IU professor urges law schools to change program length

IU law professor William Henderson is starting a national conversation urging law schools to redesign their curriculum standards to lessen years in school.

He said it’s not a matter of the number of years of law school but a matter of restructuring the law schooling process.

“I think that the real issue is that law school loses a lot of its educational steam after the first year, and part of it is because so much of the learning is classroom-oriented and there’s certain things that you just don’t get to master unless you get into the ‘operating room’ and actually do the work,” Henderson said.

The educational value of law school, Henderson said, is measured by quality instead of quantity.

On Aug. 23, at a meeting at Binghamton University in New York, President Obama presented the idea of law schools reducing their required years to two instead of three.

Obama’s reasoning behind this reduction includes rising tuition costs and the utilization of work experience during the third year instead of a full year of classes.

Henderson was Obama’s law student at the University of Chicago. If Obama’s two-year plan had been in place at the time, Henderson would’ve never had him as his professor, he said.

The IU professor said he agrees with Obama that law programs should be redesigned. However, he thinks cutting down years won’t necessarily improve quality.

“There are two claims here,” Henderson said. “One of them is that law school is too long and needs to be shorter, but a claim you hear equally as often is that law graduates are unprepared to practice law.”

Time can only help students so much, Henderson said, but if the skeletal structure of the school isn’t sturdy, graduates will have a difficult time.

“Right now, the third year of law school probably has the least marginal value of the three years,” Henderson said. “Students are hungry for learning that will accelerate their professional development, and they’re just not getting it in the third year.”

Currently, the Maurer School of Law is a three-year law school accredited by the American Bar Association. In addition to three years, the ABA requires 86 credit hours in order to be able to take the Indiana Bar Examination, Henderson said.

Henderson said he thinks IU could implement a two-year program by integrating classroom learning with legal internships in a logical sequence.  

Each state legislature or state supreme court decides the curriculum that must be followed in order to practice law in each state. Obama’s statement about the reduction of law school years is a state issue, not a national issue.

“The ABA has to change, and then the 50 states have to change,” Henderson said. “I just think that what’s at the heart of President Obama’s critique ... A better solution would be to redesign the second or third year so that it will solve the quality problem.”

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