Beyond ratings: Actually doing our jobs

The Conglomerate has rightfully devoted careful attention to Larry Gavin's recent SSRN post, The Strange Death of Academic Commercial Law. Christine Hurt and Vic Fleischer have each posted thoughtful proposals for reconfiguring the law school curriculum to bring this venerable and valuable subject back to legal academia.

Vic's suggestion warrants further elaboration in this forum. There is something to be said for reconfiguring the law school curriculum, especially in a third year that is as widely wasted as it is dreaded, according to the functional needs of new lawyers rather than the intellectual predilections of sinecured professors or, even worse, those professors' personal convenience.

Short of a comprehensive restructuring of the upper-level law school curriculum -- which after all is the sort of proposal that sinks tenure petitions, ends deanships, and generally withers otherwise promising academic careers -- perhaps we can consider a more modest intermediate step. Every law school student should complete a six-credit, two-semester "capstone" sequence as part of her or his third-year experience. Relying strictly on my personal arsenal of curricular weapons, I could conceivably offer full-year sequences in economic regulation (from antitrust to full-blown, command-and-control regulation of entry and rates), agricultural law and agribusiness law, the law of disasters, or natural resource and public lands management, among other possibilities. These are not offerings that lend themselves to a single 2-, 3-, or 4-credit course. In the tradition of, say, sports and entertainment law, they undertake to explain an entire way of doing business and to integrate such bodies of law as may be pertinent -- all from a prospective client's perspective rather than the professor's idiosyncratic view of the field. Team teaching, skills training, and clinical experience can all be incorporated into this capstone sequence.

Of course, an academy that is paralyzed by fear of The Ratings will be loath to try something different, no matter how sensible or how useful the alternative might be. The question therefore must be asked: To what extent does mastering the art of winning an unfair academic game keep us from doing our jobs?