In his 1935 indictment of legal education, Karl Llewellyn denounces the law schools of his time as factories pulling in immature, unprepared young men and, three years later, churning out young lawyers who are not significantly better prepared to deal with the realities of the legal profession. Llewellyn's critique touches upon every aspect of the North American legal education experience: the admission of students who lack the necessary critical research and writing skills, the rules-based “casebook” curriculum that ignores policy or practice questions and the release of graduates into the profession, without any follow-up on their experience that could be used to improve the education of the next generation of lawyers. In short, these graduates may have studied law, but they are not ready to practice law.
The Five Lessons I Learned Through Clinical Education