American Legal Education in the 1970’s

1. American Legal Education in the 1970’s Future of Legal Education Professor Clark Cunningham Summer 2007 Tiffany D. Williams

2. Overview • New Standards for Law School Accreditation • Initiatives to promote tolerance and diversity in law school (and ABA) admissions • Beginning of the Clinical Movement • Push for Relevance in the Curriculum

3. New Accreditation Standards Approved • April 1970-Accreditation Committee’s 1st Meeting • Chaired by Richard W. Nahstoll • Subsequent Meetings in June & November of 1970 & April, June and November of 1971 • 1971-Rules were submitted to the Councils of ABA Sections before hey were formally introduced • 1971-Rules Submitted for the Section in Milwaukee • 1973 House adopted Standards • 1974-James P. White becomes Consultant • First copy of Learning and the Law published • 1977 The Council Voted to Accept Profit-Making Schools for Provisional Approval • Current Standards: http://www.abanet.org/legaled/standards/standards.html

4. New ABA Accreditation Standards (1973) • Broad Goals • No arbitrary limitation on number of law schools • Address adequate school funding • Discourage universities from using the law schools as funding tools to ensure adequate funding • Nahstoll: “We did not want the ABA to design, require or encourage law schools to be homogenous.”

5. Preamble to Standards

6. Preamble to Standards, cont.

7. ABA Section on Legal Education, Standards Chairpersons in the 1970’s • 1970-1971 MAXIMILIAN W. KEMPNERNew York, New York • 1971-1972 EDWARD W. KUHNMemphis, Tennessee • 1972-1973 THOMAS H. ADAMSDetroit, Michigan • 1973-1974 CHARLES D. KELSOIndianapolis, Indiana • 1974-1975 R. W. NAHSTOLLPortland, Oregon • 1975-1976 E. CLINTON BAMBERGER, JR.Washington, D.C. • 1976-1977 GEORGE N. LEIGHTONChicago, Illinois • 1977-1978 JOSEPH R. JULIN Gainesville, Florida • 1978-1979 SAMUEL D. THURMANSalt Lake City, Utah

8. Law School Enrollment in the 1970’s • 1973 Enrollment Stats • 16% Women • 7.5% Minority • 1974-157 law schools had a total enrollment of 110,713 students

9. ABA Standards & Race After Bakke • 1976- Judge George N. Leighton becomes Section chairman • 1979-Jane Barrett creates the Minorities in the Profession Committee • Council considered Standard 212 • “Consistent with sound educational policy and the Standards, the law school shall demonstrate, or have carried out and maintained, by concrete action, a commitment to providing full opportunities for the study of law and entry into the profession by qualified members of groups (notably racial and ethnic minorities) which have been victims of discrimination in various forms. This commitment would typically include a special concern for determining the potential of such applicants through the admission process, special recruitment efforts, and a program which assists in meeting the unusual financial needs of many such students, provided that no school is obligated to apply standards for the award of financial assistance different from those applied to other students.” See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eyesontheprize/story/22_bakke.html for more information about the impact of Bakke.

10. Social Activism Influences Legal Education • The social movements for the rights of African-Americans and women added new courses to the curriculum in civil rights law -- which for the first time became a central topic in constitutional law -- and employment discrimination. A body of new social regulation, especially of the environment, created the demand for a new field of environmental law. • Law schools in the South had admitted no black students, and law schools in the North very few until the 1970s; since then black and Hispanic students have made up about 10 percent of each class. • Law schools had strict quotas for women before 1970; between 1970 and 1990, women went from 4 percent to 50 percent of law school enrollments. • To accommodate the new students, law schools in the 1970s and '80s doubled in size. • In the 1970s, law teachers began more aggressively to integrate other disciplines into research and teaching -- among them moral and analytic philosophy, social history, feminist studies, political science and criminology. The most powerful and far-reaching alliances were between law and economics. Robert W. Gordon, “Legal Education in the United States: Origins and Development” http://usinfo.state.gov/journals/itdhr/0802/ijde/gordon.htm

11. Civil Rights Project at Harvard University on Access and Activismhttp://http://www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/research/lawmichigan/DiversityandLegalEducation.pdf “Highly selective college and professional schools tended to have very small numbers of minority students until the late l960s and early 1970s. Their normal recruitment and selection systems did not produce significant minority enrollments and many went through the peak of the civil rights era with very few minority students.4 During the late l960's many universities decided to undertake systematic efforts to increase their minority enrollments, often spurred by the social upheaval of urban riots, student protests, federal policy, and the assassination of Martin Luther King. In the Ivy League, the percentage of black students grew between 1967 and l976 from 1.7% to 4.5%.5 There were similar or larger changes in a number of highly selective public universities. These significant changes, at a time when access to leading universities was becoming much more competitive and the country more conservative, led to opposition.”

12. ABA & Tolerance • Standard 211 prohibits racial, sexual and religious discrimination in law school admissions

13. Bar Admissions • 1972 Multi-state Bar Examination Instituted • An effort to promote more uniformity in national bar admissions

14. The Clinical Movement Begins • 1976- Devitt Committee Formed • To explore standards for admission to practice in federal courts • Clare Committee creates proposals (never adopted) • Developed minimum educational requirements for attorneys going before the Second Circuit • Evidence, criminal law and procedure, professional responsibility, trial advocacy, and civil procedure • 1979-Task Force of Section releases, “Lawyer Competency: The Role of the Law Schools” [The Cramton Report] • Made 28 Recommendations addressed to law schools, the ABA, bar admissions authorities, governmental agencies, and lawyers regarding the improvement of lawyering skills by improved education,

15. Description of the Clinical Movement & Methodology “In the 1970's and 1980's, Bellow and others started to construct a "common vocabulary of discourse on educational issues.” By focusing on clinical education as a method, clinicians began to explore what clinical teachers were and should be doing, how clinical teaching methodology could be infused throughout the law school curriculum, and what the purposes and goals of clinical teaching should be. Important early examples of clinical scholarship focused on clinical methodology, what it meant for students to assume and perform the lawyer's role in the legal system, how to identify and teach the elements of various lawyering skills, how to develop and explain theories of lawyering, how to refine and improve the supervisory process, and how to incorporate experiential learning theory into clinical law teaching.” New York State Judicial Institute Partners in Justice: A Colloquium on Developing Collaborations Among Courts, Law School Clinical Programs and the Practicing Bar Introduction to Clinical Education May 9, 2005 http://www.courts.state.ny.us/ip/partnersinjustice/Clinical-Legal-Education.pdf

16. Curriculum Reform • (a) the interest in international law in the 1950's and 1960's; • (b) the revival of an interest in the social sciences in the 1960's; • (c) the insistence on 'relevance' in the curriculum in the early 1970's, as reflected in courses such as poverty law and consumer protection; • (d) the Carrington Report of 1971, with its acceptance of the feasibility of a two-year curriculum and a clear demarcation between general and advanced law studies; • (e) responses to the articulated concern for deteriorating professional ethics, including various proposals for instruction in ethics; • (f) the clinical education movement of the 1970's and 1980's, with its proposals for broadened skills training and reduced reliance on appellate case review as the basic methodology of legal education; and, • (g) the law and economics movement of the 1970's and 1980's, which prompted both a reorientation of some traditional courses and the implementation of new advanced offerings. John C. Weistart, The Law School Curriculum: The Process of Reform, 1987 DUKE L.J. 317 (1987).