Trending: Law School Reform and Legal Education Innovation
| Publication year | 2011 |
| Pages | 101 |
| Citation | Vol. 40 No. 11 Pg. 101 |
2011, November, Pg. 101. Trending: Law School Reform and Legal Education Innovation
November 2011
Vol. 40, No. 11 [Page 101]
When articles or topics become popular online, they are said to be "trending." In these articles, which will publish up to three times per year, Alli Gerkman discusses recent headlines, articles, blogs, and online discussions on trending legal topics. Readers may submit trending topics of interest to the legal profession to agerkman@du.edu.
About the Author
Alli Gerkman is a lawyer and works as Content Manager at IAALS, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver-agerkman@du.edu.
Law School Reform and
Legal Education Innovation
These days, it is nearly impossible to follow legal news (or even mainstream news(fn1)) without finding charged discussions about what law schools and legal educators should be doing better. The latest crescendo of talk about legal education reform has, of course, been amplified by a lagging economy and law school graduates who are buckling under the weight of unprecedented levels of student debt.
"Welcome to My Nightmare"
An overview of recent online discussions about legal education starts close to home. In August, University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos made waves around the country (and no doubt inside the walls of the University of Colorado's Wolf Law Building) when he launched the then-anonymous blog entitled "Inside the Law School Scam." In his inaugural post, "Welcome to My Nightmare," Campos wrote:
In the end, the fact that law professors don't intend to scam their students is irrelevant. We are scamming them, or many of them, and we know we are-or we would know if we paid any attention at all to the current relationship between legal academia, legal practice, and the socio-economic system in general, which naturally is why so many of us avoid doing so at all costs.(fn2)
If you don't spend countless hours reading law blogs, you might not know that Professor Campos's use of the word "scam" wasn't simply careless polemic. It was a nod to the growing ranks of "scambloggers"-that is, recent law grads turned bloggers who focus on what they consider to be the great scam perpetrated by law schools on their...
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