Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

This week, I'm looking at a new essay in the Harvard Law Review by Yale law dean Heather Gerken on bridging the perceived gap between practice and theory in legal education. Next up, I'm checking in with Lily Knezevich from the Law School Admission Council on whether it's planning to offer something akin to the new so-called “adversity rankings” soon to be provided by The College Board for SAT takers. Read on!

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter:@KarenSloanNLJ

Theory v. Practice? Yale Law Dean Says “Nah”

Should law school be a petri dish of ideas and intellectual exploration? Or should it follow a trade school model, ensuring that graduates have the skills necessary to be lawyers from the get-go? Those are the wrong questions to ask, argues a new essay in the Harvard Law Review by Yale law dean Heather Gerken. Law schools, says Gerken, should integrate both theory and practice to such a degree that they aren't viewed as opposite goals, but rather natural extensions of each other. At least that's what I took away from the essay, which I highly recommend reading. The essay offers inspiration of what legal education should aspire to, yet provides enough concrete examples of how to marry theory and practice that it doesn't feel too much like a mere thought experiment. Here's Gerken:

“The dominant frame for debating legal education's future mistakenly pits practice against theory and reflects too narrow an understanding of what it means to be a lawyer. The frame prevents schools from being ambitious enough about theory and practice. And it leads law schools to train students for their first job but not their last.”

Gerken holds Yale up as a model of how to effectively bridge the gap between those who prioritize theory and those who prioritize practice, which she admits flies in the face of Yale's reputation as a wonky bastion of intellectual discourse. Disclaimer: The essay is a bit of a brag sheet for Yale. Still, a number of things caught my eye about Yale's approach to practice and theory that could be useful on other campuses.

➤➤Many of Yale's doctrinal faculty also run clinics, hence there is not the traditional faculty divide among the two groups.

➤➤Similarly, many of Yale's clinical faculty also engage in traditional legal scholarship, further blurring lines between clinicians and doctrinal faculty.

➤➤Yale doesn't require students to take a clinic, but about 80 percent opt to do so and about 50 percent take two clinics.

➤➤Yale allows students to start taking clinics in the second semester of their first year, meaning they can do five semester of clinical work. That allows students to delve into complex, long-term projects.

➤➤Students don't play second fiddle to their clinical professors, contributing research and working behind the scenes. Instead, they argue in court, draft documents and testify before regulators and lawmakers. Those frontline opportunities help explain why so many students at Yale opt to take clinics.

Gerken offers plenty of examples of the breadth and depth of Yale's clinics, and just how successful they have been. (She credits her predecessor Robert Post with growing the school's clinical program.) Yale students were on the front lines in challenging President Trump's travel ban. They've been fighting to preserve the DACA program and to preserve the rights of journalists amid the Trump administration. And the school's veterans clinic has been prolific in pressing the rights of those who have served.

She aims to show that a strong clinical program and a reputation for a solid foundation in theory aren't mutually exclusive. And she makes a persuasive case that the two goals should not be pitted against each other or seen as contrasting.

Gerken, to her credit, acknowledges that good clinical programs are expensive (and not every law school has the deep pockets of Yale.) But this dual-goal for legal education isn't just for well-funded campuses, she argues.

My thoughts: Gerken's vision of legal education as exploring both the theoretical and practical side of the law is pretty close to the ideal, as I see it. And it's clear that Yale has taken many steps to achieve that aim. Still, I have to wonder how universal—or realistic—this ideal is for all law campuses. Yale obviously enjoys so many advantages over most other law schools, and I'm not just talking about money and reputation. It's a relatively small school, which enables it to provide a robust clinical program. It gets trickier once you are faced with creating those opportunities for hundreds upon hundreds of students.

And Yale's position atop the law school hierarchy certainly offers Gerken the space to contemplate the ideal law school pedagogy in a way I suspect other deans can't. She doesn't have to worry about the size of school's applicant pool, whether its new graduates will pass the bar in significant numbers, or whether they'll be able to find jobs. Those are the kinds of concerns I think are consuming many of her dean colleagues in the day to day, which leaves less bandwidth for Gerken's loftier goals for legal education. Still, it's worth thinking through how to break down these walls between practice and theory, and Yale offers a darn good roadmap.

Adversity Score, Redux

Last week in this space, I explored the idea of a so-called “adversity score” for law school applicants that would help admissions officers gauge the obstacles people have overcome in their lives. (You can read about my conversation with AccessLex's Aaron Taylor on the subject here.)

Taylor told me that he supports the idea of an adversity score but doesn't want to see it derived by the Law School Admission Council—as the College Board plans to do with SAT takers—on the idea that schools should develop their own adversity metric. So that begs the question: Is LSAC looking at following in the College Board's footsteps and developing its own diversity score?

To find out, I rang up Lily Knezevich, the senior vice president for learning and assessment at the council. The short answer is no, the council is not currently developing anything resembling the College Board's new adversity metric. But it is closely following what the College Board is doing, in part because its member law schools are curious about the adversity scores and want to know more about how they are being calculated.

The council has made its own forays into how to support the so-called “holistic review” of law school applications. That is to say, it has looked into ways to help law schools factor in things other than LSAT scores and undergraduate grade-point averages in admissions. Back in the 1990s, when California's Prop 209 banned public universities from considering race in admissions, the council launched a research project on how it could better help schools manage their admissions procedures to hit certain goals, be it racial diversity, geographic diversity or what have you.

The Alternative Admissions Model that resulted was basically a mathematical model allowing schools to better achieve their admissions goals, whatever they may be. Do you want more than half the class hailing from in-state? The model can help with that.

So let's say you are an admissions officer who aims to bring in a class with many students who have exhibited grit and determination. The model won't help you figure out who has overcome obstacles in their lives, as the College Board's adversity scores aims to do. But if you can determine that level of grit and determination by reading through the applicant's file, the model will allow you to weigh that heavily against other factors in its calculations.

All of which is to say that the council does have tools available to help schools admit diverse classes; just don't hold your breath for LSAT takers to be assigned an individual adversity score anytime soon. 

Extra Credit Reading

Newly released emails from the University of Alabama reveal that officials decided to return Hugh F. Culverhouse's Jr.'s $21.5 million donation to its law school before Culverhouse called for students to boycott the university in protest of the state's abortion ban.

Heading to law school as a teen? This 2L at George Washington University School of Law has advice for navigating legal education before hitting 20.

The University of Denver Sturm School of Law has been sued for a second time by a female law professor who claims she was grossly underpaid for years.

Lawmakers in Louisiana have approved spending $100,000 on a feasibility study of a new public law school in Shreveport.

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I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]