DEAN'S MESSAGE
Dean Jerry Speaks on Legal Education
5 Questions
Q. Can you speak on today's challenges for legal education?
A. Twenty-first century legal education has its roots in a choice our predecessors made in the late 19th century when legal education stood at a crossroads. One of the available paths was similar to the route taken by the medical profession, and would have made heavy use of clinical training provided to small groups of students in live practice settings. That was a more expensive choice, and the medical profession made it work by setting up clinical practices that earned revenue and essentially competed with medical professionals who were not a part of the teaching establishment.
Dean Robert Jerry: Levin, Mabie & Levin Professor of Law
Law schools took a different path, largely under the infl uence of Langdell at Harvard, and adopted a model of one instructor leading large classes of 100 or more students in a setting that looked more like a traditional classroom. That model persisted as the norm for nearly 100 years until a number of lawyers and some academics put forward the proposition that legal education would be improved if skills training had a greater role. The critique of legal education stuck, and beginning in the 1970s and with the impetus of the McCrate report in 1992, almost all law schools added a signifi cant skills component to their curriculum, including both clinical training opportunities and simulation courses. UF Law was no exception and we offer eight clinics, a number of externships, and a rich array of skills simulation courses, including a mandatory upper-class legal drafting requirement.
The challenge for legal education today is that the economic model we use to pay for what we do continues to be driven by the ancient Langdell approach, that is, a large number of students being taught by a relatively small number of instructors. Most public law schools, and this is especially true of Florida, have not had the resources to support clinical and small-group skills programs in the style that the medical profession provides training to its students. If we were to mimic that approach, we would have law school faculties form their own law fi rms and go out and compete for clients and administer legal services to those clients to generate revenue to pay for the costs of small group instruction. That's where we see a profound cultural difference between the medical and legal professions - it's diffi cult to imagine law schools engaging in direct competition for paying clients with the non-academic legal profession.
So, in legal education today we grapple with how to pay for many of these skills training programs that are delivered in small-class settings with a very low student-faculty ratio.
Q. How is UF Law at training students to succeed in private practice?
A. We do a very good job here, but we continuously strive to improve the quality of our programs. As a large school that needs more funding, we do extremely well with what we have. Thus far, we provide a clinical experience or a major skills simulation training experience (such as trial practice, negotiation, counseling, or mediation) to every student who wants it. I mentioned our legal drafting program - we're fairly unique among all law schools in this regard - where every student must complete, in addition to the required legal research and writing course, an intensive course on drafting legal documents that advances those skills in very practical, real-life ways. One of our success stories is an advanced business documents legal drafting course in the corporate area, where Professor Stu Cohn works with a team of adjuncts led by Dan Aronson to provide intensive, in-depth skills training. A number of other courses are heavily oriented toward preparing students to manage sophisticated aspects of specialized practice areas.
"Private support makes most of our faculty research assistant positions possible, and this program is a classic win-win."
Q. What are some continuing challenges for higher education in general in Florida, and specifi cally for this law school?
A. Unfortunately, the trying economic times facing our country generally, and Florida specifi cally, have led to reductions in funding for nearly all government agencies, including those that deliver educational services. Over the long haul, I hope our state's budget fortunes will turn around so that new revenues can lead to new investments in our academic program. It is inevitable that increases in tuition will supply some of those new revenues, given that our tuition is among the very lowest of the nation's 200 ABA-accredited law schools. If you look for other large public law schools affi liated with the nation's top universities, you'll fi nd what are widely regarded as the seven or eight best public law schools in the United States - and when compared to that group, you'll fi nd that UF Law spends less than half per student in providing an education as the average of those other law schools.
The bottom line is that UF Law provides a really high quality education for the dollar, but we're not going to be able to deliver the kind of academic program Florida citizens deserve if we have to go through an extended time period where those other schools outspend us two to one in direct educational expenditures. We'll have to change that through a combination of state support, increased tuition, and increased private support from our alumni. That's really the only alternative if we're going to provide Florida residents with a premier legal education.
Q. How could public or private investments improve the academic program?
A. Our student-faculty ratio is getting better, but we still lag behind our peers. We need to appoint additional faculty. For a law school of our size, we need more student affairs professionals, including career services support. We need to improve the library's collection and its array of electronic databases. Having more resources to invest in adjunct faculty would improve our curriculum, and we could do more to support our co-curricular activities, such as the journals, moot court, and trial team. We have an excellent program - make no mistake about that. But we have the potential to be better, and I believe the citizens of our state deserve a law school of the very highest caliber. If, however, we go through a sustained era of resource deprivation, our current quality will defi nitely be at risk.
Q. What can our alumni do to help us through this time?
A. Our alumni have been terrifi c. We would never expect them to provide for all our fi nancial needs, and that's not what we're asking them to do. But alumni provide the real margin of excellence for the college. Our college's endowment is very strong and getting stronger, and annual giving has been growing year by year. We have been able to leverage those dollars through state matching gift programs and wise fi nancial management, and we use those resources to fi ll in areas where state support stops. For example, our extracurricular activities, moot court, trial team and student journals are exclusively funded by private support. Private support makes most of our faculty research assistant positions possible, and this program is a classic win-win - the student gets a one-on-one educational experience with a faculty member, the student gets fi nancial support to help pay for his or her tuition or living expenses, and the faculty member gets help with his or her research. When we bring in outside speakers to the college and make them available to interact with students and faculty, it's private support that makes those visits possible. We're about to have two more United States Supreme Court justices visit the law school, which is a wonderful experience for our students, and it is private support that will make those visits possible. It's also important to realize that alumni help us not just through their gifts, but also through their time and their advocacy for the law school's future. There's really no substitute for that kind of support, and our alumni have been wonderful in providing it.
Q. What do you see in the Levin College of Law's future?
A. We have a great tradition at UF Law of preparing leaders for our workplaces, our profession, the judiciary, state and national government, our communities and society. We are all familiar with countless examples of UF Law alumni making a profound difference in all of those venues, and it is hard to imagine what our communities, our state, or our profession would be like without the efforts and contributions of those alumni. I see our law school building on this tradition and projecting it into the future. It's an exciting future to imagine, and I hope we can all work together to achieve it.