Karen Sloan (National Law Journal) has a nice interview with Dean Richard Matasar (New York Law School) on the state of legal education, 'Poster child' shares frustration about pace of law school reform, on NLJ.com's law school blog. Note: this should be publicly available; I was able to access it from my cell-phone).
A lot of interesting stuff in the interview. Dean Matasar talks about the long-term value of a J.D.
I sometimes talk about an education in terms that analogize it to a car — I give a talk to every first year student here that says coming to law school is like buying a brand new Mercedes-Benz every year on credit and pushing it off a cliff. But that metaphor isn't true. Unlike each Mercedes-Benz you buy, a year of law school takes you toward a lifelong career and the ability to practice law.
Education is ... a process of learning and becoming more than what you are before you start. The question becomes: If you are going to create an educational product for the student and equip them with the skills, and it's going to be expensive anyway, do you want it to be expensive and crappy or expensive and good? * * * (Emphasis added.)
Some else that caught my eye was Dean Matasar's linking of academic support and skills education:
* * * We have a program that's directed toward our bottom-graded students that helps them get across the finish line and pass the bar exam. * * * We require the program. We staff it differently. We just brought in 15 first-year full-time faculty to teach a consolidated legal skills program in coordination with the other first-year classes. * * * (Emphasis added.)
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