Since 2014, I have tried from time to time to document my evolving sensibility about the “right” designs for higher education, sometimes using US law schools as a template, and sometimes thinking more broadly. The fruits of those efforts are posted here.
Some of these are (or were) efforts for or on behalf of my law school at the University of Pittsburgh. Some are (or were) independent creations. Any and all of them are free to copy, borrow, adapt, and implement as anyone anywhere might wish to.
This page was last updated on June 10, 2025
2014: “Visions of the Future of (Legal) Education”
This document combines posts from my blog that were directed to describing an entirely new and entirely hypothetical “law school of the future,” escaping – mostly, but inevitably never entirely – much of the legacy intellectual architecture and bureaucracy inherited from the Harvard Law School model that has dominated US legal education for more than 100 years.
2015: “Preparing for Service: A Template for 21st Century Legal Education”
The Dean of Pitt Law commissioned me and a small group of other Pitt law professors to spend a year producing a “strategic vision” (notably, not a “strategic plan”) to guide future development and allocation of faculty and program resources, anticipating the need for institutional “innovation” in an era of rapid technological change. This document was the result. It is notably less speculative and more “evolutionary” than the “Visions” document, but it advances a number of proposals that — had they been implemented — would have moved Pitt Law forward and modestly beyond the frontier of what was then the state of the art of the contemporary state of legal education.
Alas, essentially none of this “vision” document was implemented.
2015: “Leading New Lawyers: Leadership and Legal Education”
This law review article summarizes a new “course” on leadership that I developed at Pitt Law and have taught, in various forms, since 2011. “Leadership” and “leadership for lawyers” are concepts and practices that have long existed more in the imagination of the legal profession than in its training pipelines. The current form of my “leadership” course is available here.
More or less around the time that I was settling into “leadership” as a teaching theme, a group of US law professors was organizing a “Section on Leadership” within the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). I am a member of the Section, but my vision of leadership has far less to do with “lawyers” than the vision that animates most law school leadership programs, and far more to do with leaders, and would-be leaders, of all sorts, in all places and in all fields.
2018: “An Invitation Regarding Law and Legal Education, and Imagining the Future”
Frustrated by the fact that the world of legal education continued (and continues) to stick largely to tried (but rarely true) methods originated at Harvard, in late 2018 I drafted and posted this essay, in multiple parts, to my blog. I was trying to enlist colleagues in a giant re-think. I aimed to attract the attention of like-minded academic entrepreneurs at the pending 2019 Annual Meeting of the AALS, and to do that I offered not an answer to the question “what should our educational system be, and why, and how?” but instead this broad outline of prompts, motivations, and extensions to those provocative questions.
The “invitation” generated a range of almost entirely productive responses and to a number of alliances, friendships, and projects, including an online symposium about the essay; the several “Future Law Works” “Law’s Futures” gatherings; and a podcast (“The Future Law Podcast”) that lasted for 100 episodes. None of those responses, however, produced a durable version or vision of a new educational institution.
2019: “A New Paper Chase”
In this series of posts from my blog, I speculated on the systemic flaws of legal education by focusing on its central artifact: the law school casebook. It turns out to be worth the time: the casebook encapsulates much that is right and almost all that is wrong about how we train new lawyers.
2019: “The Responsive Law School”
Mark Cohen writes about law, the legal profession, and legal education for Forbes.com, and he is always thoughtful and provocative, if not always right. In this series of posts, I wrote out an elaborate response to one of his provocations, which ended up imagining, yet again, a law school keyed to the needs of society (large and small scales) and humans (lawyers, clients, and many, many others) of the present and of the future.
2019: “Proposal for a Signature Initiative”
What if “how to reform law school?” is the wrong question? What if the right question is “what does the state of legal education tell us about how to reform the university as a whole?“
That reframing has a pragmatic character; in part, I’ve learned that legal education reform is caught up in a nearly endless cycle of incremental improvements followed by retrenchment, all of the moves orbiting around and barely escaping the black hole of the Harvard model. Surprisingly, and weirdly, big reimaginings of higher education full stop may be more tractable.
That reframing also has a conceptual character; in part I’ve learned that what ails legal education turns out to be many of the same things that ail higher education: epistemological and bureaucratic siloing that locks the organizations into a vision of knowledge and practice that is both derived from and aimed at the big intellectual, social, and political questions … of the era that extends from the Industrial Revolution (in the UK and later in the US) to the immediate post-World War II global system.
What if we build systems of knowledge governance that are derived from and aimed at the big intellectual, social, and political questions of the 21st century? What if we build institutions and systems that steer away from disciplinary imperatives to “stay in your lane” and that tinker only at the margin with “cross-disciplinary” or “inter-disciplinary” research and teaching? What if we tackle the core identities and purposes of the university, re-stating its foundations and building institutions and practices on those? What if, for example, “law” isn’t the imperial, exclusive domain of governing knowledge that it has long supposed itself to be? How do we represent “law” in the context of a reimagined university?
That instinct motivated me to put together a proposal for “de-siloing” the contemporary university, in part. The proposal was and is situated in the context of my law school and university (the University of Pittsburgh), but that’s a matter of convenience for me. The impulse animating the proposal could be borrowed, modified (broadened? narrowed? twisted?) in any of multiple research universities around the world. If, that is, someone thought or thinks that going down this path, without knowing exactly where it might lead, would be a good idea.
Since timing is everything, note that this proposal is dated December 2019. The world changed in March 2020. Nothing came of the proposal. There is nothing confidential or proprietary in it. So I am happy to offer it here, and to learn where, and how, I (and the proposal) have gone astray.