of our bits of knowledge and experiment with a single credit online course. At the beginning of the semester, each of the students are asked to devote one hour per week to solving a serious problem in our country (a problem chosen by a professor in collaboration with students). By the end of the 13 weeks, the class would have almost 500 hours of collaboration. Even a single moment of collaboration would be better than Congress. In the book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell (I know he is a jackass and has weird hair) says that it takes roughly ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. Imagine if this was not just 38 students but 100 students. Imagine if it was not just 1 credit but 4 credits. Could you imagine what we could accomplish as energetic and eager law students, especially if other schools joined in on our course? Forget mastery in a field, we could breed progress.

I do not want eighty-three credits for my law school experience. I took some courses and passed some exams. I do not see why that deserves credit. There are no due dates or ends of classes in life and our education system needs to realize this fact. We should combine technology with a legal education so we are not stuck taking exams on ExamSoft but testing our minds in the real world. A course similar to the one proposed above, could have a positive impact on the world. The Internet has given our minds longevity, allowing everybody access to our thoughts and ideas. It gives us a collaborative tool that can help solve Mr. Hayek’s problem. We can let our thoughts and ideas build upon each other and come closer to efficiency. We could fix the education system and fix the country, credit by credit. And maybe, one day, we will truly know what a credit is, appreciate its value, and give and get credit only when it is deserved.