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11 UC Irvine L. Rev. 811 (2020-2021)
What the Access to Justice Crisis Means for Legal Education

handle is hein.journals/ucirvlre11 and id is 824 raw text is: What the Access to Justice Crisis Means for Legal Education Kathryne M. Young* Despite enormous social, legal, and technological shifts in the last centur, the structure of legal education has remained largely unchanged. Part of the reason so little change has occurred is that the current model mostly works; it produces a professional class of lawyers to populate the ranks of law firms and government entities. At the same time, for decades, legal education researchers have considered it practicaly axiomatic that law school has room for improvement. In this Article, I argue that the access to justice crisis-a deficit of just resolutions to justiciable civiljustice problems for eveyday people-compels an overdue examination of legal education's scope and purpose. If we assume that lawyers should have a major role in solving the access to justice crisis, as opposed to simply meeting individual legal needs, law schools must prepare lawyers to serve this role. I point to three categories of improvement that centering access to justice would necessitate: teaching a greater versatility of thinking and problem-solving, imparting a broader understanding of the ecosstem ofjusticiable problems and lawyers' place in it, and structuring law school to impart the cognitive cornerstones needed for successful legal practice. Placing access to justice at the center of legal education would strengthen, not supplant, the traditional model. In addition to equipping lawyers to address eveyday Americans' justice problems, this Article's proposals would make the legalprofession nimbler and more resilient to social, economic, and technological changes, and help overcome some of the profession's most intractable problems. *JD, PhD, Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Access to justice Faculty Fellow, American Bar Foundation. Correspondence may be sent to young@umass.edu. I am grateful to colleagues who provided invaluable feedback, including Steven Aggergaard, Swethaa Ballakrishnen, Elizabeth Chambliss, Kristen Holmquist, Lisa R. Pruitt, Ann Southworth, and Michele Statz. Enormous thanks to Emily Taylor Poppe for organizing the Thinking About Law & Accessing Civil Justice conference at UCI Law, to Carroll Seron for her generous commentary on this paper, and to the other symposium participants for their collegiality and thoughtful critique. Thank you also to the members of the UC Irvine Law Review, who provided useful suggestions and careful edits. Conversations with Meera Deo, Bryant Garth, Liz Gaudet, Marc Miller, Rebecca Sandefur, Sudha Setty, Carole Silver, and Molly Van Houweling shaped my thinking as well. Finally, I am indebted to the scholars at the Center for the Study of Law & Society at the University of California, Berkeley, especially Catherine Albiston, Calvin Morrill, Jonathan Simon, and Rachel Stern, for formative discussion of an early draft. 811

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