The Soul of Legal Education

Gary Watt*

Senior Lecturer, Director of Undergraduate Studies,
School of Law, University of Warwick. 

Gary.watt@warwick.ac.uk

* I am grateful to my colleague Paul Raffield for his enlightened comments on this article.

Copyright © Gary Watt 2006
First Published in Web Journal of Current Legal Issues

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Summary

This special edition of the Web Journal of Current Legal Issues on the subject of legal education appears exactly one decade after a special edition of Pressing Problems in Law addressed the question ‘What are Law Schools For?’ In that collection of papers, Peter Goodrich identified a number of systemic ways in which a law school education damages the soul. The present paper argues that the soul of legal education is still lost (to some degree forced out by over-zealous attention to the science of law and the science of legal education) but that it might be redeemed through imaginative engagement with an “arts and humanities” approach to legal education. There are, however, certain dangers inherent in such an engagement and this paper argues that it will only succeed so long as law schools remain mindful of their fundamental responsibility to the discipline of law.

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Contents

Soul-searching

Science and humanity

The Garden of Intellect

Art and soul

Conclusion: standing at the edge of meaning

Bibliography

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Soul-searching

“And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry” (The New Testament, Luke 11:46)

This special edition of the Web Journal of Current Legal Issues on the subject of legal education appears ten years after a special edition of Pressing Problems in Law addressed the question, What are Law Schools For? (Birks,1996). In that collection of papers, Peter Goodrich proffered this dark damnation of the nature of legal education:

“[t]here can be no doubt that law school trains the soul, that it institutes the culture of law through a hierarchical conception of knowledge and through a variety of techniques of separation, isolation and fear” (Goodrich 1996, p68).

Professor Goodrich concluded that it “need not be thus”, but the present paper will argue that, ten years on, the soul of legal education remains in dire need of redemption.

Over the course of the last decade, law schools have become adept at the process of assembling the bare bones of their law degrees. “The module-aims-bone connects to the assessment-bone, the assessment-bone connects to the feedback-bone” is a mantra familiar to us all. Every law school easily satisfies minimum core standards in terms of the form and content of its modules and has at least the bare skeleton of a degree course ready to be pulled from the cupboard when the inspectors come. A great many law schools have fleshed out the minimum core with a diversity of optional modules, a range of modes of delivery and a balanced diet of assessments. Courses in the latter category are undoubtedly meatier than minimum standards would require; but with meat there is no guarantee of life. In this brief article I am not concerned with the bare bones of our courses or with the processes and methodologies by which we flesh them out. In fact, I hope I can resist the fetish of recommending a new way of doing it. My aim is to search out the soul of legal education; to look for inspiration, to seek that which breathes life into our enterprise.  I apologise that this all sounds very grand, but the impetus for writing in this way is my personal belief that too much writing on the subject of legal education imposes additional burdens and not enough is concerned to lift us up.  

Science and humanity

Several times in the past I have encountered a fresher law student who was unsure whether he or she had made the right choice to study law as a degree.  I find it easy in such cases to assure the doubter of the merits of a law degree compared to some of the alternatives on offer, but I cannot help but think that certain degree courses may offer better training for the soul than does the law. I imagine that a degree in English Literature, for example, might offer more sustained engagement with subjects of beauty than does the typical law degree. If the fresher professes a love for English or History I will be honest: “why not pursue the subject you love, it only takes one postgraduate year to convert to law if you want to become a practitioner”. (The very notion that the one-year postgraduate course involves “conversion” hints that there is a battle for the soul here.) I am, however, jealous for a more satisfying vision of legal education, one which would allow me to say with all sincerity: “whatever it is you love about English or History, I am sure you will find it in the study of Law”.

There is in fact transcendent beauty to be found in the law; and even in some of its least promising corners. The English mortgage is a case in point.  Not only does the mortgage perform the dramatic roles of best friend and worst enemy in our material lives, the very doctrine of the English mortgage is a sublime drama liberally infused with equitable fictions that ensure redemption of the borrower’s land despite the letter of the law. Indeed, it is the conflict between formal right and substantial mercy enshrined in a secured bond that provides the dramatic impetus for one of the great trial scenes of English fiction: the trial of Shylock’s homicidal bond in Act IV of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The very word ‘mortgage’ means ‘dead-pledge’. What could be more fascinating than to study that? If our teaching of mortgage law and other doctrinal subjects is not always fascinating, might it be because we have advanced legal science at the expense of legal art?  Do we tell our students that the English mortgage can be reduced to a series of scientifically logical statements, when we ought to admit, as did Lord Macnaghten, that ‘nobody by the light of nature ever understood an English mortgage of real estate’? (Samuel v. Jarrah Timber and Wood Paving [1904] AC 323, 326.) To get to the essence of the mortgage requires an appreciation of the mortgage as the product of a subtle joint enterprise between legal doctrine, history, social circumstance and judicial imagination. With this insight the mortgage can be appreciated even if it cannot be understood. In a sense I am recommending that we allow space for a ‘humanities’ approach to legal education, for whereas a scientific approach requires reduction to basic elements, a humanities approach prefers appreciation of subtle complexities in the light of human cultures and arts. A humanities approach to legal education should produce a deep and broad appeal to the human beings at the heart of the enterprise. It should engage imagination. It should be interesting. I entirely agree that “a fundamental concern must be to help law students find greater interest in what they are studying” and that “this is achieved by continuously directing them towards its broader meaning” (Johnstone, 1999).

Peter Goodrich, the scholar who identified something rotten in the state of legal education, is now the Director of Law and Humanities at the Cardozo School of Law,  Yeshiva University in New York. An institutional marriage between law and the humanities is certainly one sure way to explore the soul or humanity of law, but for most legal scholars this will be difficult to arrange. Indeed, for those of us housed in faculties of social science or business schools such a marriage may be considered something of a forbidden love. Interdisciplinary conferences, colloquia, publications and informal engagement between jurists and humanities scholars may be more realistic aspirations. It is encouraging that the last decade has seen a number of significant initiatives of this sort, including a collection of essays on Law and Literature in the Current Legal Issues series (Freeman and Lewis, 1999) and a special issue, also on Law and Literature, of the Journal of Law and Society (Hanafin, Gearey and Brooker, 2004); there have also been monographs (eg Aristomedou 2000, Ward 1999, 2004, Williams 2005) and articles (eg Luther 1996, Manji 2005, Rackley 2002, 2003) on law and literature, and other writings that have taken in the wider humanities landscape of history, theology and classics through the lens of law (eg Tadros, Douglas-Scott and Oliver 1999, Raffield 2004) and through the cinematic lens (Machura and Robson, 2001). The challenge is to find ways to nurture these flowers of scholarship within legal education in the United Kingdom, and, whilst there have already been some thoughtful attempts to meet that challenge (eg Ashford 2005, Bradney 2000), the effort is still in its infancy.  Crucially, the challenge is not merely to find the space for the flowers of humanities disciplines to flourish within legal scholarship and legal education, but, of no less significance, to ensure that the discipline of legal science is not choked in the process, and to ensure that critical reason and clarity of expression are not abandoned. Stephen Gillers was right to assert that law “is one of the arts or humanities…and not (only) logic”, but perhaps he was too casual when he asserted, in the same sentence, that law is “not a science” (Gillers,1993 p. 410). Whilst it is clear that we should not press the scientific, technical understanding of law so hard that it squeezes out the humane, it is equally certain that the appreciation of the beauty and arts of law should not be enriched at the expense of legal science and doctrine. The ground is clear for a genuine blooming of imaginative creativity in legal scholarship and legal education, but we must be attentive gardeners for there will inevitably be “noisome weeds, which without profit suck the soil's fertility from wholesome flowers” (Shakespeare, Richard II Act 3, Scene 4).

The Garden of Intellect

“Law, say the gardeners, is the sun, law is the one all gardeners obey tomorrow, yesterday, today” – (W H Auden Law Like Love, 1939).

Earlier I referred to the 1996 volume of Pressing Problems in Law which addressed the question, ‘What are Law Schools For?’ (Birks 1996). In his preface to that book, Peter Birks opined that if research done in the law school “is ever useless to judges and practising lawyers we will have come adrift from our foundations” (Birks 1996 ix). I cannot wholly agree with that, since it may threaten the academic freedom of individual researchers. A boat may be firmly anchored and still drift somewhat. I do, however, agree with Professor Birks’ further observation, on the same page, that:

“A law school which professed to have no interest in the decisions of the courts or which boldly announced that its research and publications bore no relation to the activities of the court would be a contradiction in terms. It would have defined itself out of existence as a law school” (Birks 1996 ix).

It is one thing to seek to liberalise and humanise legal education, it is quite another thing for legal education to turn its back on the practical world of law and lawyers.  As we search for the soul of legal education and look to enliven and invigorate our intellectual lives as scholarly teachers of the law, we should bear in mind that we are not seeking an out-of-body experience. This is no call to say farewell to the flesh; this is not a carnival.  The reason I am emphasising the positive aspects of retaining links with the practice of law is because the process of liberalising or humanising law school education does not require legal scholars to choose between constructive dialogue with the practicing legal profession and constructive dialogue with scholars in other (non-law) academic disciplines. Anthony Bradney, for example, recognizes that, just as “[t]here is no sharp division between the colours red and orange which lie next to each other in the spectrum…the needs of a practitioner and university study of law can be very close to each other” (Bradney, 1995).

In the same place he concluded that, since their needs can also lie “at opposite ends of the spectrum”, it might be safer to cut off deep engagement between the law school and legal practice, but more recently he has acknowledged that an inclusive approach is possible (Bradney, 2000 p346):

“It is not that a liberal education cannot provide technical or professional instruction, cannot, in an older language, refer to matters of utility, but technical instruction should not overbear the humane nature of the education.”

As we seek to liberalise law school education, it is important that we resist any notion of having to choose between legal practice and legal doctrine on the one side and liberal education on the other.  This false dichotomy forms a dangerous trap, indeed it has been observed that “adherence to a pure notion of liberal education creates the very space in which narrow systems of vocational training develop” (Johnstone, 1999). The dichotomy trap can be set in subtle ways. Consider Fiona Cownie’s observation, in the conclusion to her extensive empirical research into the cultures of legal academics, that “[i]n embarking on the journey away from its purely doctrinal roots, academic law is cutting its closest ties with the legal profession, and bringing itself much nearer to the heart of the academy” (Cownie, 2004, p198).  There are at least two a priori assumptions here, and their truth is far from self-evident.  The first is the assumption that there is such a place as the “heart of the academy” and the second, more worrying assumption, is that a move towards the heart of the academy is inconsistent with close ties to the legal profession. If the latter assumption were true, what a disaster it would spell for the intellectual and ethical content of the legal profession; and what a disaster it would spell for the social significance of law schools. Mercifully the suggestion that a move towards the heart of the academy is inconsistent with close ties to the legal profession is quite unfounded.   What would Law Lords and former Law Lords such as Brenda Hale, Peter Millett and Robert Goff make of it? They, and many of their brethren, have deep and personal connections to the legal academy. Robert Goff received the “Grand Cross (First Class) of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany” for his contribution to British awareness of German law. Is that not a sure sign of liberal and humane endeavour? On the other side of the Atlantic, Judge Richard Posner might be thought especially liberal in his writings for a sometime chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Certainly it is a very narrow academy that will not take the author of, amongst other works, Economic Analysis of Law (Posner, 2002), The Economics of Justice (Posner, 1981), Law and Literature (Posner, 1997) and The Problems of Jurisprudence (Posner, 1990) to its heart. Of course, these great personages are the elite of the practising profession, but even the most liberal humanities degrees are almost exclusively concerned with the arts of the elite. The choice between elite intellectual engagement with things and mundane processing of things is real enough, but that choice has no necessary correspondence with any choice between vocational and academic law.

There is no hint of the false choice between vocational and academic law in the excellent article, “A Liberal Education in Law: Engaging the Legal Imagination through Research and Writing beyond the Curriculum”, by the US scholar Carol M. Parker. She writes:

“If we were to ask recent graduates to describe their most meaningful educational experiences in law school, I believe that many of them would say that those experiences occurred when they represented clients in law school clinics, when they worked as editors and authors on law reviews, or when they argued cases in moot court competitions” (Parker, 2002, p140).

Of course there are special historical and financial reasons why American law schools might be expected, even at their most liberal, to be especially positive about their relationship with legal practice; but having been motivated to seek the merits of the relationship, who can deny that they have found it? American law schools are blooming with faculties and programmes dedicated to law and humanities: Cardozo, Chicago, Columbia….the list goes on. At the other end of the alphabet, Yale has a dedicated journal of Law and the Humanities. The advisory board of that journal is a galaxy of academic luminaries but the mission statement of the journal is encapsulated in the words of the only judge on the advisory board.  The Hon. Guido Calabresi, judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and former Dean of Yale Law School, observes that:

“Law feeds and is fed by the world around it. Fortunately, that world is at least as aptly described and understood by the humanities as by the social sciences. Hence, and also fortunately, it is impossible fully to understand law without a deep and sympathetic knowledge of the liberal arts.”

