By John Sexton

This is a time when legal education has a lot on its platter.

There is important new work to start: to meet the challenges and opportunities presented by the globalization of human endeavor and interdependence, and by information technologies that are radically changing how humankind communicates and thinks.

There is much unfinished business to complete: to connect law studies more coherently with the studies of the other human sciences; to open law schools and the legal profession to voices and ideas too long unheard; to discover ways of making justice and equality realities for those in our society to whom they remain promises unkept.

And there are long-time, vital responsibilities that we must continue to fulfill: to ceaselessly reexamine the law and question its adequacy; to broad and deepen its intellectual foundations and improve its capabilities; to educate lawyers to practice their profession with exacting technical competence, self-critical insight, resourceful imagination, and humane understanding.

With all this to do?and with the constant need to be concerned about the costs of doing it?there is particular danger that the various components of our mission will be viewed as mutually competitive within any law school. Viewing them as competitive might lead a law school to attempt to do a little of each, following a strategy of spreading its resources around among the competitors; or it might lead to concentrating on some components and giving up on others. Either course would be a bad mistake?and not only because of the shallowness that is likely to follow the first and the narrowness that is sure to follow the second. It would be a bad mistake for the deeper reason that the several components of our mission are complementary, and that there is no better way to advance each of them than by advancing them all jointly.

Of course, resource-allocation choices need to be made at any given time and place; a particular school may need or want to devote special attention to one component or another at a particular moment. And of course every school will have its own way of integrating the components; there is no single model that will work for everybody. But it matters greatly that some form of integration of the components be pursued as a desideratum, not merely tolerated as a necessity ? that the components be understood as enhancing one another, not merely coexisting, still less as coexisting in chilly discomfort.

To function and evolve, the law needs praxis and theory, meticulous doctrinal analyses and vaulting reconceptualizations, the kind of ?local knowledge? and insiders? familiarity that is necessary to grip how legal institutions work, and the perspectives of outsiders that are necessary to call the familiar into question and to make us look at it afresh. Those perspectives can come from interactions with people trained in other legal systems and other scholarly disciplines; they can come from interactions with people who have been forced to look at our own legal system from outside because they could find no place inside it; they can come from interactions between law students who are motivated to ask not only how? but why? and law teachers who are concerned to take the why questions seriously. Genuine interaction is the key to all of this, and the law schools of this country are ideal locations for it.

Law school classrooms are not assembly lines where legal knowledge is packed into would-be lawyers like tuna fish into cans. Law school classrooms are sites of discourse where the law is constructed by the ways we talk about it. How the issues for discussion get framed, who gets to say what in the process of framing them, how open the discussion is to a negotiation of alternative visions of relevance, how informed and open the faculty and the students will be about the range of ideas and values that might inform alternative visions or relevance?these are important questions because, as James Boyd White reminded us in Heracles? Bow (p. 34):

Every time one speaks as a lawyer, one establishes for the moment a character—an ethical identity, or what the Greeks called an ethos—for oneself, for one?s audience, and for those one talks about, and proposes a relationship among them. . . . One is always establishing in performance a response to the question ?What kind of community should we who are talking the language of the law establish with each other, with our clients, and with the rest of the world? What kind of conversation should the law constitute, should constitute the law??

And for almost all future practitioners, scholars, teachers, wielders, and shapers of the law, the performative conversations through which we become conscious of those questions—if we ever will—start in law school.

The richer, more imaginitative, and more welcoming of multiple perspectives those conversations are, the more likely it is that law as practiced every day and as evolved every year and as reconceptualized every so often in future will be serviceable for our widest needs and our highest aspirations. And the better lawyers each of our graduates will be in a world so complex and fast-changing that the only sure thing is that all of them will have to deal with issues we cannot now fully foresee.

This is why it is illusory to suppose that any law school can train lawyers to begin to practice competently without challenging them to think about the law in an environment in which law?s premises and processes are constantly under scholarly examination. Or to suppose that serious scholarly examination can proceed very far except in an environment awake to the problems constantly churned up by the daily workings of the law. Or to suppose that the levels of understanding of those problems necessary to address them with either professional or scholarly excellence is likely to be attained and maintained except in an environment alive to the insights of a range of humanistic and social sciences, and awake to the perceptions of those who can view our legal systems from outside or underneath.

Skimping on any of the elements necessary to nurture the right kind of environment for legal studies is tempting but shortsighted and eventually self-defeating.

* This article appeared in the August 1997 AALS Newsletter