Saturday, July 11, 2015

Podcast: Episode 12: Three Rules for Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers

Welcome to our twelfth episode of The Legal Watchdog podcast.

Today we discuss legal education reform and, more specifically, my recently published essay Three Rules for Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers.  These rules are so simple that even law professors could implement them!  First, professors should teach a real body of law, instead of the useless mishmash of cases found in the typical casebook.  Second, professors should teach all of the topics within a given subject area, rather than just the topics they find interesting.  And third, professors should publish law review articles that are useful to lawyers and judges.  Matt, of course, disagrees with many of my ideas; surprisingly, though, so does Amy.  (Knightly would have agreed with me, but he was off on a wine tasting tour of northern Wisconsin.)  

Here are additional links to some of the things we referenced in the podcast:

My other law review articles are available here.

The law review article (not mine) simply titled Fuck can be found here.  (Hat tip to my favorite law blog, the Irreverent Lawyer, for alerting me to that one.)

A discussion of the Texas law profs raking in huge salaries, bonuses, and even “forgivable loans” can be found here.

We also mentioned the scam blog movement — a group of blogs that exposed, well, the law school scam.  This movement is probably chiefly responsible for the huge decline in law school enrollment.  (The practicing lawyers of the country thank you, scam bloggers!)  Some of my favorite scam blogs include OTLSS, LSTCITLSS, 3TR, JDD, LSTB, and ATL.

To meet your podcast hosts, click here

Our funky, jazzy theme song ("Cold Hurt") and our cool intermission song ("Murgatroyd") were generously provided by David Pizarro.  To hear more of David's music you can listen to his philosophy-psychology podcast Very Bad Wizards, or go directly to his SoundCloud page.

Finally, here is the podcast: