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July 25, 2008
Arthur Miller: Law Schools Are Not Doing Their Customers a Service in Terms of Legal Research
A video interview featuring Arthur Miller on legal research and writing at law schools was shown as part of the West town hall meeting on legal research skills in Portland (Podcast preview of the meeting]. You can view the YouTube versions here. [JH]
Has the change in "how we research" changed legal education?
What should the "starting point" be?
July 25, 2008 in Legal Research Instruction | Permalink
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Comments
what? law schools not teaching legal research?
Can it be true? Well, Arthur Miller, the King of Civil Procedure, says so. The Legal Writing Prof Blog has this entry about a recent Town Hall Meeting held in Portland Oregon sponsored by none other than West Publishing / Thomson. Apparently, law schools are sacrificing the practical for breadth of course selection. In Mr. Miller’s opinion, the pure practice apparently is suffering as a result.
Posted by: Sujan Patricia | Feb 3, 2009 12:51:02 AM
Like legal writing was not being taught 30 years ago? Better check your "research" because the anonymous poster above must have used Google on that on. How old are you? Are you even in the same league as Professor Miller? Research that!
Posted by: Miller was in Texas | Nov 15, 2008 1:44:05 PM
I was at that West event on Saturday. I have to take issue with one point A. Miller made in the video. He said that law schools aren't doing as well in teaching research as they did 30 years ago. The problem with that statement is that most law schools did not even teach legal research and writing up through the 1970s. I do agree that most law schools are doing an inadequate job of teaching research. The reason for that is because legal research is tied together with legal writing and lr&w professors know very little about research. These lr&w professors are generally entry-level law professors who only know and care about legal writing.
Another strange thing about that town hall meeting was that the law firm librarians were saying that law schools should teach about pricing and cost effective legal research on both Lexis and Westlaw. The problem is that West will NOT give out pricing information at all. I taught legal research and advanced legal research for over 10 years and getting ball-park pricing information for Westlaw was almost impossible. Lexis was very forthcoming with general pricing information but West was not. The funny thing was this town hall meeting was sponsored by West.
I also got a little creeped-out by the giant Thomson-Reuters logo screen-shots that popped up about 45 minutes into the town hall meeting.
Posted by: anonymous | Jul 25, 2008 12:18:38 PM
