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Because whatever else one can say about
the profession of teaching law, the essence
of it does lie in the classroom. We are
responsible for research, we are responsible
for writing, and as you know this has been
a very productive faculty through the years.
But first and foremost, we are educating the
next generation of lawyers and it is fun to
trade ideas with bright minds. There is never
a time in which you don't get new ideas,
new ways of looking at things, and of course
the law itself has changed a great deal.
It's really hard in many ways to describe
all the ways in which legal education has
changed since I first started in 1947,
but it has changed. Certainly, some of the
basic techniques of teaching are the same,
and, in my judgment, should remain the
same. I think that the casebook method of
instruction for the first year is probably
as good as any system that can be devised.
In talking to students, I never fail to have
them point out how much more
they like law school than they like their
undergraduate education.
Primarily because they felt that they were
participants, that they were called upon in
class, they had the opportunity to express
their ideas, to have opinions, and to deal with
a new and exciting discipline in an interesting
and challenging way.
So the first year of law school looks much
the same except the material has changed
radically. There's still property, contracts,
torts, procedure, criminal law, not only at
Illinois, but nearly every place, but of course
there have been real revolutions in these
areas. In my own field, for example, the law
of landlord tenant has reversed itself almost
180 degrees since I've first started teaching
in that area. The whole area of land use:
planning, zoning, subdivision control, limited
domain, environmental law - these areas
didn't even exist at least in the law school
curriculum at the time when I started to teach.
So there's been a lot of change of subject
matter and of course even the old doctrines
have been modified.
Beyond the first year however, we have
used a lot of new techniques, and used them
much more extensively: problem courses,
seminar courses, practice courses, simulated
courses in which we deal with real problems
in a simulated fashion, trial advocacy programs.
We've made a real effort to keep the law
school responsible to the changing needs of
the law itself. We have not always succeeded,
and to some extent, it is still true as it was in
your day — the first year you scare them to
death, second year you work them to death,
and third year you bore them to death.
I think we're doing better then we once did,
but we still have a ways to go to be sure that
we are being true to the very high quality of
students that now enroll at the College of Law.
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