Technology Serves Law Students, Practitioners
by Edward J. Reisner
In the middle of the nineteenth century, as law schools were
developing on college campuses, they often were seen as a supplement to
the clerking experience their students were receiving working part time
for local lawyers. Until the middle of the twentieth century, at least
some lawyers still trained by "reading the law" in law offices. While
legal education has been fairly stable for more than 50 years, over the
400 years of legal practice on this continent, law schools have changed
in response to the expectations of the profession and students, as well
as to the economy and the society it serves.
Lawyers already are fulfilling continuing legal education
requirements by teleconference, programs delivered by satellite, and,
now, by Web-based education. Technological improvements arrive almost
daily. While the debt load of graduating law students and the overall
cost of legal education increase, traditional law schools are being
forced to look at innovative ways to hold down costs and meet the
challenges of delivering an ever-increasing panoply of courses, some
requiring instructors with very specialized knowledge or experience.
A new graduate from a law school in 1901 would find both legal
education and the practice of law almost incomprehensible in 2001. With
the increasing pace of change, it will not take another 100 years for us
to feel "out of place" unless we adapt and change. While the concept of
a law school with no classrooms may be at least surprising, if not
alien, to us today, it may be a logical extension of a traditional law
school 10 years from now.
The bar exam has been the key to the profession, a method of
distinguishing between the qualified and the unqualified, among
graduates from law schools of all types, sizes, and traditions. And,
once admitted, the marketplace sorts the eminent from the merely
competent.
If legal education did not adapt, we would still be teaching by
lecture, there would be no legal clinics, and students would graduate
with no knowledge about those fields of law that have developed in our
own lifetimes. Let law schools continue to develop and incorporate the
best of new techniques and technologies.
Edward J. Reisner, U.W. 1972, is an assistant dean at the U.W. Law
School, Madison. His responsibilities have included career services,
alumni relations, and other administrative matters.
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