FACILITATING BETTER LAW TEACHING-NOW

[...]I will recommend a set of realistic strategies for law schools to more fully implement the Carnegie Report's recommendations, and introduce a nationwide initiative called Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers that is designed to facilitate this process. Specifically, law schools could do a better job of preparing their graduates to compete for high-quality legal jobs if we did a better job of preparing practice-ready lawyers.12 What might surprise many outside of the legal academy is that there is a potential set of solutions to these problems that is close-at-hand: the recommendations of the Carnegie Report.13 The authors of that report compared legal education to other forms of professional education, to the elements of the practice of law, and to adult learning theory, and reached two basic conclusions.14 First, the report concluded that American law schools do a relatively good job of teaching students about legal doctrine and how to determine that doctrine and its limits.15 But, the Carnegie Report concluded, law schools have traditionally not done a very good job of teaching the skills for deploying that doctrine in the service of real clients or the professional identity required to understand the role of a lawyer.16 Accordingly, the Carnegie Report recommended a fairly straightforward prescription: