The Inherent Inseparability of Doctrine & Skills

A quick screen shot of my brief bit in Linda Edwards' fantastic new book The Doctrine Skills Divide: Legal Education's Self-Inflicted Wound.  I think the title speaks for itself, and the book should be required reading for everyone interested in reforming legal education today.

Wake Forest Law Review Publishes "Revisiting Langdell: Legal Education Reform & The Lawyer's Craft"

The Wake Forest Law Review has published its 2015 Legal Education Reform Symposium volume entitled Revisiting Langdell: Legal Education Reform & The Lawyer's Craft.  The volume can be purchased here and I hope it will make a positive difference in legal education reform. 

My introductory article in the volume highlights longstanding, substantial damage Christopher Columbus Langdell has inflicted on law schools and legal education. Much of this damage stems from three of Langdell’s wrong and counterintuitive notions: (1) law is a science of principles and doctrines known with certainty and primarily traced through case law; (2) studying redacted appellate cases is “much the shortest and best, if not the only way” of learning such law; and (3) despite Langdell’s own roughly fifteen years of practice experience, practice experience taints one’s ability to teach law. I briefly highlight problems with, and harms resulting from, each of these wrong notions. Among other things, I briefly explore: (A) contradictions, oversights, and wrong assumptions in Langdell’s views; (B) how the very meanings of “theory” and “practice” reject Langdell; (C) how the necessary role of experience in meaning itself rejects Langdell; (D) parallels between Langdell and unworkable Cartesian dualism; and (E) how the necessary role of framing in the law rejects Langdell. I also briefly survey some remedies suggested by reason, experience, common sense, and modern cognitive psychology. These include rejecting the redacted appellate case method as a primary mode of instruction, recognizing the necessary fusion of theory and practice, recognizing the need for practice experience in law professors, recognizing the embodied nature of meaning and the resulting role of practice and simulation in good legal education, embracing the humanities (including classical rhetoric) in legal education, abandoning meaningless distinctions such as distinctions between “doctrinal” and “non-doctrinal” courses, and abandoning “caste” systems demeaning those with law practice experience and elevating those who lack such necessary experience.  My introduction can be found here.

Double Sonnet of William James: Grace That Brings Good Order in the Head (Addition to "The Apology Box")

            Double Sonnet of William James

                                   I.
  
Descartes, pure mind and body can't be kept

Apart as claimed.  Drawn from experience,

They share a common nature, common sense

That both derive from shared experience.

I am therefore a monist.  I accept
That all is drawn from pure experience:
The body, mind, and all relations.  Hence,
Truth, too, must come from shared experience.

Truth is what works in shared experience.
With free will, physics is indifferent.  Hence,
Determinism turns on how we find

An absence of free will.  Because we find
Determinism horrid, we are led

To free will's higher order in the head.

                            II.

Descartes, why suffer needless doubt except

When something fails to work.  There's little sense

In doubting for the sake of doubt. I've kept

So many years of James I see no sense

In doubting James.  Efficiencies accept

That James exists until experience

Astounds such thinking--I of course accept

Doubt when thought stumbles with experience.

For me, religious doubt makes little sense.
Belief in God disturbs no physics.  Hence,

If God brings better order to my mind,

I'd err denying God.  Of tender mind,

I savor God and angels overhead,
And grace that brings good order in the head.

© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016

  
The current contents of "The Apology Box" can be found here.