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51 Wake Forest L. Rev. 325 (2016)
The Role of Experiential Learning on a Law Student's Sense of Professional Identity

handle is hein.journals/wflr51 and id is 345 raw text is: THE ROLE OF EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING ON A LAW STUDENT'S SENSE OF PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY* Steven M. Virgil** INTRODUCTION Among the most important factors for hiring new faculty members at most law schools is the promise of future scholarship.' Once hired, law faculty members spend about half of their time writing articles for journals,2 usually on interesting topics related to their teaching. In addition to promoting the school's reputation, this scholarship serves to inform decisions on promotion and tenure.3 While law schools prefer to have excellent teachers, it is fair to say that they make important decisions based more on scholarship than teaching effectiveness.4 With so much effort and importance placed on scholarship, it is worth asking, as we do today, what a research agenda looks like in an era of reform, which seems to be where we are at this moment. There is currently a significant amount of criticism aimed at legal education and a growing feeling that what has become the standard law school experience does not fit very well in our times or does not readily lend itself to practice.5 It is common to hear that law schools must change or risk finding themselves out * Parts of this Essay reflect the ideas found in Mark Jensen, Jill Crainshaw, Steven Block, Mark Knudsen & Steven Virgil, Interdisciplinary Professional Education: Spirituality, Health and the Common Good (June 2010) (unpublished manuscript) (on file with author), delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke University. I would also like to thank Sam Wellborn (WFU Law '12) for his contributions to an earlier version of this paper. * * Clinical Professor of Law, Executive Director of Experiential Education, Wake Forest University School of Law. 1. See John D. Copeland & John W. Murry, Jr., Getting Tossed from the Ivory Tower: The Legal Implications of Evaluating Faculty Performance, 61 Mo. L. REV. 233, 241 (1996). 2. David Segal, What They Don't Teach Law Students: Lawyering, N.Y. TIMES (Nov. 19, 2011), http://www.nytimes.coml2011/11/20/business/after-law -school-associates-learn-to-be-lawyers.html?ref=davidsegal. 3. See Copeland & Murry, supra note 1, at 241. 4. See id. 5. See A. Benjamin Spencer, The Law School Critique in Historical Perspective, 69 WASH. & LEE L. REV. 1949, 1951-52 (2012). 325

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