“I Hope Marquette Will Always Be a Teaching Law School”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia called Wednesday for Marquette University Law School faculty and students to focus on the basics – teaching and learning core knowledge of the law – and for lawyers who support the Law School to be advocates for maintaining that emphasis.

Speaking at the dedication of Ray and Kay Eckstein Hall, the Law School’s new home, Scalia said, “I hope Marquette will always be a teaching law school.”

About 1,500 people, including all seven members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, took part in the dedication ceremony in a large tent next to the $85 million building. The building was described by both Scalia and Chief Justice Shirley A. Abrahamson of the Wisconsin Supreme Court as “magnificent.”  

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Handshake Science

As I mentioned last month, I don’t know that formulas always make things clearer, but an NPR story from July on handshakes might prove me wrong. (A hat tip to Natalie Fleury for this idea.)  Marketplace on NPR aired a story about the science behind the handshake. Geoffrey Beattie, a professor at the University of Manchester researching handshakes for General Motors, came up with the following formula for the perfect handshake:

PH = √(e2 + ve2)(d2) + (cg + dr)2 + p{(4< s >2)(4< p >2)}2 + (vi + t + te)2 + {(4< c >2 )(4< du >2)}2

This is the key to the equation: 

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Preaching And Practice: The Nature of Legal Education

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.

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