A Fresh Look at Lawyers\u27 Education

These are remarks made by Robert MacCrate at the T.C. Williams School of Law in October, 1992. Mr. MacCrate served as chairperson of the ABA Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Narrowing the Gap, and is a former president of the ABA

Keynote Address—The 21st Century Lawyer: Is There a Gap to Be Narrowed?

This law school symposium on the Twenty-First Century Lawyer reflects a fundamental shift in the focus of legal education within the academy—from law in the abstract toward the reality of law in the daily work of lawyers. While holding firm to their scholarly mission, law schools are giving increasing attention to the world of lawyer performance and the needs of their students to be prepared to participate effectively in the legal profession. The 1992 Report entitled Legal Education and Professional Development-An Educational Continuum, by a task force of the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, which I was privileged to chair, helped crystallize this change in focus and is the precipitating cause for this symposium. A glance at what has gone before can help place the discussion in context

Introduction: Teaching Lawyering Skills

This article is an introduction to the articles resulting from a “Teaching Lawyering Skills” symposium at the University of Nebraska College of Law. The focus of the papers is upon what law schools are and should be doing to improve the teaching of skills and values and to implement the vision of the American Bar Association Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession of building an educational continuum. This symposium makes a significant contribution to the growing dialogue in recent years on innovative and creative ways of teaching lawyering skills and professional values while identifying the impediments that law teachers encounter in providing such instruction