I graduated law school in 1985, articled in a reputable firm, and then, full of misplaced confidence and naiveté, I opened my own office in 1992 with another young lawyer of my vintage.
For reasons that were, candidly, more tongue in cheek than having any serious design or merit, I insisted that our new letterhead contain a catchy little Latin phrase at the bottom, and 23 years later, it remains:
“Jus est ars boni acqui”
Law is the art of the good and the just.
Now – if you Google that Latin phrase, you will come across several iterations suggesting that “ars” should be interpreted as “science.” I don’t know, personally, because I’m not a Latin scholar, but I think most of us who have practiced for more than a few years, would, perhaps, see the “law” as much more of an “art” than a “science”.
And this leads me to my discussion about the value of “traditional legal education”. Back in the day when I graduated (pre-email, or for that matter, pre-fax machine even) , law schools throughout Canada – with the exception perhaps of the University of Calgary and the University of Victoria – were more or less providing what has been referred to as a “traditional” or “Socratic method” of legal education. You read cases, ad nauseam, and then you recited in class on demand, like a dog doing a trick, the facts/the issues/and the ratio decidendi. Occasionally, very occasionally, you would have some discussion regarding the underlying philosophy of the law, but more often than not, you examined and then put to memory, the aforesaid 3 pillars of case law in a thousand cases from Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball to Hedley Byrne v Heller.
Then, with a little luck, you obtained an articling position and found that 90% of what you had to now do as a student wasn’t covered in law school (how to dictate, how to make a client feel confident in your skills, how to avoid irritating your legal assistant, how to collect a retainer, and how to assure a proper stock of beer is maintained in the office lounge).
This irritated law firms. They wanted students to “hit the ground running” (i.e. make money now.) As a result – law schools began to expand their vision of what “legal education” looked like, perhaps taking a cue from the efforts of the University of Calgary and others. Now, in the post-Google age, we have discussions arising about whether or not physical law schools are even necessary, and whether or not a detailed review of the 130 pages of Bedford v. Canada is necessary, in lieu of a one or two paragraph head note – whether “skills” are more important than memorization of legal principals. More and more we hear the call for practical and cheaper legal education. Law firms and the public want cheap “ready to use” lawyers straight out of University.
And lo and behold. We now have Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. A three year program, which includes a practicum component recognized as a replacement for the traditional articling requirement by the Law Society of Upper Canada. You graduate law school and day 1, you open up your practice engaging in corporate mergers and acquisitions or renvois litigation. No articling, no bar admission exams. No problem. You’re insured. Clearly, the innovative effort of Lakehead and the LSUC have reduced practical training and legal education by a full year compared to the rest of us luddites who attended and who still may attend “traditional” legal education and articling programs that took four years.
Is this good, or bad? Well, I’ll take the “con” position, because, well, that’s what I do. I’m a contrarian. I’ll ignore the limitations of my own traditional education gained at the University of British Columbia way back in the 80’s, and instead, posit that the move towards more innovative and “practical” legal education may be miss-placed.
Why?
Because the practice of law is not a “science”. You cannot predict that if you add “X” litres of testimony from Ms. Black with “Y” kilograms of expert reports from Dr. Brown, you will end up with judgment, “Z”.
Law is an art. At its best, the law takes many diverse legal principals, and applies a liberal amount of understanding and imagination, and turns those principals into the legal equivalent of a painting by Renoir – many, many differing shades and colors – with varying inflections of hand pressure and brush texture, combined with a discerning eye and mind.
And, like any artist – from a concert pianist or ballerina, before you can create great “art”, you have to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours doing the dull, plodding work of acquiring knowledge of the foundation of your art.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book “Outliers” makes the bold statement that to master a skill you require ten thousand hours of practice. I assume the goal of being licensed to practice law, and being able to foist yourself upon the unsuspecting public is to assure that you have mastered the ability to care for your client.
So. By my very rough calculations, after three years of law school, averaging 8 hours per day, over three years you will engage in about 4,128 hours of training. Not quite half way to “mastery” according to Gladwell. But the suggestion is that at Lakehead University the moment you graduate, you’re good to assume responsibility for ensuring that someone is not wrongfully imprisoned, or loses custody of their child, or obtains compensation for being improperly dismissed from their employment.
I’m not so sure.
Should law schools today look like the Inns of the Court in the mid-1600’s? Or even the University of British Columbia in the mid-1980’s (remember Oingo Boingo?) Probably not. But I would suggest that the breadth of even a basic understanding of the law sufficient to found a career as a lawyer requires something akin to Gladwell’s ten thousand hours. That the three years of traditional education, providing a strong foundation for the later development of our “art” is absolutely necessary, and that by cutting corners in favor of making it easier for firms to make money faster is not the answer to a highly skilled and competent legal profession.
