Reform of the First-Year Curriculum for United States Law Schools

Purpose

The first-year curriculum of United States law schools has remained essentially unchanged for a century. The focus is on common law topics--property, torts, and contracts--that are treated as sharply separated subjects and taught through a case method that emphasizes appellate decisions. The program characteristically lacks integration and attention to the pervasive role of legislation and regulation. It fails to give students a sense of the economic, social, political, and philosophical context of laws, and a sense of "the lawyering process," or what lawyers actually do.

Project faculty wrote a new first-year law curriculum which addresses the shortcomings of the traditional curriculum, and taught the eight newly devised courses to one section (approximately a fourth of the class) of entering students for each of two years.

Innovative Features

A radical restructuring of the traditional curriculum, the new first-year program allows for the introduction of historical, philosophical and social scientific considerations into the study of the law, while continuing to provide the essential basis of legal doctrine, procedure and argumentation that will enable students to succeed in upper level courses.

The new courses have such titles as "Bargain, Exchange and Liability," "Democracy and Coercion," "Legal Justice" and "Government Processes." Some courses draw the bulk of their illustrative material from a single aspect of the law, such as the "Government Processes" course, which focuses on workplace injuries.

A seminar that meets in small sections deals with largely jurisprudential topics that transcend the boundaries of other courses, and includes a critical evaluation of su ch contemporary movements as legal process theory and critical race theory. Even c ourses whose subject matter boundaries seem more traditional, such as offerings in legal process, legal writing and property, have a more historical and philosophical orientation than is customary.

Evaluation

The three following approaches were used to evaluate the original project:

1. Student Response. A wide variety of instruments measured student response, including computer-scored course and faculty evaluations and questions calling for discursive answers about expectations and actual experience. Students were surveyed at the time of graduation to learn about the effects of the program on their second and third years. A series of "town meetings" conducted during the first two years of the new curriculum gave students an opportunity to make suggestions for change.
2. Faculty Reaction. The Dean of the Law Center appointed an independent faculty committee to evaluate the experiment. Committee members attended classes and read syllabi and course material in order to prepare a report on each course and on the total effect of the program.
3. Objective indicators. The grades of students who completed the experimental first-year program were compared with those of other students in second-year courses to see if the differences in preparation resulted in higher or lower grades.

These same methods are being used to evaluate the project's continuation.

Project Impact

Students were generally pleased that they had enrolled in the experimental program, many finding it a better experience than what they believed the standard first-year curriculum to be. Negative responses resulted from such factors as lack of understanding of the nature of the new curriculum, the discovery by individual students that law was a poor career choice, and the inevitable problems that arise in the first offering of a new curriculum.

The performance in second-year courses of the first group of students to experience the experimental curriculum was generally the same as that of their classmates who had been in the regular program. No set of grades from an individual second-year course showed a marked difference in performance between the two groups.

The committee of faculty members established to follow and evaluate the program recommended its continuation for two more years for one of the four sections of first-year students. Since the project ended, three experimental courses have been taught by faculty who were not part of the original group, indicating a spreading of interest in the program among the Law Center faculty.

Lessons Learned

Instructors used the feedback from students and their performance in later courses to make a number adjustments in the program. These changes dealt largely with clarifying goals for the students, avoiding redundancies, and including more instruction in traditional legal doctrine and standard modes of legal reasoning in one or two areas.

As project leaders learned, a program such as this one needs to take advantage of the particular strengths of individual instructors, even at the expense of adherence to a pre-existing plan. Faculty eventually realized that an experimental program is just that, and that mid-course corrections are therefore entirely appropriate.

Instructors attended each other's classes during the first-year of the new program, and met weekly throughout the first two years. This effort to coordinate instruction ran counter to the usual practice of teaching courses in isolation, and ultimately created a sense of common purpose that the faculty appreciated and that, when communicated to their students, became an important factor in the success of the project.

Project Continuation

At the end of the program's third year, the oversight committee decided that the experimental curriculum should continue to be offered to one section of the entering class for the projected five years. Thus, the project continues in much the same form as originally envisioned. Project leaders hope to involve new faculty into the program, thereby maintaining its vitality and increasing the numbers of those who have direct experience with it.

Available Information

Articles about the new curriculum have appeared in the University of Toledo Law Review and the American Bar Association Journal. A detailed description of the program and course syllabi are available from:

Louis Seidman
Georgetown University Law Center
600 New Jersey Ave., N.W.
Washington, DC 20001
202-662-9102
E-Mail: Seidman@Law.Georgetown.Edu

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