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The Chronicle of Higher Education's Daily Report |
Going to law school to get a law degree has become a little like going to an ice-cream parlor for a scoop of vanilla. Plenty of people still do it, but many schools' brochures — like the elaborate flavor-and-topping menus on ice-cream parlor walls — now tempt them with something different, something more.
Law students can have their juris doctor credential flavored with a concentration in a specialty like environmental or intellectual-property law. Or they can go for a double, mixing their J.D. with a master's degree in some other field like business administration, clinical psychology, or the geosciences. If they wish, they can top their selection off with a master of laws (LL.M.) degree, signifying expertise in some subfield like alternative dispute resolution.
The curriculum at law schools has undergone a major transformation in recent years, as many have set up niche programs to attract students. A few critics, however, are beginning to speak out against the trend, arguing that it is driven largely by marketing considerations and hurts legal education.
Specialization "has become almost the norm," says Edward L. Rubin, dean of Vanderbilt University Law School and a former chairman of the Association of American Law Schools' curriculum committee. He says he welcomes the trend out of a belief that it helps provide law students "with a more intense educational experience" than they might get through a traditional legal education. It is also a way to train students for the real world, where law firms increasingly focus on distinct practice areas.
But in an article published this summer in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Michael A. Olivas, a professor of law at the University of Houston, argued that specialized J.D. programs "are generally poorly organized and shallow." And Brian R. Leiter, a professor of law at the University of Chicago who edits a widely read blog on legal ed-ucation, Brian Leiter's Law School Reports, regards much specialization as "faddish" and "not necessarily based on careful research about the actual needs of the job market or careful examination of the academic merits of the programs."
Navigating Currents
The rise of niche programs comes at a time of intense debate over whether the curriculum of law schools should undergo profound change.
This broader discussion was spurred by a January 2007 report, by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which concluded that too few students are graduating from law school adequately prepared to work in the field. Although some legal educators cheered the report, others greeted it with skepticism, and the question of how to respond to it remains high on the agenda of the Association of American Law Schools, which holds its annual meeting this week.
The Carnegie report actually said almost nothing about specialization and instead called upon law schools to improve how they teach practical skills and to focus more on ethics and professional responsibility. Yet the Carnegie report and many advocates of specialization offer the same basic critique of legal education as it has been delivered for the past century, saying that it turns off students and wastes much of their time by putting them through three years of courses taught through the Socratic method.
"You can't give graduate students the same thing three years in a row," says Mr. Rubin, of Vanderbilt. "What was terrifying the first year and interesting in the second becomes boring by the third."
What remains uncertain is whether the shift toward specialization at law schools conflicts with or complements the Carnegie report's recommendations. "I don't think anyone has really sorted this out in a really clear way," says William M. Sullivan, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation and the report's lead author.
Lawrence C. Marshall, director of clinical education at Stanford University's law school and head of a consortium of 10 law schools developing responses to the Carnegie report, say its recommendations and the trend toward specialization "really dovetail together very nicely." Both, he says, call for students to get practical training in the areas they will be working in "to help them think not just like lawyers but like clients."
As law is practiced today, "lawyers need to think through problems in a host of very complicated social and economic situations." says Michael A. Fitts, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. A key distinction many legal educators draw is that lawyers of the past told clients what not to do, but today's lawyers are often called upon to tell clients what to do.
Some of the concentrations and master-of-laws programs being offered by law schools — like those dealing with alternative dispute resolution or mediation — offer precisely the sort of practical training the Carnegie report recommends.
But Mr. Sullivan, of the Carnegie Foundation, says his report's recommendations are advanced little by specialized programs that simply offer new content without changing how law students are taught.
And some experts on legal education worry that the pursuit of specialties or joint degrees in other areas will divert many law students' time and attention away from the practical training and ethics instruction the Carnegie report advocates.
Catherine L. Carpenter, a professor of law at Southwestern Law School who formerly led the American Bar Association's curriculum committee, cautions that hiring faculty members to offer specialized programs often leaves law schools with less money to offer courses in other areas. "Specializations are costly," she says, "and there is a tradeoff in terms of the other content courses you can offer in depth."
Standing Out, Fitting In
The rapid growth in niche programs at law schools began in the 1990s, spurred by a combination of competition for students, financial considerations, and pressures from faculty members within law schools and elsewhere in the university.
