Third Year of Law School: Part II

Well, as I suspected, there is a wide range of opinion of whether we should continue to have a third year of law school.  Let's see if I can sum up the prevailing themes, for and against:

1) We should not have a third year of law school because it is a waste of student's time and money.  With law school tuitions at $30K for private schools and at least $15 K for public schools, per year, this is not an insignificant argument.   Plus, this argument goes, perhaps students can find a better use of their time, either by starting in the working world or doing some sort of internship, that would provide more marginal utility than another year of classes.

2) We should have a third-year option of law school, which would give students the ability to do supervised intern- and externships if they wished, but also graduate early if they so desired. 

3)  We should have  a third year of law school because students cannot learn enough in two years to become quality, ethical lawyers.  Law school does not consist only of classroom learning, but also involves learning how to become  an upstanding member of the profession.   We need this third year, the argument goes, to turn our students into better lawyers all around.  This is the "why rush students into practice" argument.

4)  We should have a third year of law school because having only two years would (a) devalue the professional degree, and (b) make the hiring pressures impossible for first years, thereby affecting the second year of law school as well. 

5)  We should eliminate law school as a profesional school, entirely, and reinstitute the LLB degree, allowing prospective lawyers to enter law school straight from high school (as they do in Europe and used to do here.  Hugo Black never attended college, but went straight into law school because he was rejected from his college choice).   

6) On the other extreme, as Orly argues for below, we should make a two year degree available for most lawyers and then force law professors to get a PhD if they want to teach.

Personally, I'd pick option #2.  Although I loved law school, and got a lot out of my third year, I don't think that it's necessary for most students.  Those who want to stay and take extra classes or do internships may do so;  those who wish to graduate early, either for professional or financial reasons, may also do so.  This already happens in many law schools I know of, where students graduate a semester early in order to pursue other options. 

Orly's idea about requiring law professors to get a PhD is interesting, but ultimately unworkable, I think.  Law is different from other graduate disciplines in that it daily affects people's lives and livelihoods.  Unlike other disciplines, such as English, we need our professors to have at least little practice/real world experience, which they would not have if required to get the PhD.  As Robert Cover wrote almost 20 years ago, violence is inherent in law's practice:  "Legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death." (Robert Cover, Violence and the Word, 95 Yale LJ 1601 (1986)).   Accordingly, to have a corps of professors who only approach the teaching and scholarship of law from the theoretical side would be extremely dangerous, in my estimation. 

Over at the Legal Ethics Forum, my fellow blogger David Hricik discusses the problems inherent in legal academia's disconnection from the law.    As he notes,  professors are shut up in the ivory tower enough as it is.  To require a PhD would simply exacerbate the problem all the more.