Law school vs. graduate school

Last May I fin­ished my 3L year, and am now the proud pos­ses­sor of a JD. On Thursday I began my first year pro­gram as a grad­u­ate stu­dent in the his­tory of sci­ence. The expe­ri­ences, per­haps unsur­pris­ingly, have been strik­ingly dif­fer­ent: law school is, ulti­mately, prepara­tory to prac­tic­ing law as an attor­ney, and much of its empha­sis is on track­ing stu­dents in that direc­tion.  Graduate school in the human­i­ties and social sci­ences, mean­while, is about train­ing future academics.

Law school’s ped­a­gog­i­cal approach does not nec­es­sar­ily reflect this ulti­mately prac­ti­cal goal, though, and its focus on the so-​​called “Socratic method” and on appel­late case law is, many argue, an inef­fec­tive means of train­ing effec­tive lawyers:

Martha Minow, the new dean of Harvard Law School, where the Langdellian method of teach­ing from appel­late opin­ions was devel­oped, has called for “another case method” closer to the one used in busi­ness and public-​​policy schools, and con­sis­tent with W and L’s approach and Carnegie.

PrawfsBlawg: What’s hap­pen­ing in legal edu­ca­tion?.

In con­trast, grad­u­ate school is emi­nently suited to its goal of train­ing new aca­d­e­mics. We read other aca­d­e­mics, write like aca­d­e­mics, and teach and grade like the teach­ers we expect to be. Very dis­con­nected from the “real world,” per­haps, and often overly bound up with the­ory — but still, if one is aim­ing to work in this area, the train­ing is, in a very real sense, prac­ti­cal.

Law school, though, while push­ing the prac­ti­cal, does not teach it. At most, one might argue that it teaches a kind of think­ing — a very crit­i­cal kind of think­ing — but it does not teach stu­dents to prac­tice law (nor to teach it, for that matter).

I’m curi­ous to see how my reflec­tions on law school edu­ca­tion change as I pur­sue my PhD — I expect I might feel more pos­i­tive about it as more time passes. We shall see.