Interesting article in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education: All Rise. Welcome to Law School, by Katherine Mangan:

Unlike medical students, who work in teaching hospitals and clinics as they learn, most law students don’t set foot in a courtroom until their third and final year, when they have the option of participating in legal clinics. The Touro Law Center, a division of Touro College, is one of a growing number of law schools changing that by emphasizing practical skills from Day 1. …

Touro’s program is part of a broader soul-searching at law schools, which have been accused of being stuck in a model that’s more than a century old. For years, practicing lawyers and judges have complained that law-school graduates lack the skills to represent clients adequately. In 1992 the ABA issued a report that urged law schools to identify skills, values, and ethics lawyers should possess and adapt curricula accordingly. Since then, many law schools have offered more externships and mock courtroom exercises to give students more hands-on practice.

But the schools haven’t gone nearly far enough, according to two recent, widely circulated books: the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s Educating Lawyers, by William M. Sullivan, Anne Colby, Judith Welch Wegner, Lloyd Bond, and Lee S. Shulman (Jossey-Bass), and Best Practices for Legal Education, a handbook published by the Clinical Legal Education Association, written largely by Roy T. Stuckey, a law professor at the University of South Carolina. Both books call on law schools to offer more practical training, as well as attention to social and ethical issues.