LAWS3344 · Law

American Legal Education

Boston College Law School

This seminar is designed for students who would like to examine carefully the nature of their legal education. We will commence with the English and Continental origins of legal scholarship and teaching, examine the development of formal legal education in America from the founding of the Litchfield and Harvard Law Schools to the rise of Legal Realism, and conclude with the pressing controversies facing America's law schools today. Among the topics covered will be the relationship between formal legal education and the practicing bar, the changing composition of the faculty and the student body, the early pedagogical controversies, the different methods and ends of modern legal instruction and the role played by law schools in fundamental disputes about jurisprudence political ideology, economics and social reform. A research paper will be required rather than a final examination. Multilithed materials. Course will be taught at Harvard Law School.