THE ANNUAL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF LAW SCHOOL

The AALS meeting will begin in a few days. A theme running through the meeting will be the future of legal education and the role of practice-ready legal education. There will be a lot of discussion of change, the need for change, how to implement change, etc. However, if one steps back and listens carefully to the loudest voices, one will hear the voice of the reactionary, the voice of the counter-revolutionary disguised in the language of the revolutionary or, most-likely, the progressive. Do not be fooled. The advocates of practice-ready legal education are supporters (if not the dupes) of the hierarchy. They would have law students graduate with only the skills and limited knowledge that would allow law school graduates to take their positions in the machinery of the legal bureaucracy. They will would train the law students to be high-quality, but easily replaceable worker bees. Void of any inclinations toward the intellectual, the original, the independent, the true. Void of any inclinations toward law as being about justice. When legal education stops being about justice, what is its special worth? Lawyers simply become paper shufflers, mouthpieces, suits.