Law Schools and the Goliath Syndrome
J. Robert Brown | Monday, June 8, 2009 at 06:00AM While this is a corporate governance blog, we also occasionally touch on matters pertaining to legal education, particularly rankings.
With that in mind, we turn to a recent piece in The New Yorker, How David Beats Goliath. The article indicates, counter intuitively, that David often beats Goliath but mostly when David responds to Goliath with unconventional strategies. As the article notes:
- David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time. . . . What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”
How does this pertain to legal education? It suggests that law schools wanting to "slay Goliath," which in this post means moving up in the rankings, ought not to invariably play by Goliath's rules. In other words, law schools need to embark on strategies that are unconventional.
What might this mean? There is no easy answer. In How David Beats Goliath, it meant a basketball coach who used a full court press to cause turn overs and throw off the ability of the superior shooting teams. Moreover, whatever the "unconventional" idea, once enough schools follow suit, it will become "conventional."
With law schools, there are a number of possible ways to attract positive attention to the institution through unconventional approaches that also benefit students. Possible examples?
- Law classes in foreign languages. International law programs have proliferated. Yet programs that actually teach students to operate in non-English enviornments are almost nil. Particularly for programs offering law classes in Spanish (the University of Denver has a "Spanish for Lawyers" program), it provides an opportunity to encourage internationalization and to reach out to an under-represented segment of the community (non-native English speakers).
- Changes to the first year curriculum. Most law schools teach the first year in a more or less identical fashion. Contracts, torts, civil procedure, criminal law, property, maybe conlaw, crimpro and sometimes an elective. Harvard's reforms announced a couple of years ago put a bit more emphasis on international and administrative matters but otherwise didn't tamper much with the model. What might be done? How about a first year curriculum that in one semester teaches civil law (torts, contracts, civpro, property and legal writing) and in the second teaches criminal law (crim, constitutional crim pro, criminal procedure, legal writing and a seminar on a crimlaw topic). Perhaps by clustering the courses, there will be opportunity for common problems and cross learning, increasing retention.
- Increased substantive expertise by allowing a professor with a particular area of expertise to teach the same 20 or 25 students in several classes during the same semester, perhaps providing opportunities for experiential learning. This could be set up several years in advance, allowing students to plan for the semester and entail rotation of faculty. The designated faculty member might even teach his/her entire load in one semester, giving students 10-12 hours of the area under study.
- Becoming the first law school in the country to have tenure track writing faculty for both first year and upper level writing requirements? Particularly with the upper level writing requirement, schools often allow completion through methods that can sometimes be unrigorous, whether participation on a law review or completion of a seminar paper. Having students taught entirely by trained writing faculty (for both first year and upper level) would by itself be an unusual step. Making them all tenure track would be unique.
These are random ideas of varying quality. There are other methods. I have written about the use of law blogging by faculty to raise a law school's notoriety. See Of Empires, Independents, and Captives: Law Blogging, Law Scholarship, and Law School Rankings. If anyone else has unconventional ideas, please share them.
Reader Comments (5)
If one wanted to draw an analogy it would not be between legal education and war or most sports, it would be between legal education and a sport like ice skating. In the former judges give scores which determine the winners and losers. Radically different moves or routines are likely to draw interested comments from the judges, but also likely to draw very low scores as well.
Davidic strategies may be valid educationally, but their efficacy in moving a law school up higher on the law school food chain is dubious.
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