Event Title
Paradigm and Parable: Legal Education’s Separate but Equal Premise and ABA Standard 405
Document Type
Presentation
Start Date
12-6-2019 3:30 PM
End Date
12-6-2019 4:10 PM
Presenter Biography
Craig T. Smith joined the Carolina Law faculty in 2010 and serves as a Clinical Professor of Law and Assistant Dean for the Writing and Learning Resources Center. That center operates Carolina’s nationally ranked legal writing program and a growing Academic Excellence Program. His teaching and research interests focus mainly on legal research and writing. He has served on the editorial boards of several journals, chaired accreditation teams for the American Bar Association, and been the president and a board member of the Association of Legal Writing Directors.
Smith attended Michigan Law School, serving on its law review and graduating cum laude. He practiced law at Pierce Atwood in Portland, Maine, worked for a court and a ministry in Germany as a Bosch Fellow, and earned an LL.M. magna cum laude from the Universitaet Potsdam. He also clerked for Judge James Carr of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, taught at Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law, and directed the legal writing program at Vanderbilt University Law School.
Description
Legal education indeed operates under a separate but equal paradigm. That paradigm rests on a premise, a logical proposition regarded as self-evident or already proved. The premise is that legal educators can justly be separated into distinct classes who receive quite unequal treatment. That premise, moreover, is fixed in stone. It’s a pillar of legal education’s governing architecture. The pillar is Standard 405 of the American Bar Association’s Accreditation Standards. It defines, for every accredited law school, a minimally acceptable “professional environment” for a law faculty. At a glance, Standard 405 seems a dull set of rules: four “shall” statements, arranged in sections, totaling 181 words. Viewed with insight, however, it’s a parable: a “micro” story about how our world actually works and how it should work. What’s in that story? And what does it tell us about the long-term arc of legal education?
Paradigm and Parable: Legal Education’s Separate but Equal Premise and ABA Standard 405
Legal education indeed operates under a separate but equal paradigm. That paradigm rests on a premise, a logical proposition regarded as self-evident or already proved. The premise is that legal educators can justly be separated into distinct classes who receive quite unequal treatment. That premise, moreover, is fixed in stone. It’s a pillar of legal education’s governing architecture. The pillar is Standard 405 of the American Bar Association’s Accreditation Standards. It defines, for every accredited law school, a minimally acceptable “professional environment” for a law faculty. At a glance, Standard 405 seems a dull set of rules: four “shall” statements, arranged in sections, totaling 181 words. Viewed with insight, however, it’s a parable: a “micro” story about how our world actually works and how it should work. What’s in that story? And what does it tell us about the long-term arc of legal education?