Legal Education and the Law-School Curriculum

Any consideration of the future course of American legal education must proceed from recognition of a fundamental fact: the fact, namely, that the system of legal education which we have already developed in this country, and which stands embodied in the law-schools belonging to this association, represents the most original and unique contribution as yet made by the United States to educational progress in any field.No consideration of possible change or reform can proceed intelligently without basing itself on this foundation of solid achievement; and no consideration of possible change or reform is entitled to hearing unless it involves no impairment or threat of impairment to the efficiency of the structure of legal education which we already possess.In this existing structure and the ends and purposes which it embodies we are fortunate in having a standard by which to test the promise of proposed reforms.The mere fact that a thing is new and different should give it no title to adoption; rather it should impose a burden of proof that the new thing is more in harmony with the underlying purposes and objectives of our existing legal education than is the established thing for which we are asked to substitute it.What we must ask is whether it is only something new, or whether it is really a better way than the way we are now using for accomplishing the purposes of legal education as we envisage them.The basic question which therefore emerges at the very outset is the question of what we conceive as the major ends and purposes of legal education.Do we envisage ends or purposes at all, or are we so completely habituated to a routine that we find no room to ask what the routine is for, and feel no need of standards by which to test it?What is it that we are trying *An address delivered at the Chicago meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, December i93o.