A Modest Proposal

Professor William Wang has taken the possibilities that technology offers and turned legal education on its head. Rather than simply advocating the integration of computers with traditional pedagogy, Prof. Wang proposes a radical disaggregation based on the premise that technology has provided a brave new world for the teaching industry. His article is in the nature of an inquest into the fundamentals of higher education in general, legal education in particular. Whether this essay was penned in the spirit of Swift's A Modest Proposal the reader will have to judge. Certainly for legal educators, it offers a fresh perspective on some current problems. —Eric Noble

The Restructuring of Legal Education Along Functional Lines

By William K.S. Wang*

[Originally published in 17 The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues 331 (2008)] Full text PDF version available.

Abstract

Currently, law schools tie together five quite distinct services in one package, offered to a limited number of students. These five functions are: (1) impartation of knowledge, (2) counseling/ placement, (3) credentialing (awarding grades and degrees), (4) coercion, and (5) club membership. Students do not have the opportunity to pay for just the services they want, or to buy each of the five services from different providers.

This article proposes an “unbundled” system in which the five services presently performed by law schools would be rendered by many different kinds of organizations, each specializing in only one function or an aspect of one function. Unbundling of legal education along functional lines would substantially increase student options and dramatically increase competition and innovation by service providers. This offers the hope of making available more individualized and better instruction and giving students remarkable freedom of choice as to courses, schedules, work-pace, instructional media, place of residence, and site of learning. Most importantly, this improved education would be available on an “open admissions” basis at much lower cost to many more individuals throughout the nation, or even the world.

In order to explain how to restructure the existing law school system, this article will discuss the five educational services presently performed by law schools, the disadvantages of tying these services together, a hypothetical unbundled world of legal education, the advantages of the unbundled system, answers to some possible objections to the system, and some recent developments in the use of technology and distance learning in law schools.

The main theme of this article is the advantage of unbundling. A more modest sub-theme is the benefit of use of technology and distance learning.

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*Professor, University of California, Hastings College of the Law.