David A. Brennen
2024-2025 Council Chair
At this mid-point of my term as Chair of the Council for the Section of Legal Education, I continue to be impressed with the Council and the important work that we do. The Section brings together legal educators, practitioners, and judges to provide services to those involved in legal education through workshops, conferences, and publications. Though its activities are many, they are all focused on important objectives – protecting law students, protecting consumers of legal services, and serving as a type of certification for state courts that determine bar admission. Given these objectives, the Council focuses on key values in its work – especially in areas where the overarching objectives might appear to come into conflict. For example, in advancing the certification objective, we try to ensure that our requirements for law schools do not unduly increase the cost of legal education. Similarly, in advancing diversity objectives that serve the interests of students and consumers, we try not to lose sight of our certification objective by ensuring appropriate standards for assessing quality and merit. Finally, in advancing each of the overarching objectives, in addition to being guided by a diverse Council membership, we are constantly collecting and assessing data to drive our decisions.
Given this immense and challenging charge, the Council has been hard at work this year advancing an agenda that serves the interests of its constituents. In the first half of the year, we sought advice on how best to move forward in considering approval of completely online law schools that have no brick-and-mortar component. We heard from many that approving online law schools could serve the interests of law students and consumers of legal services by making legal education more accessible. Another area that we focused on in the first half of the year was seeking advice from constituents on how best to use data in general to inform decision-making on a variety of matters – and data can be quite revealing. For instance, our data on the effectiveness of increasing the number of experiential credits to six in 2014, when no exact number of credits was required prior to 2014, show that that change may not have been aggressive enough. Since 2014, the number of law students enrolled in clinics, externships, and simulation courses barely budged. Additionally, as compared to other professions like medicine and architecture, for example, law schools are required to devote a much smaller portion of the curriculum to experiential learning. Does this data mean that, if we want the many benefits that could come from experiential learning and that our standards do not currently require, we should consider increasing further the number of required experiential credits?
As we finish out the year, my hope is that the Council will continue to serve its constituents in a non-partisan and balanced way that advances the interests of students and consumers of legal services in every state. While the Council places a high value on academic freedom for its faculty to ensure a high-quality education, it also respects the rule of law and will never ask law schools to violate the law, including with respect to consideration of race in admissions. In addition to a diverse Council membership, the Section of Legal Education relies on the efforts of hundreds of volunteers to do its work. Thus, I invite each of you who cares about legal education to join us as we explore how best to move forward in this important mission. As long as we work together, we will continue to have a legal education and justice system that is the envy of many worldwide.