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An odd Victorian bears much responsibility for the current crisis in legal education. After practicing law for fifteen years, Christopher Columbus Langdell hypocritically convinced law schools that law professors as a rule should have no practice experience. He also convinced them that law professors should come from only a few elite schools (whatever that means) and that the law can and should be learned through parsing redacted appellate cases. To be sure, Langdell always had critics and many law schools have moved away from him over the years to various degrees. For example, in the years before the Great Recession, law schools began adding clinical and legal writing faculty who merged practice with theory. However, these faculty members often were and often continue to be regarded as inferior in status to the “core” or “doctrinal” Langdellian faculty, were and often continue to be paid less, and were and often continue to be non-tenure track, non-core faculty. Continue reading »