ON A PRACTICAL LEGAL EDUCATION

This Wiki entry is an essay with a cause. It was inspired by my experiences and a recent passage I read from the economist Friedrich Hayek. Although I do not wholeheartedly agree with his economic theory, I respect his clarity in thinking and writing. In an essay entitled The Use of Knowledge in Society, Hayek thinks and states "The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess...to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality." I believe this statement is true but with the exponential evolution of technology and the bringing together of minds on the Internet, human beings finally have the ability to fix Mr. Hayek's problem of determining a rational economic order. For example, this wiki brings together some of these dispersed bits.

Law schools around the country are not taking advantage of this partial solution. Instead, our law school educations are stuck in the past (Just think about using ExamSoft for our final exams). As it stands, the law school education is inefficient. I recognize that it is not just the law school education but the country's entire public education system that is inefficient but we must start somewhere.

AN AMBITIOUS ENDEAVOR

We live in a period of great technological change that is sure to bring with it, great shifts in power. It will be our jobs as the greatest minds of our generation to assist others in adapting to this change and adapting to these shifts in power. Let us start by building a better legal education.

I do not know if we have enough power to turn my idea into something that works but I would like to brainstorm a new system on this wiki. This somewhat uncomfortable open space that allows us to actually share our thoughts and gives us the possibility of creating something of substance, is bigger than my grade or your grade, it is and should be the future of our country's education system. It is convenient for the collaboration of great, thought-filled minds. It is efficient in allocating our resources by maximizing our time and space. We should use this technology to better the law school education, to better our learning experiences, to expand our thoughts into ideas, and our ideas into tangible creations.

I started this essay as a rant about how crappy of an experience law school has been. At some point in ranting, I caught a glimpse of my angry self in the reflection of my laptop and realized I can take that anger and transform it into useful energy. We do not need to learn the law as we learn it today. We need to learn the law so that we can create laws for the vastly different present and the incredibly different future that is coming our way.

Our intellectual property laws are stuck in the past. Our corporate laws have allowed our corporations to run rampant (see Essay #2). Our constitutional law has allowed our government and our politics to remain, for the most part, stagnant without maximizing our potential to progress, as government officials and politicians battle back and forth just to win and wave their shiny golden ticket in the air, from Justice to Justice, from court to court, from election to election, from sea to shining sea. This is not only a problem, it is a disaster. When there is a problem, you usually know where to start. For example, if your house has a leak, you determine where it is, and go from there but if your house was destroyed by a hurricane (a real one, not that little lady Irene that New York complained about for weeks), your only option is to collect your insurance and start over. We need to start over and we are the brightest law students in the country. We have the power to rebuild the legal education.

For the most part, the problem in the majority of law school courses is that they don't ask us to think. They instruct us to read and then they test us on our reading comprehension skills. Rather than allowing us to think about what we learned and develop skills necessary for contributing to the legal field, we are asked to spit back information, hoping that the professor gives us a good grade. Those grades are quite limiting too. They force our great minds to compete. And when we finally get passed our grades, it will be a paycheck, or a car, or a house, or a personal space shuttle. I have no problems with competition per se. I have problems with competition without progress which happens to be the basis of our legal education.

True progress comes from building on thoughts, not from getting a check+ on a paper nor a check signed by a law firm. Those things are restraints on our intellectual capabilities. At the level of intelligence we have all shown by now, competing for a grade is worthless.

By taking this course, I realized that I am interested in the law, just not the laws of today. They do not pertain to my life or my future. They are the laws of yesterday, stuck in the past and not forward-looking in any way. We need laws for today and we need laws for tomorrow. This course was not a typical course and I know that because I actually received an education by taking it. I was asked to think and express my thoughts. Those thoughts were challenged, and I was not told I was wrong but asked to build upon them until they were right, for my own benefit and in turn, for society's benefit too. For once, my thoughts on, and education in, a topic were not going to end with the receipt of a grade. I appreciate this so much that I want to take this course and use it as a basis for our future legal education.

I want to take advantage of the bits of knowledge each of us have and combine them to form a real idea for what our legal education needs. We could start small. A single course. It doesn't need a grade because our grade will be shown by our progress.

Imagine a law school course that used this wiki. Each of us was asked at the beginning of the semester to devote one hour a week to solving a serious problem in our country (a problem chosen by a professor in collaboration with students). By the end of the 13 weeks, we would have almost 500 hours of collaboration. That is a lot of hours for great minds to think about a real problem. In the book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell (I know he is a jackass and has weird hair) says that it takes roughly ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. Imagine if this was not just 38 students but 100 students. Imagine if it was not just 1 credit but 4 credits. Could you imagine what our minds could accomplish as young law students if other schools joined in on this practice. Forget mastery, we would have progress.

The best part about this idea is that this course would be fun, educational, and would have impact in the real world. It would be all of these things because we would finally be asking students to think by using their minds instead of their memory-recall. It is not fun to memorize, it is fun to learn.

I do not blame our education system and if I did, I would deserve some blame as well. But in my life, I have ruled out the concept of blame - there are only consequences. Our current education system is a two-way street and at a young age, I learned it was possible to walk down that street without thinking too much and so I stopped thinking so much. I have woken up to the fact that the only thing that will satisfy me is to think and to do something with my thoughts. I have learned from my street-walking mistakes and the consequences of my thoughts from now on will hopefully make up for my past decisions.

I do not want 83 credits for my law school experience. What credit do I truly deserve? I took some courses and did well on my final exams. At some point over the past three years, it hit me that there are no due dates or ends of classes in life. Our education system needs to realize this too. A wiki like this, and a course similar to the one I proposed above, could have impact. As technology has shown, the benefits of longevity are exponential. The idea of artificial intelligence is strange because it is not artificial at all. It is our logic and our volition that creates the intelligence to begin with and it is real. It has just given our brains, and thoughts, the ability to live on after our bodies die.

Mark Twain once said, "Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it." The Internet gives us the ability to collaborate so that we can do something about the world's problems. So let us use technology for that purpose. We can help Mr. Hayek solve his problem. We can become efficient. We can let our thoughts and ideas build upon each other in a more efficient manner. We should combine technology with a legal education so we are not stuck taking exams on ExamSoft but testing our minds in the real world. We could fix the education system and fix the country, credit by credit. And maybe, one day, we will truly know what a credit is, appreciate its value, and give and get credit only when it is deserved.

-- AlanDavidson - 08 Dec 2011