The Law School Laboratory: A Call for Developing the “Third Apprenticeship” Through Experimental Research
Publication Date
2-12-2018
Document Type
Article
Organizational Units
Sturm College of Law
Keywords
Legal education, Professional identity, Carnegie Foundation, Pedagogy
Abstract
It has now been a decade since the Carnegie Foundation illuminated a troubling omission in U.S. legal education: a neglected “third apprenticeship” in “professional identity and purpose.” While the standard J.D. curriculum focuses on learning to think like a lawyer (the cognitive apprenticeship) and increasingly offers opportunities to acquire practice skills (the skills apprenticeship), the neglected third apprenticeship laid out in the 2007 Carnegie Report deals with helping students find a sense of personal meaning and public contribution in their roles as lawyers. Legal education has been subjected to a steady stream of faultfinding for over a century, including the recent feeding frenzy of criticism over rising educational debt. But the third apprenticeship detailed in the Carnegie Report merits special attention due to a growing and diverse body of empirical support. In this post, I argue that we have very successfully taken the first two steps in addressing professional identity and purpose—empirical researchers have thoroughly diagnosed the issue and some law schools have innovated in response. I argue that our next step should be to build on the current momentum in both the curricular innovation movement in law schools and the new and expanding networks of legal education researchers to begin to design experimental studies assessing how interventions affect different aspects of professional identity and purpose. Any effort to substantially revise the remarkably enduring U.S. law curriculum and pedagogy needs to present a highly persuasive body of evidence. An ambitious experimental research agenda (developing what I call the “law school laboratory”) would greatly bolster the case for larger reforms. In the next decade, this new wave of research will allow us to begin to systematically fulfill the promise of the third apprenticeship.
Copyright Statement / License for Reuse
All Rights Reserved.
Publication Statement
User is responsible for all copyright compliance.
Recommended Citation
John Bliss, The Law School Laboratory: A Call for Developing the “Third Apprenticeship” Through Experimental Research, New Legal Realism Conversations (Feb. 12, 2018), http://newlegalrealism.org/2018/02/12/bliss-on-law-teaching-reform/.