Jeffrey A. Dodge, assistant dean for admissions and operations at Hofstra University's law school, said in an e-mail message that in recruiting trips "I run into students from across the country who are choosing law schools based on concentration offerings." The 15 concentrations that Hofstra has established in recent years — in fields like family law, energy law, real-estate law, and taxation — are "definitely huge selling points, and I find them to be very successful recruitment tools," he said.
Climbing the U.S. News & World Report rankings of law schools can be a daunting task, but, by making focused expenditures in a given specialty, a secondor third-tier law school can at least distinguish itself as having a highly ranked program in an certain area, such as health-care law.
Also helping to drive the growth in specialized programs is a shift in the faculty at law schools. In their quest to draw attention to themselves through published research, many law schools have been hiring faculty members who, in addition to their J.D.'s, hold Ph.D.'s in other fields. Often they have become advocates for the creation or expansion of programs in their areas of expertise.
Similar forces have helped drive the rise of joint-degree programs at law schools. Professional schools throughout universities have been hiring more faculty members with crossdisciplinary backgrounds and entering into collaborations to try to find new ways to attract students.
"We have a very strong university, and we are offering the strengths of this university to students who have an interest that goes beyond law," says David F. Levi, dean of Duke University's law school, one of the first to seek to offer an array of joint-degree programs. About a fourth of Duke's law students now earn joint degrees, and "I have never heard anyone say I regret the time I spent on that extra course work," Mr. Levi says.
When the American Bar Association surveyed accredited law schools in 2002, it found that 55 percent of respondents offered specializations and certificates in areas like international law and intellectual property, and nearly 85 percent offered joint-degree programs. About 55 percent offered masterof-laws and other post-J.D. degrees — up from just over 40 percent 10 years earlier — although many of those programs were geared toward international students.
The Association of American Law Schools surveyed its members on curriculum changes two years ago and, while failing to get enough responses to quantify how many new niche programs were out there, nonetheless was able to document a flurry of new activity. (The group has posted the law school's survey responses on its Web site.)
Uncertain Payoff
Drew M. Gulley, a third-year law student at Hofstra and editor of its law review, says many students there are seeking concentrations partly out of a belief that "some employers expect specialization in particular fields."
There is no research showing how much specialization improves law students' job prospects, however, and legal educators and experts on law firms disagree on its impact.
Judith Welch Wegner, a former senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation and a professor and a former dean of the law school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says, "in this climate, I don't think that is how law firms are going be hiring." At best, she says, having a specialization will just be a "tiebreaker" for people up against comparable candidates.
Tom Hill, who directs recruiting for the San Francisco-based law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, says a joint degree's impact on employability "is probably relatively neutral," helping only with firms with a practice in that area. "If you have a joint degree where we don't have an area of practice, it can be somewhat harder to convince us that your interest in the firm is a genuine interest," he says.
A SAMPLING OF LAW-SCHOOL SPECIALTIES
U. of Connecticut School of Law, Hartford, Conn.
Seven joint-degree programs, including a J.D./M.A. in public-policy studies in conjunction with Trinity College, and a J.D./master of library science in conjunction with the library-sciences department at Southern Connecticut State University. Connecticut also offers a master's of laws in insurance law and four J.D. concentrations, leading to certificates in intellectual property, tax studies, law and public policy, and human rights.
U. of Dayton School of Law, Dayton, Ohio
The "Lawyer as Problem Solver" curriculum requires students to choose one of three tracks: advocacy and dispute resolution, personal and transactional law, or intellectual property, cyberlaw and creativity. Students must complete four or five track courses, including a track-specific course in dispute resolution, in addition to general course work.
Stanford Law School, Palo Alto, Calif.
Twenty-five joint-degree programs, most of which began as part of a major curriculum overhaul announced in 2006. J.D./Ph.D. programs offer doctorates in fields such as economics, philosophy, and psychology. The school also offers four-year joint J.D./master's degrees in business administration, public policy, and international policy, and three-year joint J.D./master's degrees in conjunction with one-year master's programs in fields such as education, engineering, and various area-studies programs.
William Mitchell College of Law, St. Paul, Minn.
Students are invited to chart their own course through the curriculum after completing a requirement-loaded first year. Most of the possible pathways are quite general — one is simply labelled "bar preparation." But students have the option of venturing down much more specialized roads by, for example, taking courses offering them expertise in intellectual property or tax law.
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