I previously blogged The Future of the Tax Academy, sparked by a series of blogosphere posts on the future of law and economics launched by Josh Wright.  In the most recent installment, former George Mason Dean Henry Manne writes:

I really do not think that we should be bothering in law schools with either teaching or research that in some ways does no make for better lawyers or for better legal scholars (not necessarily the same thing, but again there is convergence in the long run).

Larry Solum has written a detailed post in response:

[T]he legal academy stands at a crossroads. One can imagine a variety of possible futures. Law schools might begin to realize that the study of law must become a distinctive multidisciplinary enterprise: this is the path taken by political science, where political phenomena are studies from a variety of perspectives, including rational choice & formal modeling, empirical studies, political theory, political history, and so forth. Or one can imagine a return to the idea of law schools as professional schools that emphasize doctrine–although this would require an intellectual foundation that justified the return to doctrinalism. Or perhaps the legal academy will segment itself–with most law schools returning to the trade school model that emphasizes the training of practising lawyers and the law schools of major research universities functioning to produce elite lawyers, legal academics, and multidisciplinary research. Or something else.