»  Reprinted from the July 2009 issue of Louisville Bar Briefs   «

In this summer of disquiet, of economic uncertainty and instability, we may yet redeem this season if we transform poetry into motion and song into resolve. From fields of lawyerly prose, let us greet the long reaches of the peaks of song, the rife of dawn, the reddening of the rose.

I shall start by connecting the nineteenth century poetry of Edwin Markham to the twenty-first century politics of Rahm Emanuel. "Never let a serious crisis go to waste," the White House Chief of Staff has said. In law as in politics and war, crisis is "an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before." All elements of the legal profession are questioning the premises of the profession's business model, and with good reason. In an environment resembling nothing so much as the "creative destruction" that Joseph Schumpeter so famously portrayed in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), every legal institution — no matter its vintage, no matter the depth of the tradition that has sustained it — must justify itself anew.

We legal educators are by no means immune to the forces of change sweeping the profession as a whole. What many clients now ask of the billable hour — Must it be? — applies with equal force to every aspect of legal education. If law schools are to survive the current crisis, much less thrive when that crisis has passed, they must subject every practice, procedure, and policy to the closest scrutiny. For years we have granted putative pedagogical primacy to the Socratic method. We have not only acquiesced in the oldest, largest firms' propensity to interview only the "top ten percent" of our students; legal educators bear heavy responsibility for fostering an approach to identifying and recruiting talent that has exposed some of these very firms to the grave economic vulnerability.

Not every aspect of traditional legal education will survive. Indeed, when America, the legal profession, and the academy emerge from the current crisis (as we assuredly will), individuals and institutions will prevail according to their willingness to act nimbly and to discard, as needed, their commitments to traditions and expectations that have been as debilitating as they have been entrenched.

If I could prescribe only one guiding principle for contemporary legal education, it would consist of this reminder: Students attend law school not in order to master an abstract body of knowledge or even a systematic way of thinking, but rather to learn a broad battery of skills — intellectual, social, and practical — for helping real people with real problems find real answers and get real results.

Ian Tyson sings the cowboy classic, Summer Wages.

Too often legal educators and hiring partners alike assume that the primary, or even exclusive, purpose of law school is to teach students how to "think like lawyers." This approach typically treats skills such as clear writing, effective oral advocacy, efficient research, and interpersonal savvy — the very things learned by experience, whether in Law School-sponsored settings such as the Law Clinic, a public service project, or a moot court competition, or at some sort of law-related job — as passing fancies to be gambled and lost like summer wages. Properly configured, legal education integrates the analytical core of traditional law school instruction with a host of wider skills that are best learned and mastered by doing.

Our counterparts in the broader economy have grudgingly, belatedly accepted a parallel insight into the value of hard work and manual labor. In the same week that watched Chrysler pass into Italian hands and General Motors fall into bankruptcy, the New York Times Magazine published Matthew Crawford's fantastic essay, "The Case for Working with Your Hands." In pursuit of a paperless "information economy" wholly detached from the world of substance and sweat, America has come to devalue, seriously and systematically, all livelihoods that produce actual things.

Lawyers, of course, belong to a service profession whose output is measured in paragraphs and pages (and increasingly in intangible bits and bytes) rather than acre-feet, metric tons, or hundredweights. And our Law School, along with the rest of the University of Louisville, derives its very raison d'être from students' belief that they will in fact gain something from formal education and thorough grounding in the shared knowledge of contemporary culture. The ongoing economic crisis in our profession and the world at large, however, invites us to rethink our priorities. Where once we privileged the dronelike billing of hours assembling financial instruments based at best (if at all) on phantom assessments of unrealized wealth, we might encourage our graduates to make their living in ways more consistent with honest work. We should commit ourselves not merely to shifting wealth, but to creating it.

I hear attorneys singing, the varied carols I hear, no less melodious in their music than the songs of mechanics, carpenters, masons, and parents at home. An economy based on value rather than speculation offers no shortage of work for professionals who advise clients, forge alliances, complete deals, resolve conflicts, and uphold the public trust. We call those professionals lawyers. They have valuable contributions to make, and our Law School will always be there to train the best of that cohort.

Not quite a generation ago, this Law School proclaimed for itself and its parent university a lofty ambition, that of being "Harvard on the Ohio." In so doing, we missed a far more potent source of inspiration from the banks of the Charles River. For lawyers, who after all are "social engineers" in the most positive sense of that term, the Massachusetts model truly worth emulating is the Institute of Technology. Mens et manus: mind and hand, one and inseparable, now and forever. What M.I.T. says in Latin, our own university, through the inscription inside Grawemeyer Hall, has likewise said in plain English. We dedicate ourselves to the "higher training and useful education of [our] aspiring youth."

This, then, is my summersong. Binding ourselves to the wheel of law and labor, in service to those who toil and make, is not enslavement but liberation. Admire by night the estival glow of Deneb, Altair, and Vega — those lights to us are Plato and the swing of Pleiades.