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Home > Journals > Michigan Law Review > MLR > Volume 38 > Issue 7 (1940)

 

Abstract

A conspicuous and very wholesome manifestation today in legal education is dissatisfaction with legal education. With education in general for that matter. Doubtless the dissatisfaction begins with the general and extends to the particular. The law teacher, that is, observes that the college graduate who comes to him can barely read and write the English language, is scarcely aware that there are any other languages, is wholly devoid of intellectual curiosity, wholly untrained in hard thinking, wholly uninformed about and uninterested in the ideas which make for or against civilization. It makes the law teacher think there must be something wrong with what is euphemistically called college education. Then, if he is at all honest and clearsighted, he begins to wonder about his own product. He observes that the law graduate still cannot speak or write good English, though he now uses slightly longer words in mis-expressing his lack of ideas--that he still wistfully believes that there is "the law" about something if the professor would only tell him what it is--that he supposes the law is divided into "subjects" the way modern highways are divided, with concrete barriers to keep you from veering off one lane and on to another going in the opposite direction--that he thinks the Constitution was adopted to protect business, and estates invented to nourish lawyers--that he has one unfailing reaction to any attempt to investigate the purposes of society and the functions of law: "it's just theoretical." Perhaps, it is borne in on the law teacher, there may also be something wrong with legal education.

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