The Legal Kaffeeklatsch

When law school classes resumed this week after spring break, all of the 199 ABA accredited law schools were teaching their students online. There were surely hardships and hiccups, technical glitches, and perhaps some inept professors and students...but the screams of outrage have been muted. On the contrary: the feedback from blog posts, the twitter feeds and the like has had a tone of enthusiasm. At Miami Law, where I have a (virtual) front row seat, Dean Tony Varona has noted I have seen many silver linings over the last couple of weeks. Our community has come together in ways that make us very proud. Acts of kindness abound. Many of our colleagues are stretching themselves to do extraordinary work in support of the greater law school community. As just one example, the members of our IT team have been nothing short of heroic in their efforts. Our faculty colleagues have been putting into place innovative teaching approaches that leverage the advantages of distance learning and, ...

The Sound of One Hand Clapping? The Report of the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Education is out! A press release, and the Report itself, are on the ABA website here: https://bit.ly/2QHJDJE. Two years of truly hard work lie behind the Report's (intentionally) short pages. I can attest to that, since I had the privilege of working with the Commission behind the scenes. The Commission found that legal education and licensing urgently need reform. The obstacles to attaining that are set forth with stark eloquence in the Report: And yet--the Report holds out hope, and lays out a road map for overcoming these hurdles.  Has it landed at the wrong time, in the midst of the Corvid-19 crisis? Maybe, in the sense that it is difficult for it to compete for attention with genuine issues of life and death. But maybe not, because the existential crisis has -- literally overnight -- required changes of legal education and the licensing process that were unthinkable just one m...