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The nation also has a broader need that is going unmet: lawyers trained to rethink outdated laws and design systems that support human flourishing—legal architects.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 (the philosophy that law is a set of rules created by human authorities, distinct from morality or ethics) at the exclusion of any real consideration of natural law has produced an innumerable set of rules, regulations, and laws that quash individual liberty rather than secure it. Lawyers today lack creativity and are trained to follow rules, not question them. For every problem, they propose another law—stifling innovation and liberty. The accumulation of law now suffocates the pioneers, the entrepreneurs, and the civil society leaders who built America. 

Without legal architects, the law struggles to keep up with societal changes, new technologies, and evolving political realities. The substance and enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 does not check the means used by Big Tech and other corporate behemoths of the modern era to entrench their power.

So long as law schools operate as they do today, these failures will persist. It is no secret that law schools fail to train practice-ready attorneys. If assisting the public with their legal causes is an animating principle of the profession (as it should be), then legal education must graduate lawyers capable of meeting a growing demand for legal services. 

Yet, reorienting legal education around legal services would frustrate the education of lawyers as legal architects. Class time spent working on drafting a complaint, creating a will, and operating a small firm is not conducive to producing deep thinkers about the underlying goals of the law itself. 

In contrast, the education of legal architects would involve a wildly different classroom experience. Whereas legal practitioners may study case law on how the Supreme Court has interpreted the Equal Protection Clause, legal architects would spend that time studying what equality under the law should mean in practice—unconstrained by case law. 

That’s why law education as we know it cannot persist. It must be divided. But don’t expect law schools to lead the charge. They’ve ignored calls for reform for nearly a century. 

A 90-Year-Old Call for Bifurcation of Legal Education

In 1935, legal scholar Karl Llewellyn made a similar case for reform. In his article, “On What is Wrong with So-Called Legal Education,” he argued that those hoping for a shift in the legal profession should not look to those benefiting from the system. 

Llewellyn insisted that legal education should serve society—not just cater to students or academics. He pushed the profession to consider difficult but necessary questions. Are quality lawyers too expensive for everyday Americans? Can certain types of business be standardized and cheapened, and so made available to all who need counsel? Where is it adequate, and where is it not? Where and for whom are there gaps in the tasks performed?

The answer was apparent to him. Between the extremes of indigent and well-off clients was “an unexplored, unexploited, unattended range of legal need.” It troubled him that the profession did not know or necessarily care about the scope and nature of that need. This need is essential to understand and critical to shaping legal education. 

Contemporaries of Llewellyn were not prepared to act on his call for reform. Upon sharing his paper with other scholars, he scoffed that one responded by contending that “students were entitled to have [the type of legal education] they came for.” Llewellyn’s peers dismissed his ideas, showing “truly neither law students nor law professors, as masses, have begun to appreciate either their job, or what can be done with that job.” 

“No faculty,” not even “one percent of instructors,” according to Llewellyn, “knows what [they] are really trying to educate for.” Instead, he observed a tendency among the legal profession to “cling inertly and incuriously” to an “outmoded tradition.” The crutch of tradition thwarted the profession from realizing that the merits of tradition only go so far—”useful here, wasteful or futile there.” Llewellyn explained that law schools operated “as if there were a single kind of lawyer, with a single kind of practice, for which a single kind of training would suffice.”

The idea that one type of lawyer can meet all legal needs is as outdated now as it was in 1935. Law schools and the legal academy must adjust accordingly.

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