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: