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90 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 615 (2015)
Crisis and Trigger Warnings: Reflections on Legal Education and the Social Value of the Law

handle is hein.journals/chknt90 and id is 643 raw text is: CRISIS AND TRIGGER WARNINGS: REFLECTIONS ON LEGAL EDUCATION AND THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE LAW KIM D. CHANBONPN* INTRODUCTION The news about law schools is bad. College graduates are being dis- couraged from attending because most will exit with significant debt load and no guarantee that they will be able to obtain employment profitable enough to offset the investment in their education. Because fewer students are seeking admittance and class sizes are shrinking, tuition-dependent law schools are facing a financial crisis. In response, crisis managers have proferred solutions steeped in the buzzwords of neoliberal economic poli- cies. Austerity, consumer-oriented servicing, and other corporate tropes have lately become the new norms in law school management. However, the superficial logic of these policies belies the radical restructuring of legal education currently taking place, as well as, I argue, a broader assault on the law's central role in promoting social goods. The prevailing law school crisis narrative is peopled with the follow- ing cast of stock characters: crusading administrators, recalcitrant faculty, and disillusioned students. Administrators who struggle to rein in spending on faculty salaries and other fixed costs. Faculty who are uninterested in change, preferring instead to write esoteric scholarship and to teach using the same methods first introduced by Harvard's Dean Langdell in 1890. And students who face bleak employment prospects upon graduation, and are desperate to learn only what they might need to pass the bar exam and to launch, practice-ready, into the working world. According to the prevail- ing crisis narrative, each group represents mutually exclusive and opposi- tional interests. However crude these archetypes, tensions between faculty and stu- dents exist and are exacerbated by highly-stylized classroom interactions mediated by the Socratic dialogue. In this environment, students often ex- perience performance-related stress, embarrassment, and frustration. These * Associate Professor, The John Marshall Law School. My thanks to Blair Pooler and Mary Lu Cole, two of my former Criminal Law students, for their research assistance. I would also like to thank Pro- fessor Francisco Valdes for providing his helpful comments on a draft of this Essay.

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