What Will Our Future Look Like and How Will We Respond?

• Author: Michael A. Fitts
• Position: Dean and Bernard G. Segal Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School.
• Pages: 1539-1548

1539

What Will Our Future Look Like and How

Will We Respond?

Michael A. Fitts

Over the past quarter century, American society has served as a global

model in a number of different arenas: scientific research, technological

innovation, university education, and business entrepreneurship. There are

many reasons for our comparative leadership, including a dynamic

economic and social structure, a relatively diverse and open society, and

stable political institutions.

Legal education is an excellent example of just such an American

model. As Judith Areen nicely describes in her accompanying article, the

decentralized and dynamic quality of the American educational system,

which lacks the intrusive governmental presence or control that is found

throughout much of the world, has been a major ingredient in our

leadership.1 For these and other reasons, the scholarship that emanates

from our universities, on a theoretical as well as a more practical level, is in

many respects the envy of the world. It is no accident that thousands of law

faculty and students flock to the United States each year to study in our

classrooms, work with our faculty, and gain an understanding of how our

legal system works. Equally important is exposure to the academic process

through which we analyze and teach the next generation how to understand

and shape legal institutions. If the measure of excellence is the level of

external interest in, and imitation of, an institution, we are very successful

indeed.

In spite of—or perhaps because of—the preeminence of our system of

legal education, the last thirty years have seen sustained debates over

questions surrounding where legal education should develop most and the

nature and extent of the regulatory framework that helps oversee its

development.2 Almost every aspect of this system and its regulation has been

 Dean and Bernard G. Segal Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School.

1. See generally Judith Areen, Accreditation Reconsidered, 96 IOWA L. REV. 1471, 1472–79

(2011) (discussing the evolution of higher-education accreditation in the United States and its

early and continued independence from state and federal governmental control).

2. See, e.g., SECTION OF LEGAL EDUC. & ADMISSIONS TO THE BAR, AM. BAR ASS’N, LAWYER

COMPETENCY: THE ROLE OF THE LAW SCHOOLS (1979) (“Cramton Report”); SECTION OF LEGAL

EDUC. & ADMISSIONS TO THE BAR, AM. BAR ASS’N, LEGAL EDUCATION AND PROFESSIONAL

DEVELOPMENT—AN EDUCATIONAL CONTINUUM (1992) (“MacCrate Report”); WILLIAM M.