Many flavors of law school

Over the past few issues of the AALS News, AALS president John Garvey (Dean of BC Law) has written about the importance and value of pluralism in the legal academy as a whole.  I'm a fan of both Garvey and his focus on this issue. 

There are strong forces right now pushing law schools to assimilate to common norms.  The strongest of these, perhaps, is the perceived importance of the U.S. News rankings.  Because those rankings give serious weight to only a relatively small number of factors, law schools across the spectrum are making similar decisions (for example, hiring those with the potential to do national scholarship) which are likely to diminish some of the distinctions that have traditionally existed between schools.

Perhaps the largest of those distinctions, historically, has been between the "graduate school" model of education which has emphasized scholarship by the faculty, and the "professional school" model which instead emphasizes teaching skills.  In conversations with those working at third and fourth-tier law schools, I have been impressed with two things:  First, the strength of at least some elements of their program (usually on the teaching side), and second, their desire to change so as to no longer be a third- or fourth-tier school.  Universally, the reaction to this desire is to put more emphasis on scholarship.

Regardless of whether this increased emphasis is good for a school or not (that is an ongoing argument I won't enter here), it will probably make American law schools less diverse, as purely professional schools become more rare.

-- Mark Osler