1. Law schools started adding clinics when the cry from employers and students for more practical education became too loud to ignore.

2. Since most tenure-track law profs had little practice experience, the schools hired new people — but fought like hell to keep them off the tenure track.

3. The instructors most valuable to a clinic — experienced practitioners looking to transition into academia — are likely to seek other employment once they realize they’ll be treated as second-class citizens.

4. The people who, status issues notwithstanding, opt to teach clinics are often second-rate or fiercely ideological.

5. The original problem — not enough practical education — is not solved.

* Obviously not a phrase of which I claim to be the original author.

I think probate and crim law clinics make a lot of sense. Cause clinics? Only if you’re advancing Alinsky’s cause.

As for law schools generally, it’s a self-sustaining system. Powerful profs, lawyers, and judges decided several decades ago that the way the law worked was Wrong and Nonsense, and so they ushered the old rules out the back door and brought in their shiny new Interest Analyses, Balancing Tests, and Policy Considerations. The cases and articles presenting favorable views of the older system based on Following the Rules and Being a Decent Human Being are read now, if at all, only for the purpose of being the subject of shallow ridicule. Then the next generation of attorneys comes in looking down at such rules, the social order they grew out of, and the analytical method of legal reasoning used in them. The cycle continues.

Which brings us to the second problem, that these are not lawyers but students trying to learn to be lawyers. Much as law firms complain about the inadequacies of legal education in the failure to produce new lawyers who are competent to practice, they aren’t any more competent before they graduate. Yet, we put real people’s lives in their hands? Is filling a niche poorly better than not filling it at all? While we hear the anecdotal stories of successes, we hear little to nothing of the failures. Would students even recognize a failed defense that could have been successful if they were competent? Will lawprofs admit that students under their care did a lousy, incompetent job?

Perhaps a solution would be having adjuncts, rather than ideologically-bound/theoretically-inclined lawprofs run these clinics, or have the clinical students work under practicing lawyers rather than out of a professor run clinic. But while the concept of clinics for the purpose of exposing students to nuts and bolts lawyers sounds fine, no competent lawyer would watch these kids in action and say that what they are doing is good lawyering, as much as we might like to do so.

[cross-posted from Overlawyered, where comments are open] If blogging has been lighter than usual, one reason is that I’ve been racing forward on my new book on law schools and their influence, tentatively entitled Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia …