Legal Education and Public Policy: Training in Public Interest

Harold Lasswell Myres McDougal

1. A recurrent problem for all those who are interested in public policy, the reform of legal education must ever become more urgent in a revolutionary world of cumulative crises and increasing violence 2. For 6 to 7 decades exclusive monopoly of the new subsidized intellectual elite 3. Little has been actually achieved in refashioning ancient education practices to serve insistent contemporary needs 4. What they think they have done to legal education may be recapitulated as a transition from lectures, to the analysis of appellate opinions, to confusion. 5. Blind, inept, factory- ridden, wasteful, defective, and empty. 6. Efforts to integrate law and other social sciences fail through lack of clarity about what is being integrated, and how and for what purposes. 7. Proposition that legal concepts, institutions, and practices are instrumental only: but the main organizing foci for determining both fields and courses arrangement within fields and courses of a swollen and shapeless curriculum are still time-worn, over-lapping legal concepts of the highest level abstraction. 8. Ignoring skills in negotiation, personnel management and public relations 9. Great emphasis is put upon historical studies, but too often these studies degenerate into an aimless, literary eclectism that fails to come to grips with causes or conditions. 10. That law school the only proper concern of law school is method- science disinfected of all preference. 11. Proposals to escape from this confusion has been legion- tended by technologizing or gadgetizing the discussion at an early state- got lost in minutiae- irreverently modification of small particulars 12. First indispensable effective reform- clarify ultimate aim. Legal education must be conscious, efficient, and systematic training for policy-making. Proper function of law school s is contribute to the training of policy-makers for the ever more complete achievement of the democratic values that constitute the professed ends of American polity. 13. POLICY- as the making of important decisions which affect the distribution of values. 14. What is needed now is to implement ancient insights by reorienting every phase of law school curricula and skill training toward the achievement of clearly defined democratic values in all the areas of social life where lawyers have or can assert responsibility. 15. Away form practices of a free society and toward the slogans, doctrines and structures of despostism. Outburst of racialism in Germany 16. Balanced skill state has been yielding to the bureaucratic state. 17. Can a lawyer be blamed? Yes because a lawyer is an indispensable adviser of every responsible policy-maker of our society 18. Complete job analysis of the profession. 19. Lawyers influence true measure is found in the cumulative effect of multiple thousands of routine, day-to day presentations of fact and deliverance of opinion.

20. Lawyer ia a learned profession. It is his responsibility to acquaint himself with the long-term interests of all whom he serves and appropriate means of securing such interests. Be trained for responsible leadership 21. War is the time to retool our educational processes in the hope of making them fit instruments for their future job. 22. What are the essentials of adequate training for public policy? 23. A. Goal thinking, B. Trend thinking C. Scientific thinking 24. Goal Thinking- requires clarification of values. Seek to promote the major values of democratic society. A student may be allowed to reject morals of democracy and embrace those of despotism, but it has to be made with self awareness and deliberate choice and not by self deception. The supreme value of democracy is the dignity and self-worth of the individual. Prospective lawyers should be exposed, by way of warning and sophistication, to the work of representative specialists in derivation; relatively little time should be required, however, to teach them how to handle, and how to achieve emotional freedom, from ancient exercises. 25. Trend thinking. Anticipation of things to come. The results of trend thinking must be continually evaluated by the policy maker in the light of his goals; the task is to think creatively about how to alter, deter, or accelerate probable trends in order to shape the future closer to his desire 26. Scientific thinking. Trend is a register of the relative strength of the variables that produce it. Compare body of trends before we can build up scientific knowledge. Policy maker needs to guide his judgment by what is scientifically known and knowable about the casual variables that condition the democratic valuables. 27. Should not be inferred to discard traditional skills and knowledge of a lawyer. 28. Proposal: Training in the distinctive core of the lawyers repertory skills and information be given a new sense of purpose and criteria of relevance. 29. J Holmes- energy can be more profitably spend than in the reading of cases. 30. Given a new sense of purpose and trained in the skills and information which should be common to all policy makers, the lawyer cannot escape becoming a better lawyer.