Law practice in the twenty-first century requires resilience, but that is not what law schools teach. Instead, we teach students to be motivated by anxiety—about grades, rankings, salaries, prestige—and to cling to the hierarchies that feed that anxiety. To be effective, attorneys need to be dexterous and nimble. They must be able to transfer their learning to new contexts, perhaps fail, learn from that failure, and try again. To be effective, they must understand the inter-connectedness of clients, problems, and areas of the law. Yet this is not what law schools teach. In fact, the standard law school curriculum, centered on specialization and expertise, does exactly the opposite. This article offers a critical examination of legal education's failure to teach resilience, and our choice to cultivate anxiety and the entrenchment of hierarchies, despite the harm to students, clients, and communities.
Institutions of legal education prize students and faculty members who dedicate themselves to narrow specialization and the expertise presumed to follow from such myopic focus. Why? Perhaps it is due to the law's continued growth and increasing complexity. Perhaps it is because of the uncompromising demands of legal employers and wealthy clients. A less seemly truth—certainly not discussed in law school classrooms—is that specialization and expertise become a shortcut to make us all bigger fish in smaller ponds. And that is good for business and self-preservation, whether a law student, professor, or attorney.
This article examines the history of legal education and the profession through the lens of my own experiences as a student and a faculty member, as well as my students' experiences. I postulate an alternative theory for our troubling obsession with expertise and specialization, one in which the manufactured “need” for specialization is simply another tool to maintain the law's exclusivity. The quest for expertise and specialization is simultaneously a cause and an effect of modern legal education, which has long been driven by anxiety: anxiety that the law will not be sufficiently elite, venerated, and powerful. That it will devolve from a profession to a mere trade. That we will throw open the gates and let in the “unworthy.” We see this quest for exclusivity in niche seminars offered each semester, certificate programs, the proliferation of specialty journals, absurdly narrow public interest fellowships, and law firms parsed into more practice areas than they have attorneys (or so it seems). If we really intend to teach students the difficult process of building expertise or to give them a broad and balanced foundation on which to specialize, legal pedagogy would look radically different. If we really want to train lawyers who are prepared to practice their chosen profession--rather than simply groom them to adopt and reenact our existing hierarchies and power structures--legal education would center resilience, not anxiety.