There is no sense here of any need to shun law in practice in order to embrace law in humanity. I am sure that my students have been as much inspired by the drama and elegant prose of the preamble to a Denning judgment as by any passage of Dickens. (Brian Harris QC has collated a number of inspirational judicial dicta in his book The Literature of the Law (Harris, 1998)).  Just as law can be presented as literature, so literature can be presented as law. An early instance of this is the work of A. Laurence Polak, a solicitor and classics graduate, who reported events from the Classics and Shakespeare in the form of informative and amusing law reports (Polak, 1946a, 1946b). Today the texts of Shakespeare’s plays are employed at McGill University, Canada, as the body of law for mooting legal issues. According to the McGill website, “students who participate in the Shakespeare Moot Project are finding themselves at a rare moment of unfettered creativity. They not only study the emergence and nature of a legal system. They make one”. Mooting is of course an undeniably practical art, yet it is also undeniably humane, not least because it is stimulating, even fun, and involves cooperation with colleagues. One of the great American law teachers, Karl Llewellyn, identified its capacity to save the soul of legal education (1930, p96):

“Moot court work will bring you into quick contact with a group. And in groups of students lies your hope of education...In group work lies the deepening of thought. In group work lie ideas, cross-lights; dispute, and practice in dispute; co-operative thinking and practice in consultation; spur for the weary, pleasure for the strong. A threefold cord is not quickly broken: in group work lies salvation.”

My own contribution to What are Law Schools For? considered the law school as “A ‘House of Intellect’ for the Profession” (Savage and Watt, 1996). It portrayed the legal profession as a cooperative endeavour encompassing the efforts of academic and practising jurists. The chapter included a tour of the various rooms that practising and academic jurists inhabit within the House of Intellect, and concluded with the observation that the law’s great strength as the focus of a general education is its capacity to provide “an excellent environment for the application of theory and ethics to real-life problems” (Savage and Watt 1996, p57). Ethics should certainly have an important place in the House of Intellect, for “[t]o turn from law and legislation to ethics is to pass into a different atmosphere and a larger room” (Hewart, 1930, p53). However, the tour of the House of Intellect should not have stopped there. In retrospect, it is clear that the tour should have concluded, as all the best tours do, with a tour of the garden. This is the place where the finest blooms of the jurist’s profession are to be found. The humane jurist, whether law tutor or legal practitioner, should spend time in the Garden of Intellect. Indeed the doors between the House of Intellect and the Garden of Intellect should remain open at all times to ensure that the sights, sounds and scents of the garden fill every space of the house. I will not set in concrete terms what this might mean for the individual law teacher but it is likely to include space for law teaching and legal research that is so imaginative in form and content that it cannot readily be assessed by external inspectors (representing QAA, RAE and such like) unless the inspectors are themselves permitted to exercise their imaginations to the necessary extent.  Certainly there must be freedom to frame the law as a humanities discipline and not solely as a branch of social science. The potential for an imaginative humanities approach to legal education may be illustrated in a small way by the fact that final year trusts students at Warwick have the option (as an alternative to a more typical essay title) to “write a short play for three parts to represent the private discussions which took place in chambers between Megaw LJ, Stamp LJ and Sachs LJ before they handed down their judgments in Re Baden's Deed Trusts (No. 2) [1973] Ch 9”. The more adventurous student can even opt to submit his or her full module dissertation in the form of a dialogue or play.  Of course, to breathe new life into an old formula is just the first step into the garden; the potential is endless.

If there is a “heart of the academy”, it is the place where the various gardens of our disciplines meet; but even when we spend time at the furthest reaches of the garden we must not lose sight of our own house (or, if we have multi-disciplinary backgrounds, of our houses). The House is in the Garden and the Garden is in the House; they are one. It is one thing to have indistinct borders where the gardens of the disciplines meet, one would wish for that (Becher and Trowler, 2001), but it is quite another thing to abandon the house altogether. Airy fairies who spend their entire lives at the bottom of the garden may fear to visit the house; legal academics should not. The need to journey beyond traditional academic disciplines whilst remaining in touch with them is the key dilemma for liberal education.  Leavis captured this when he identified the need to “produce specialists who are in touch with a humane centre, and to produce a centre for them to be in touch with” (1948, p28). There is a wonderful moment in an episode of The Simpsons (“Marge in Chains”), when the family lawyer, Lionel Hutz, asks “can you imagine a world without lawyers?” He sees all the creeds and colors of the earth holding hands beneath a rainbow sky. And he shudders. Can we imagine a law degree without lawyers? Of course we can, but would it be a garden paradise? I am not convinced it would be. The arts of law are practiced in the application of our fertile minds and imaginations to the issues of real-life. It is the flesh as much as the spirit which makes the life. The words of Oliver Wendell Holmes are as true now as they were over a century ago:  “The main part of intellectual education is…learning how to make facts live” (Holmes, 1886b, p36-37).  More recently another great American scholar, James Boyd White, (once briefly a legal practitioner) indicates that law’s rootedness in factual reality makes it, like poetry, one of the finest trees in the Garden of Intellect: “Both poetry and law unite the particular and the general: the image and the idea” (White, 1984, p1681). In short, the law school’s Garden of Intellect should be a cultivated garden in which flowers spring from human imagination and are ordered by human will.

Art and soul

“The law the lawyers know about is property and land; but why the leaves are on the trees…why faith is more than what one sees…they do not understand”
(H D C Pepler The Devil’s Devices 1915, p38))

Oliver Wendell Holmes once concluded a lecture to undergraduates of Harvard University with the assertion that “the law is not the place for the artist or the poet. The law is the calling of thinkers” (Holmes 1886a, p29-30). Yet this is the same Oliver Wendell Holmes who elsewhere opined that “the life of the law is not logic but experience” (Holmes, 1881, p1). These two statements might appear to be at odds with one another, but insofar as the former contrasts law with pure art and the latter contrasts law with pure science they can be reconciled in the assertion that law is neither wholly one thing (art) nor wholly the other (science). Law is a blend of the two. Law is science fiction: part science, part fiction. The soul of legal education cannot find full expression without an appreciation of this tension (or harmony) in the essence of law. In another place, Oliver Wendell Holmes captured the essence of this when, speaking on “The Use of Law Schools”, he described the “noblest” graduates of law as those who acknowledge their dependence upon “abstract thought, of science, of beauty, of poetry and art, of every flower of civilization” and who are committed to “finding a soil generous enough to support it” (Holmes 1886b, p47). The challenge for those of us committed to legal education is to ensure that the Garden of Intellect is generous enough to support all the flowers which properly belong there. This is legal culture in a pleasing sense.

As the son of the renowned poet of the same name, Oliver Wendell Holmes was doubtless a good judge of the difference between poetry and law, but I do not agree with his claim that “the law is not the place for the artist or the poet” (Holmes, 1886a, p29-30). Cultivated poetry, as opposed to the type that is permitted to grow wild, is central to the language of law (Nussbaum, 1996).  The poetry of hyperbole, metaphor and simile are essential to the law; indeed, what is precedent if not simile? Nobody would suggest that the law could operate without fictions of one sort or another. The lawyer, especially the practising lawyer, perhaps especially the solicitor, is nowadays sometimes portrayed as a soulless technician. Regrettably, the portrayal may sometimes be accurate, but there is at least the craft of drafting and the skill of persuasion even in the most run-of-the mill legal practice, and in the right soil these crafts become high arts. Karl Llewellyn once said of drafting: “I know of no art more difficult. I know of no art more fascinating” (Llewellyn, 1930 p98).  Likewise, one of our senior judges has observed extra-judicially that the interpretation of a statue ‘is not a science. It is an art” (Steyn, 2002). Judge Learned Hand was of the same opinion: “I like to think that the work of a judge is an art…[i]t is what a poet does, it is what a sculptor does” (cited Shanks, 1968, pxiii).  The drafting of pleadings and submissions have been admired for their artistry since Elizabethan times. In his Defense of Poesie, Sir Philip Sydney observed that “Poet can scarcely be a lyer…he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth…he citeth not authorities of other histories” (Sydney 1580-81).  This might suggest irreconcilable differences between the art of poetry and the arts of law, but Sydney proceeds to defend the lawyer’s use of fictions:

“And dooth the Lawier lye, then when under the names of John of the Stile, and John of the Nokes, hee putteth his Case? But that is easily answered, their naming of men, is but to make their picture the more lively, and not to build anie Historie. Painting men, they cannot leave men namelesse”.

