Contrary to conventional narratives about legal education, Aspiration and Reality in Legal Education reveals a widespread desire among law teachers to integrate both theory and practice into the education of versatile and civic-minded lawyers. Despite this stated desire, however, this aspiration is largely unrealized due to a host of intellectual and institutional factors that produce a profound gap between what professors believe about law and the ideas they communicate through their teaching. Drawing on interviews with over sixty law professors in Canada, David Sandomierski makes two important empirical discoveries in this book. First, he establishes that, contrary to a dominant narrative in legal education that conceives of theory and practice as oppositional, the vast majority of law professors consider theory to be vitally important in preparing "better lawyers." Second, he uncovers a significant gap between the realist theoretical commitments held by a majority of professors and the formalist theories they almost uniformly convey through their teaching and conceptions of legal reasoning. Understanding the intellectual and institutional factors that account for these tensions, Sandomierski argues, is essential for any meaningful project of legal education reform.

A critical history of the Americanization of legal education in fourteen countries The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the export of American power—both hard and soft—throughout the world. What role did US cultural and economic imperialism play in legal education? American Legal Education Abroad offers an unprecedented and surprising picture of the history of legal education in fourteen countries beyond the United States. Each study in this book represents a critical history of the Americanization of legal education, reexamining prevailing narratives of exportation, transplantation, and imperialism. Collectively, these studies challenge the conventional wisdom that American ideas and practices have dominated globally. Editors Susan Bartie and David Sandomierski and their contributors suggest that to understand legal education and to respond thoughtfully to the mounting present-day challenges, it is essential to look beyond a particular region and consider not only the ideas behind legal education but also the broader historical, political, and cultural factors that have shaped them. American Legal Education Abroad begins with an important foundational history by leading Harvard Law School historian Bruce Kimball, who explains the factors that created a transportable American legal model, and the book concludes with reflections from two prominent American law professors, Susan Carle and Bob Gordon, whose observations on recent disruptions within US law schools suggest that their influence within the global order of legal education may soon fall into further decline. This book should be considered an invaluable resource for anyone in the field of law.

There is a myth that lingers around legal education in many democracies. That myth would have us believe that law students are admitted and then succeed based on raw merit, and that law schools are neutral settings in which professors (also selected and promoted based on merit) use their expertise to train those students to become lawyers. Based on original, empirical research, this book investigates this myth from myriad perspectives, diverse settings, and in different nations, revealing that hierarchies of power and cultural norms shape and maintain inequities in legal education. Embedded within law school cultures are assumptions that also stymie efforts at reform. The book examines hidden pedagogical messages, showing how presumptions about theory’s relation to practice are refracted through the obfuscating lens of curricula. The contributors also tackle questions of class and market as they affect law training. Finally, this collection examines how structural barriers replicate injustice even within institutions representing themselves as democratic and open, revealing common dynamics across cultural and institutional forms. The chapters speak to similar issues and to one another about the influence of context, images of law and lawyers, the political economy of legal education, and the agency of students and faculty.

The 19th century saw dramatic changes in the legal education system in the United States. Before the Civil War, lawyers learned their trade primarily through apprenticeship and self-directed study. By the end of the 19th century, the modern legal education system which was developed primarily by Dean Christopher Langdell at Harvard was in place: a bachelor's degree was required for admission to the new model law school, and a law degree was promoted as the best preparation for admission to the bar. William P. LaPiana provides an in-depth study of the intellectual history of the transformation of American legal education during this period. In the process, he offers a revisionist portrait of Langdell, the Dean of Harvard Law School from 1870 to 1900, and the earliest proponent for the modern method of legal education, as well as portraying for the first time the opposition to the changes at Harvard.

This dissertation examines the attitudes, pedagogical practices, and teaching materials of Canadian contract law professors to better understand the relationship between theory and practice in legal education. Professors express a widespread aspiration to translate theory into practice - to incorporate theoretical and critical perspectives as a means of producing "better lawyers." However, an analysis of the substantive theoretical attitudes about law reveals that this aspiration is imperfectly realized. When professors describe their beliefs about law, they overwhelmingly express strong commitments to realist and critical ideas, drawn largely from American legal thought, that emphasize law's contingency and indeterminacy, and that construe considerations of policy, context, and politics as central to an understanding of law. However, the attitudes about law reflected in key manifestations of "practice" reveal an apparently contradictory set of commitments. Professors describe and conceive of legal reasoning, which can be considered a foundational practice shared by legal professionals, in a way that foregrounds formalist attitudes of law. These conceptions treat judicial reasoning seriously, privilege the importance of doctrine, and emphasize the determination of relevance with reference to an internally coherent set of rules - all of which effectively marginalizes considerations of policy, politics, and context. Moreover, the way professors teach, how they formulate their learning objectives, the decisions they make about substance, and the materials they use all put into practice these formalist ideas, rather than the realist and critical attitudes to which professors are purportedly committed. A similar tension arises as between critical introductory statements in Canadian contract law casebooks and the casebooks' more conventional presentation of substance, as viewed through the remedies chapters. These observations imply that Canadian legal thought may be characterized by theoretical eclecticism co-existing with methodological homogeneity, a failure to operationalize theoretical commitments. Moreover, the dynamics reveal a complex interplay between structure and agency in legal education in which professors participate affirmatively in reproducing the structures that condition them. This complex interplay partially accounts for the tenacity of conventional categories, concepts, and pedagogical formulae, and is a crucial factor to understand in the pursuit of any transformative vision for legal education.