In this era of swiftly moving opinion it seems like sacred calves are born with increasing regularity. The latest sacred cow in the legal profession is the need for law schools to produce "practice-ready" graduates. University of Maryland law professor Robert Condlin tries to slaughter that particular cow (which he says was actually born in the sixties) in his research paper, 'Practice Ready Graduates': A Millennialist Fantasy, reported on by WSJ Law Blog and Tax Prof Blog. Conceding that the legal labor market is in crisis, Condlin writes:
Law school curricular reform is not an economic stimulant and trying to use it for that purpose will destroy something that works in a futile attempt to revive something that does not. Legal education’s principal purpose should be (and always has been) to develop a critical understanding of law and legal institutions, and the thinking skills that underlie law practice tasks generally. Becoming proficient at practice tasks is the work of work, so to speak, the result of performing the tasks over and over again, on a daily basis, under the guidance of experts, as part of the process of being socialized into the profession. Legal education, like most higher education, helps one avoid becoming a captive of socialization more than it socializes, and adapt received wisdom to changing beliefs, wants, and needs more than locking that wisdom in its present state.
The push for "practice-ready" grads, Condlin concludes, has nothing to do with improving the education of law students; instead, it is a move by profit-pressed law firms to save money.
