Should law professors be required to practice?

Law professors are required to teach (a little) and expected to produce scholarship (a lot).  The third part of the job description is "service," but this can mean just about anything or nothing.  Committee work, CLE lectures, conferences can all count as service, and few schools demand or even expect "service" to include any real practice of law.

Reading Neal Katyal's terrifically interesting new Harvard Law Review comment about his work in the Hamdan case has me thinking about requiring law professors to do some practicing.  Here are a few passages from Neal's piece that prompt these thoughts:

Perhaps fueled by an intense desire to move up in published law school rankings, many of the nation's leading law schools have ramped up course offerings and the number of faculty members devoted to legal theory while disparaging practitioners.  Like any excluded group, practitioners have begun disparaging the theoreticians in return.  We are witnessing one of the most significant developments in the history of American law: the majority of professors on many law faculties are now specializing in areas that are of no obvious relevance to their students' activities upon graduation....

The truth is that very few law schools today prepare students to be lawyers: this responsibility is shunted off to law firms, the judges for whom students clerk, prosecutors' offices, and others.  The obvious exception is law clinics, which do offer crucial lessons in the art of good lawyering.  But clinics, despite their many virtues, still do not reach most law students, and their connection to the theoretical law taught elsewhere in the school is often left murky.

The cost of this educational failure is massive, forcing employers to spend their limited resources on training new lawyers in the basics of their jobs.

Neal's article ultimately provides a partial defense to all the theory in law school, but it still spotlights the insights a law professor gains from working on a real case.  Of course, Neal's amazing experiences with Hamdan, one of the most intriguing modern constitutional disputes, are not what all law professors would get from practicing in their field.  But, speaking for myself, I have gotten so much from working with clients and writing amicus briefs recently, and my forays into practice have greatly enhanced my teaching and scholarship.

So why not demand (or at least expect) law professors to write a real brief or contract or will or legislative proposal every few years?

Posted by DAB