Legal Education Has Lost Its Way
Legal education has lost its way. Its primary purpose should be training lawyers to meet society’s legal needs, yet no one involved—law schools, faculty, or bar exam prep companies—seems to care. These actors are too invested in the status quo to allow for meaningful reform. The solution? Overhaul legal education by creating two tracks: one for practicing attorneys and another for designing the legal systems of the future.
Millions of Americans can’t afford basic legal representation. This violates core constitutional guarantees. The Fourth through Eighth Amendments promise specific legal rights—rights that become meaningless without access to counsel.
Constitutional protections against government overreach mean nothing without legal representation. Try fighting an illegal search, property seizure, or jury denial alone—you’ll lose. The same holds for everyday legal battles: Unrepresented parties consistently lose to represented landlords, employers, and ex-spouses. Without a lawyer, both your constitutional rights and personal interests are effectively unenforceable.
Our constitutional and social orders cannot function as intended if people cannot access an attorney. They will actively unravel (as they are already doing) if only some people can make good on their promises and protections. The legal profession cannot idly let this occur if its members are going to uphold their oaths to support the Constitution and assume a special responsibility for the quality of justice.
Writing Better Laws, Not Just More Laws
The nation also has a broader need that is going unmet: lawyers trained to rethink outdated laws and design systems that support human flourishing—legal architects. Decades of an insistence on legal positivism (
Article from Reason.com
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