In my earlier post on the long running debate about the proper emphasis of legal education, I wanted to suggest that there is more of a symbiotic relationship between practice and preaching.
Focusing on one part of the issue, Bruce Boyden wonders what relevant experiences an eight year practitioner might have not yet hand. Bruce says that stayed at Big Law to the cusp of partnership and then decided to leave (probably adding to his long term happiness and that of his family). He says he was doing a lot of the things that partners do and writes: 

One observation was that the transition from associate to partner in a large law firm is a transition from a larger proportion of hands-on legal practice (writing and filing briefs, doing research, advising clients on the content of the law, marshaling evidence, even appearances in court) to a larger proportion of business management: managing resources (associates, staff, and other partners) and managing clients–keeping current clients happy and bringing in new clients

These “partner” duties, he suggests, are not, in some sense, the practice of law and may be better informed by an MBA program than a J.D. He asks what law professors who leave the practice short of this stage are missing. It’s a great question and is answered, I think, not so much in terms of what someone has “missed” but by a consideration of what others may have “gained.”

Kristin Scheuereman’s thoughtful post on legal education mirrors a debate that has broken out on the law blogs on the nature of legal education and its relationship to what lawyers really do. The critical stance is represented by a forthcoming piece in the South Carolina Law Review entitled Preaching What They Don’t Practice: Why Law Faculties’ Preoccupation with Impractical Scholarship and Devaluation of Practical Competencies Obstruct Reform in the Legal Academy.  The author, Brent Newton (an adjunct at Georgetown) argues that law schools are populated by faculty that have very little practice experience and are far more interested in theory and the more esoteric and sexy elements of the law than in the day to day practice that most of their students will be concerned with. (Even at schools like Harvard, most students do not go on to specialize in constitutional cases of the first impression or international regime change.) An elaboration of the critique is that most law faculty could not – because they never have – first chair a complicated civil case or corporate acquisition.

In response, the argument is that law school is not trade school and the extensive practice experience does not necessarily correlate – in fact may be inversely related to (because, among other things, one can no longer remember what it was “not to know”) – with the ability to teach. Those who have been absorbed with the law as it is may have a hard time engaging in scholarship about the law as it should be.

While I agree with Ed Fallone that Marquette does better than most at teaching skills and at reaching a the right balance between theory and practice, I think that we all can benefit from attending to the debate. Both perspectives have merit.