Orin Kerr has wriitten a very helpful guide (PDF) called "How to Read a Judicial Opinion: A Guide for New Law Students." It's an 8-page mini-manual that will be useful to many people, not just law students.

Lawyer or non-lawyer, this guide will help anyone who wants to sift through the sometimes opaque and arcane world of judicial decisions. Highly recommended.

While that bit of information is interesting in its own right, perhaps more interesting is the way I know about it: YLJ went out of its way to thank blawger Sean Sirrine, and ask him once again to help get the word out about the opportunity (which he did). Just another example of blawgs throwing a courtyard bazaar at the ivory tower and fostering a culture of participatory law. I can't think of a more effective way to engage those who might have something intriguing to say.

There's been a recent brouhaha in legal education after a law professor banned the use of laptop computers in her classes. It should surprise no one to find that I think this action is preposterous.

However, Professor Maule, in his post called "To Allow Laptops or Not to Allow Laptops: That is the Question," offers a thorough analysis of the issue that most people will find much more convincing that me just saying "Preposterous!"

The money quote:

One goal of legal education is to teach future lawyers that professionals need to be responsible. Teaching law students to be responsible requires more than denying them the opportunity to be irresponsible. It requires guiding them around the tempting distractions. If law faculty become too controlling, how are the students going to fend for themselves after graduation when the faculty isn’t there to control things for them?

The snarky ones out there might say, "Taking away laptops in law school will prepare students to work in those law firms that are busily trying to take laptops away from lawyers and have them only work on desktop computers." Some might think that I would be one of the snarky ones, but that's probably not the case.

Professor Maule, however, is a welcome voice of reason in this discussion. Highly recommended.

Let's discuss.

He discusses the debate in academia over whether academics should be blogging or, instead, confine themselves only to traditional academic vehicles. He frames the issue: "From my vantage point, it appears that the so-called traditionalists are beginning to sense the threat to their way of academic life that blogs, and technology generally, pose. Understandably, they seem concerned that the foundations of the think/write/publish routine to which they are accustomed and with which they are comfortable are beginning to crumble. The irony is that the approach held so dear by traditionalists probably isn't old enough to qualify as a tradition."

The money quote (but you should read the whole post):

If there is a difference, it's that I have almost instantaneous access to what others are thinking, ideas that would not see, and do not see, the light of day in the world of student-edited, paper format reviews that often are too late to be of use. Sometimes I seek feedback, and learn far more from listserv discussion than I would chatting with the one or two members of my faculty who have expertise in my area of the law. Then I write. The difference is that when I'm ready to publish, I publish. I don't go begging to second-year and third-year law students who have little if anything to add to the analysis, and whose focus on the technical insanities of the Blue Book or whatever citation format directive is in vogue adds weeks if not months to the process without adding anything to the message.

I do remember an early morning class I had in my third year where on the last day of classes before the exam (the day you found out what was going to be covered on the exam) I noticed quite a few people were shaking hands with people they hadn't realized were even on the class roster because they hadn't seen each other all semester. In other words, I don't think that this story points to a new phenomenon or is symptomatic of a "new generation of law students."

I'd be curious to learn the correlation between these stats and time spent looking for a job, interviewing and working part-time jobs during the third year.

Friedman, who has a background in the actual practice of law, lays out the case for a practice-oriented approach to legal education and identifies the key concerns practicing lawyers have expressed about today's model of legal education. I especially want to emphasize his point about the over-concentration on litigation in the curriculum, especially in clinical training.

The money quote:

Clarity of purpose is as fundamental to a law school curriculum as it is to most other endeavors. Learning to think like a lawyer is a technique, not the goal of law school. For me, it is clear that the educational goal of an American law school should be to educate and train effective new lawyers. To many practicing lawyers, that goal seems obvious. If it had been accepted, however, there would be an ongoing dialogue between legal academia and practicing lawyers on precisely how to go about creating effective new lawyers. There is little or no such discussion

I expect to see see much more discussion in the coming days, weeks and months. The tensions created by the current system and the expectations for that system are sufficiently out of alignment that I expect to see the beginning of innovation and change in fairly short order. Some of the changes could be quite massive and it is reasonable to expect to see new models of legal education arise.

If you consider only one fact out of Friedman's article, consider the amount of training that PLI does. Then ask yourself this: if PLI offered its own law school, how interested would you be in hiring its graduates? Think about that one.

I was reading the law librarian group blog called "Out of the Jungle" and was, once again, struck by the high quality of librarian blogs.

Let me point you to the recent post on Out of the Jungle called "Practical Skills." In this post, Diane Murley addresses in a thoughtful and thought-provoking way a question that has been on the minds of lawyers and law students, but too infrequently, law professors and law school administrators: why don't law schools teach law students the practical skills needed to practice law?

Hey, that's a pretty simple question, and one that goes right to the heart of the matter.

Diane's post also goes to the heart of the matter and raises a series of questions that all of us in the legal community should thinking about and trying to answer.

When I was an adjunct law professor and taught an IP contract drafting course, I remember how much students appreciated the class where I took about 20 minutes and explained to them what they would actually do when given an assignment at a law firm to draft a contract. They told me tha they didn't feel that they were getting that information in their other classes.

The money quote from Diane's post:

"Do law school professors seek input from practicing lawyers on how the professors can better prepare their students for practice? Should they? Do substantive law professors care what lawyers think? If not, why not? Should they care more about whether students will be ready to practice law when they graduate?"

Her comments comparing what the approach of law professors with that of law school librarians will open your eyes and make you think.

I didn't think that it was possible for me to be a bigger fan of law librarians, but Sabrina and Diane and other law librarians have made me raise my admiration level even higher in the last few days.

Anayat Durrani's Becoming a Law Professor, Part 2 is mighty interesting reading. I read the article with a chaser of this post and savored the irony.

Thankfully, the guardians of the gates of law professor hiring are busily at work keeping people like the lawyer bloggers well away from teaching any law students.

Heck, one of the reasons we started "Between Lawyers" was because we had to research and answer questions on new legal issues long before any academic search was available. I'm sorry, but law review articles that come out a year after the fact don't make a lot of sense in today's world, but it is quaint to read about people who think that they are the most important factor in hiring law professors.

I'm curious about how innovation takes place in that environment.