Training the Whole Lawyer

• Author: Deanell Reece Tacha
• Position: At the time of the Symposium, Deanell Tacha was a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. On June 1, 2011, she became Dean at Pepperdine University School of Law.
• Pages: 1699-1706

1699

Training the Whole Lawyer

Deanell Reece Tacha*

“The training of lawyers is a training in logic.”1

“The result [of American legal education] is to prolong and reinforce the

habits of thinking like a student rather than an apprentice practitioner,

conveying the impression that lawyers are more like competitive scholars

than attorneys engaged with the problems of clients.”2

I am honored to be involved in this important Symposium. As a sitting

judge, I have been fortunate to observe and read the work of hundreds—or

probably thousands—of lawyers. In very real ways, we judges are the

consumers of legal education. The clients, of course, benefit from their

lawyers’ education, and society reaps the long-term benefits of perpetuation

of the rule of law; but it is we the judges that scrutinize, criticize, and utilize

the analytical, written, and oral-advocacy skills of lawyers, so one could

describe this Article as a consumer report for legal education. If I could be

so bold, this consumer thinks that, in most ways, American legal education

has done a good job of training millions of lawyers. If measured in sheer

numbers, the number of law-school graduates represents an extraordinary

feat; but in those numbers may be a central weakness: by training so many

lawyers, we may have ignored (or at least given short shrift to) what I call

“training the whole lawyer.” Lawyers are not, and should not be, simply an

amalgam of the law-school courses they have taken. The whole lawyer is all

the torts, contracts, securities law—all the courses—but also a big “plus.”

The “plus” is, in my opinion, the difference between the adequate lawyer

and the great lawyer. The whole lawyer (1) integrates the knowledge base,

(2) possesses both legal and interpersonal skills, (3) models professionalism,

and (4) fosters civic engagement.

* At the time of the Symposium, Deanell Tacha was a judge on the United States Court

of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. On June 1, 2011, she became Dean at Pepperdine University

School of Law.

1. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Path of the Law, 10 HARV. L. REV. 457, 465 (1897).

2. WILLIAM M. SULLIVAN ET AL., CARNEGIE FOUND. FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF

TEACHING, Summary of EDUCATING LAWYERS: PREPARATION FOR THE PROFESSION OF LAW 6

(2007), available at http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/sites/default/files/elibrary/Educating

Lawyers_summary.pdf.