Some Concerns about the Future of Legal Education

Journal of Legal Education

Volumn 51, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 469-484

  Becker, David M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0035746024     PISSN: 00222208     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (6)

1. I did not record his remarks, nor did I take notes. But I am confident that my recollection is accurate because its wisdom and importance registered immediately and indelibly.
2. Karl N. Llewellyn made this observation many times. See, e.g., Jurisprudence: Realism in Theory and Practice 318-19 (Chicago, 1962).
3. Karl N. Llewellyn made this observation many times. See, e.g., Jurisprudence: Realism in Theory and Practice 318-19 (Chicago, 1962).
4. Some faculty would disagree - not totally but at least partially - with respect to courses taken during the second and third years of law school. However one states their respective goals, most teachers still present for discussion cases, statutes, regulations, and so on. We synthesize these components of law and apply them because so often the governing principle and its
5. Commercial programs must presumably be standardized because tailor-making them would be prohibitively expensive and would take more time than any law teacher would wish to devote to such a project. One of the most popular commercial computerized instruction models is Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, but CALI's lessons are designed largely for information transfer. For example, a lesson on life estates presents textual explanations of the material followed by questions designed to assess a student's comprehension of the information. The closest CALI comes to approximating a critical-thinking exercise comes in the form of games. For example, its "Buffalo Creek I: A Game of Discovery" lesson - housed in the Civil Procedure section - casts a student as a lawyer on one side of a pretrial motion practice situation. Students choose how to gather information and what motions to make on behalf of their clients, but they must select choices from a stock menu of options. And the exercise's purpose remains information delivery, as is evidenced by the lesson's insistence that some choices are correct and some incorrect. While CALI does not seem to effectively use technology to teach law students to think critically about the law, researchers in the field of artificial intelligence are attempting to create technology advanced enough to do just that. A good article about modeling legal argument with artificial intelligence is Ronald P. Loui et al., Logical Models of Argument, 32 ACM Comp. Surv. 337 (2000). And other researchers (including Kevin Ashley and Vincent Aleven) are working on technology that would use artificial intelligence to teach law students legal reasoning skills.
6. I could be dead wrong about this. Who would have ever thought that the Internet would be used to perform psychotherapy? Yet Internet psychotherapy has arrived, and who knows where this might lead? For a description of what has happened, see Keay Davidson, Site for Sore I's: Therapists Say Reading the Screen No Comparison to Reading Body Language, San Francisco Chron., June 3, 2001, at E9.