The leaves are changing, the nights are cool, and there’s a nip in the air in the early mornings.  That means it’s October, which means for most law students that school has been in session for nearly two months (for most students).  It’s around this time that the 1Ls perhaps notice an increase in workload.  Now there’s not just reading and briefing for class – which may be clipping along more quickly now – but probably assignments due in their writing classes.  All along, in the background, 1Ls are hearing people talk about “getting those outlines started.”  Second years have hustled through the on-campus interview process, which seems more selective than ever, and some are working their way through call-backs.  Others are frustrated that they aren’t getting any call-backs.  And likely most 3Ls are themselves working on getting jobs, knowing with that as each day passes, they are one step closer to graduation and one step closer to having to pay back those loans.

Perhaps here is where the stress starts to kick in.

Not all stress is bad; stress often gives us the kick in the pants we need to get things done, and we can return to “normal.” But for law students, the stress can seem to be ongoing, weighing them down for weeks or maybe months.  Is there any way for law students to avoid this stress?

[Editor’s Note: This month, we asked a few veteran faculty members to share their reflections on what has changed the most in legal education since they became law professors.  This is the sixth and final entry in the series.]

Legal education is no longer lean. When I was hired as Marquette Law School’s third administrator in 1975, the Law School had about a dozen full-time faculty members and three professional law librarians. These days, the Law School has a dozen administrators, forty or so full-time faculty, and more than a dozen professional librarians. The Law School facility is more than three times larger than when I started at the Law School. That enrollment is up some, from about 450 full-time students to about 600 full-time students and another 150 part-time students, accounts for only a fraction of the growth.

The principal change I’ve seen in my 35+ years at the Law School (I was an adolescent when first employed by Marquette) is this amazing growth in the resources and cost of legal education. Students are paying unprecedented amounts for a law school education and receiving access to unprecedented resources in return.

Some of the most important new resources and costs are those mentioned by my colleagues in this blog series.  

[Editor’s Note: This month, we asked a few veteran faculty members to share their reflections on what has changed the most in legal education since they became law professors.  This is the fifth in the series.]

As I finish my twenty-second year as a law professor, I marvel at how technological advances and the proliferation of specialty courses have changed (and, in most instances, improved) legal education since I began my academic career in 1990.  Yet I am mindful that the essential components of a high-quality legal education remain unchanged (e.g., an interactive and engaging academic environment that stimulates critical thinking, reasoned legal analysis, creative problem solving, an understanding of legal doctrine and policy, and the development of effective verbal and written communication skills).

There were no laptops in the classroom when I begin teaching twenty-two years ago, and handwritten exam answers were the norm. Now it’s rare to see any student without his or her PC during class.