This portrayal of the lawyer’s art is not far removed from the art of poetry as Robert Frost depicts it in his essay The Figure a Poem Makes (Frost, 1995).  There he describes how poetry produces “a clarification of life…a momentary stay against confusion” (Frost, 1995, p776). Certainly the arts of the lawyer and the poet are alike insofar as they seek to express transcendent values in particular words by means of devices including metaphor and simile, but whereas a poet need not strive to resolve ambiguity, lawyers have a responsibility to strive for utmost clarity even though they must frequently embrace defeat. In any case, even when the lawyer’s art of drafting succeeds in removing ambiguities, lawyers must first imagine the ambiguities they remove. Therefore the lawyer’s art is poetry, but poetry subject to discipline; and the lawyer is a poet, just one who feels a professional responsibility. We stand at “the edge of meaning” (White, 2001) and we must allow imagination to flourish, but it should so far as possible be with a view to teasing something meaningful from the meaningless. Poetic law has its place, as does poetic justice, but imprecise legal writing is poor legal writing. Indeed, as a former Dean of Chicago Law School once said, there is “no more obvious symptom of immaturity in a human culture than contempt and disregard for precision and responsibility in the use of words” (Ward, 1953, p425-426). When a lawyer is irresponsible with language, lives may be ruined.

Conclusion: standing at the edge of meaning

“The self exists in a world that it does not wholly understand, and for which no language is adequate; the response [the poets Frost and Herbert] make,
as Plato does too, is a specification and an elaboration of these conditions in the forms of expression we call art.
Something like this, I believe, is true of the judge and lawyer as well.”
James Boyd White, The Edge of Meaning (White, 2001, p251)

James Boyd White is seamlessly professor of Law, professor of English and adjunct professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. In this, as well as in his writing, he is an ideal expression of the happy unity of the House of Intellect and the Garden of Intellect. He was once a fresher student of law, but apparently saw no conflict between law and the humanities. On the contrary, he recounts that when he was thinking about going from English graduate school to law school he went to hear a moot court argument on tax and administrative law. He had expected it to be “dry-as-dust”, but instead found the law to be “a fascinating activity of mind, a way of engaging with language and the world” (White, 2001, p219-221). The particular “activity of mind”, the flower of intellect which stands at the very border between the garden of the lawyer and the garden of the poet, is the flower of imagination. As our ideal gardener puts it: “[t]he lawyer and the judge live constantly at the edge of language, the edge of meaning, where the world can be, must be, imagined anew” (White, 2001, p223). The 18th-century British statesman Edmund Burke, who early in his career gave up the law in favour of (other) literary work, once wagged that “The law sharpens the mind, by narrowing it”, but legal education that celebrates imagination will surely enliven the mind by broadening it. Carol M. Parker writes “what should we tell students through our curricula? Perhaps what we should say to them, not lightly but quite seriously, is this: Use your imagination.” (Parker, 2002, p131).

If we had to sum up in a single word the developments that have taken place in legal education over the last decade, that word might be “pedagogy”. Its origins are in the ancient world; in the Greek description of the slave (pedagogos, from paidos (boy) and agogos (leader)) whose task was to accompany his master’s children to school. In its positive sense, pedagogy is a relationship in which one party guides the other through sometimes difficult terrain, perhaps breaking a path where it has become overgrown with weeds; perhaps extending a helping hand.  In its negative sense, pedagogy turns law school tutors into slaves and turns law school students into children; the tutors carry the students on their backs and the students have a free ride. My hope is that a decade from now, when we look back on the tenth anniversary of this special issue on the subject of legal education, we might sum up the focus of modern law school education in a different word: “imagination”. There is reason to believe that the soul of legal education may be redeemed through the celebration of imagination, but in the course of celebration we must not abandon reason to belief. We must not forget our responsibility to the discipline of law, to the practical and scholarly profession of law, and to the highest hopes of those we teach. This paper commenced with Peter Goodrich warning that law schools train the soul in the wrong way, but James Boyd White issues a counter-warning (White, 2001, p223). Having identified the lawyer’s power to imagine the world anew, he observes that “to do this well is an enormous achievement; to do it badly, a disaster of real importance”. 

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