{"id":6,"date":"2013-11-13T04:17:51","date_gmt":"2013-11-13T04:17:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/leahaplunkett\/?p=6"},"modified":"2013-11-13T04:17:49","modified_gmt":"2013-11-13T04:17:49","slug":"law-school-interrupted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leahaplunkett\/2013\/11\/13\/law-school-interrupted\/","title":{"rendered":"Law School, Interrupted?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When it comes to law schools, everyone\u2019s a critic these days.\u00a0 Even President Obama has piled on, suggesting that law schools \u201cwould probably be wise to think about being two years instead of three.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 The third year is a waste of money, critics say, because it doesn\u2019t get students ready to be lawyers.<\/p>\n

Like any good lawyer, I have a question about language: what does it mean to be a lawyer?\u00a0 Does it mean that you identify a client\u2019s problem, propose a solution, and fight like hell to get the result your client wants?\u00a0 Or are you only a lawyer if you do those things for rich corporate clients?<\/p>\n

This question isn\u2019t just lawyerly yammering.\u00a0 Law schools today offer a lot of opportunities for third year students (and second years, for that matter) to represent actual clients.\u00a0 It\u2019s just that these clients tend to be real live people rather than businesses.\u00a0 Never mind that the essential skills of lawyering\u2014advance your client\u2019s interests zealously and ethically, conduct thorough legal research on the issues you\u2019re working on, and lay out strong arguments in written, oral, and other forms of advocacy\u2014don\u2019t change much from one legal job to the next.<\/p>\n

In the view of many law school haters today\u2014as well as many law school supporters\u2014real law is something you do on behalf of big businesses.\u00a0 Everything else is just practice.\u00a0 A recent article in the Economist sums up this patronizing position nicely: \u201cLaw faculties have long sent their students to gain practical experience by giving free advice to the poor. . . [which] often means learning how to be good at suing businesses.\u201d<\/a> (Last time I checked, businesses spent a great deal of time suing each other, so it\u2019s pretty unfair to say that poor people have cornered that particular litigation market.)<\/p>\n

It also means learning how to be damn good at being a lawyer\u2014regardless of which defendant you’re suing.\u00a0 This past weekend, I had the pleasure of celebrating the 100th<\/sup> birthday of the oldest student-run legal services organization in the country: the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau<\/a>.\u00a0 Since 1913, second and third year students at Harvard Law School have \u201cgain[ed] practical experience by giving free advice to the poor\u201d on such vital matters as divorce, eviction, and fair wage practices.\u00a0 They have argued cases in many courts and other tribunals, including the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.\u00a0 The Bureau has been home to more than 2,600 Harvard Law students\u2014including First Lady Michelle Obama, Governor Deval Patrick, and Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.\u00a0 Justice Brennan once said of his service there: \u201cBureau exposure is to the hard reality, yet fascinating world of the practitioner, not as it\u2019s depicted in books, but as it actually is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today, in the Bureau and other similar programs across the country, third year law students gain significant experience with this hard yet fascinating reality.\u00a0 Under the supervision of licensed instructors, they handle the nuts and bolts of lawyering.\u00a0 Not only are they getting ready to be lawyers, they are essentially working as lawyers already.\u00a0 For them and the clients they serve, it would probably be wisest to continue this work on law as it actually is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When it comes to law schools, everyone\u2019s a critic these days.\u00a0 Even President Obama has piled on, suggesting that law schools \u201cwould probably be wise to think about being two years instead of three.\u201d\u00a0 The third year is a waste of money, critics say, because it doesn\u2019t get students ready to be lawyers. Like any […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6240,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leahaplunkett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leahaplunkett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leahaplunkett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leahaplunkett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6240"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leahaplunkett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leahaplunkett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leahaplunkett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions\/9"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leahaplunkett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leahaplunkett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/leahaplunkett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}