Wednesday, June 15, 2022

Law Students Should Learn Law Practice (1933)

The law student should learn, while in school, the art of legal practice. And to that end, the law schools should boldly, not slyly and evasively, repudiate the false dogmas of Langdell. They must decide not to exclude, as did Langdell—but to include—the methods of learning law by work in the lawyer's office and attendance at the proceedings of courts of justice. . . . They must repudiate the absurd notion that the heart of a law school is its library.

Jerome Frank, "What Constitutes Good Legal Education?" (speech to the ABA Section of Legal Education, 1933), cited in Edward T. Lee, The Study of Law and Proper Preparation (Chicago, 1935), quoted in Robert Stevens, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill: Univ. N. Carolina Press, 1983), pp. 156-57.

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