Reforming the Culture Part 2: Solutions

Hastings is embarking on a major curricular shift in the next few years. Our school's first ever Strategic Plan is currently being drafted and if the vision statement they posted on their website is any indication, it intends to change the curriculum some. These reforms will fail if they do not address and alter the culture in the school. Law school culture poses a direct threat to any reforms of the curriculum. The external reward system of "being the best" replaces any vision of personal and professional responsibility or personal values and judgments, and therefore any reform that goes outside of the strict pathway toward "being the best" will be marginalized and remain mostly un-utilized by students.

So how do we change a culture focused on a rank-based competitive reward system? How do we encourage students to take risks with the classes and programs they become involved in? The authors of The Law School Matrix: Reforming Legal Education in a Culture of Competition and Conformity make several suggestions. Their prime suggestion is to focus on cultural change.

They emphasize three areas of mismatch present in law school:
1. The Pedagogical Mismatch. A mismatch between "student idealism (why we came to law school) and what we still mostly study in the identity forming first year"
2. The Training Mismatch. The substance of what we are taught and what young lawyers find useful.
3. The Professionalism Mismatch. The mismatch between the career path law school pushes students onto and the real range of legal need and work in the real world.
The authors note that many reforms have attempted to address some of or all of these mismatches without getting at the root of the culture. All of these mismatches should be addressed in any reform effort, as they are deeply involved with the way students interact with school.

The incentive structure is the next focus. They are skeptical of any reform efforts that do not address the underlying incentive structure present for both students and faculty. Without a fundamental change to the incentive structures, hierarchies of excellence will still be the focus, and any threat or risk to a professor or a student's position in the hierarchy will be marginalized. Incentive structures should be reshaped to integrate the intellectual, personal and professional development of students. They should be "tailored to the learning goals and multiple forms of practice" and push students to use their legal imaginations and take risks in their education.
Translating this advice into the Hastings environment, this means Hastings needs to stop ranking students based on GPA, or anything else for that matter. The curve should be abandoned, because its primary impact is to generate competition and fear. Right now grades feel arbitrary to students and students get very little feedback from professors. ABC grades are impersonal and give only minimal useful feedback to the student about how they are doing, and no sense of how they can improve. A pass/fail system with written feedback about what areas students need to improve in would be a sensible place to start in the design of a new a new grading system.

All stake-holders need to participate in the reform process, according to the authors. This includes students, faculty, alumni as well as those outside the school, such as lawyers, legislators and judges who narrate the law.
Hastings has already done a fairly good job involving students and faculty in the process. Students have been surveyed for input and there is an email address to send suggestions. The faculty have been presented with a draft, and have given their suggestions. I do not know if alumni or other groups have been contacted, but it would be a good idea.

Expand the reform project to include locations outside the classroom and curriculum. Any location that generates culture is game. The authors specifically note incentive structures that define legal education as the technical mastery of the law apart from normative commitments. The emphasis on high student/faculty ratios and unitary grading policies in another important target. Teaching styles that disconnect students from clinical and experiential learning should also be addressed.


Since many law students internalize the law school culture within the first three weeks, this is the crucial point where change is needed. The first year curriculum needs to get away from the Langdell style and execution. Students need to do clinical work their first semester (such as a GAAP-based clinic). The discourse from professors needs to shift from a focus on winning litigation and defeating your opponent to an emphasis on ethical behavior, lawyers being protectors and high-minded professionals. Positive identity-formation that resonates with student's initial identities and internal motivations is essential for the first semester. The authors suggest that the first year be broadened pedagogically, experientially, and substantively to embrace the wide range of meanings and purposes of the law. The emphasis on adversarialism needs to shift to a multi-approach focus. The law's normative responsibility must also be central in the process of identity formation.

Overall, the authors emphasize that this will be a slow and continuous process. It will need to continue beyond the implementation of the the strategic plan. To sum up their findings, the authors created a table in the appendix, on page 553, that outlines a reimagined school this way:

Role of Law: Law as a Plural and Contested Concept that involves reconciling multiple forms of authority, rethinking metrics of symbolic legitimacy, and expanding public problem-solving to foster continuous inquiry about law’s meaning and role, including the relationship between the “is,” the “ought” and the “what might be.”
Pedagogical Goal: Building analytic, strategic, institutional, and problem solving capacity; Developing legal imagination.
Role of Conflict: Multiple forms and formats of conflict explored.
Modeling Expertise: Contextually and collectively constructed, includes ability to exercise leadership in addressing important social problems.
Integration of Personal, Professional, and Academic Goals: Integrated and interrogated through collaboration among faculty, administrators, practitioners, and students.
Evaluating Success: Integrating evaluation into the learning process; Connecting success to personal aspirations and social goals.

Now that is a law school I would love to be a student in.