Law Students' Corner

• Citation: Vol. 78 No. 3 Pg. 15
• Publication year: 2009
• Pages: 15
• topic: Administrative Law

Law Students' Corner No. 78 J. Kan. Bar Assn 3, 15 (2009) Kansas Bar Journal March, 2009

Law Students' Corner

Tradition vs. Innovation: Time to Rethink the First-Year Curriculum?

By Travis Turner, Washburn University School of Law

The vast majority of American law students share a relatively universal first-year curriculum. Generations of lawyers have shared a similar introduction to legal education. The practice of law, on the other hand, has changed dramatically since the introduction of the traditional first-year curriculum. The gap between education and practice may provide insight into a central question facing legal education: Is it time to change the approach? In this essay, I propose that American law schools use recent changes in the curriculum at Harvard as an opportunity to explore introducing administrative law, international law, and more skills instruction into the first year.

In 1870, Christopher Columbus Langdell became the dean of Harvard Law School. Langdell radically changed the approach to legal education by creating a three-year curriculum taught by a full-time faculty.^[1] Langdell's influence on legal education did not end with institutional changes. He also divided the curriculum into defined courses of study. These courses, to the chagrin of a century of law students, ended with final examinations. Traditionally, the first-year curriculum has been comprised of a combination of six courses — contracts, torts, criminal law, civil procedure, property, and constitutional law. This lineup is the legacy of Langdell's...