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Tamanaha and His Critics: Transatlantic Reflections on the “Crisis” in Legal Education
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 March 2019
Abstract
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In this article, Lawrence Donnelly, an American born and trained attorney who is now a Lecturer & Director of Clinical Legal Education in the School of Law at the National University of Ireland, Galway, considers Professor Brian Tamanaha's seminal Failing Law Schools, a comprehensive critique of legal education in the United States. The article first thoroughly outlines and analyses the central lines of argument in Failing Law Schools and then evaluates the scholarship written in response to it. The article next compares and contrasts the state of play in legal education in the US with what is happening in Western Europe and posits that, for a variety of reasons, law schools on the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean may actually be better – and more realistically – placed at present than their US counterparts. Lastly, the article urges that legal educators around the world continue an open dialogue on the “crisis” Professor Tamanaha presciently identifies in a concerted effort to ensure that law students receive the best possible training to equip them for working in legal careers that may not closely resemble those pursued by their predecessors in light of rapid globalization, ever-improving technology and consequent changes to how legal services are provided.
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References
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Predictably, legal educators have now incorporated IBR (income-based repayments) into their sales pitches. A law professor asserted in a national law magazine in 2011 that owing to the benefits of IBR law school debt Is not that bad. “After 25 years, any remaining loan balance is forgiven. … Moreover, the loan forgiveness aspects of these plans are basically back-end scholarships.” This is a cavalier way to speak about the lives of graduates who will spend the bulk of their professional careers in a program designed to help people in financial hardship. What law schools portray as a “back-end” scholarship the graduates will experience as a life-crimping financial ball and chain. From the standpoint of the national fisc, it is worrisome when law schools try to introduce naïve students to enter law school by telling them that they won't really have to pay back the scary loan amounts if things don't work out.
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133 As someone passionately committed to clinical legal education, I pose this question and scenario with a heavy and disbelieving heart.Google Scholar
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