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.

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.

Comprehensive history of American legal education. Originally published: Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, [1983]. xvi, 334 pp. Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s examines legal education and its impact on the legal profession and the society it serves. This highly lauded work won a Certificate of Merit from the American Bar Association upon its original publication. Stevens' distinguished career in education and law includes his eight years as Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, seventeen-year term as professor of law at Yale University and nine-year term as president of Haverford College. Well-annotated and indexed, with a thorough bibliography. "the most comprehensive treatment of the subject." --LAWRENCE M. FRIEDMAN A History of American Law, Third Edition (2005) 589

From Barack Obama (Harvard and Chicago) to Bill and Hillary Clinton (Yale), many of our current national leaders emerged from the rarefied air of the nation's top law schools. The ideas taught there in one generation often shape national policy in the next.The trouble is, Walter Olson reveals in Schools for Misrule, our elite law schools keep churning out ideas that are catastrophically bad for America. From class action lawsuits that promote the right to sue anyone over anything, to court orders mandating the mass release of prison inmates; from the movement for slavery reparations, to court takeovers of school funding-all of these appalling ideas were hatched in legal academia. And the worst is yet to come. A fast-rising movement in law schools demands that sovereignty over U.S. legal disputes be handed over to international law and transnational courts.It is not by coincidence, Olson argues, that these bad ideas all tend to confer more power on the law schools' own graduates. In the overlawyered society that results, they are the ones who become the real rulers.

"Legal academics and practitioners in recent decades increasingly emphasize the so-called "globalization" of legal education. The diffusion of the Juris Doctor (JD) degree to Australia, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea, as well as the advent of a very similar Juris Master (JM) degree in China and a shift in the late 1980s and beyond to a new, US-influenced format in India, exemplify shifts toward US legal education practices (Flood 2014). The global and Americanizing trend is evident on the web sites of law schools around the globe, with many law schools competing to be the most "global" in terms of their faculty, curricula, teaching methods, and students. Less pronounced but related to the literature on legal globalization is that on "transnationalization" and transnational processes, which is a strong component of the move toward globalization in legal education. As this book shows, if we look to see what is celebrated as part of globalized law schools and faculties, we see increased cross-border flows of professors and students, teaching of transnational legal subjects, development of particular forms of teaching practice such as legal clinics, explicit focus on transnational rankings, and transnationalized scholarly communities sharing teaching and research methods and approaches across domains of law"--

This volume analyzes the nature of the law school in the university environment, confronting the tension between the vision of law school as a training ground for new lawyers versus the vision of law school place for original scholarship and academic discourse. In examining the role of the law school in modern society, sections are devoted to a myriad of controversial areas of legal study, such as feminist theory, race theory, and post-modernism. This volume offers scholars of legal education a map to the future of law schools.

This insightful Research Handbook provides a definitive overview of the New Legal Realism (NLR) movement, reaching beyond historical and national boundaries to form new conversations. Drawing on deep roots within the law-and-society tradition, it demonstrates the powerful virtues of new legal realist research and its attention to the challenges of translation between social science and law. It explores an impressive range of contemporary issues including immigration, policing, globalization, legal education, and access to justice, concluding with and examination of how different social science disciplines intersect with NLR.