Scientific Eclat and Technological Change: Some Implications for Legal Education

About: This article is published in Michigan Law Review.The article was published on 1965-06-01 and is currently open access. It has received 1 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Legal profession & Technological change.

Summary

A. The Legal Way and the Scientific Way: A Comparison

• No matter how the lawyer's necessary training and absorption in such matters may make him appear, the notion that he is to play less than a leading role in a society oriented to scientific methods and technological developments subordinates his special fortes to surface appearances.
• Both are skeptical of facts which by their outward simplicity suggest that no questions need be asked.
• Similarly, both are motivated by a common faith in the possibility and importance of reducing-perhaps eliminating-the operation of uncontrollable chance in the behavior of matter and energy and in the governing of man's conflicts and affairs.
• Michigan Law Review [Vol. 63:1423 man not trained to look for the exemplifying particulars of such trends in cases, statutes, and administrative attitudes and regulations will scarcely know how to evaluate and give meaningful shape to the interests of others in times of change.

1427 B. The Legal Way and Technological Advances

• As technological advances add new interrelationships to a growing network, exclusive spheres of private interests in isolation become smaller and less tenable.
• The legal way becomes more obviously a matter of the preservation of that pattern and the survival of life itself.
• The acceptance and vitality of the legal way, therefore, become centrally important, rather than less so, in a society of technological change.
• In doing so, he rides not into the sunset of his day, as some suggest, but into dawn.
• It is true that he does not ride alone, but neither can he go behind other ministers to social needs.

I. Uses of Lawyers' Traditional Fortes

• Future conflicts, which will be more numerous and complex, will sharpen traditional fortes of the Ia-wyer.
• But so long as accommodation is effected by the design of lawyers in probably as many as ninety per cent or more of all claims, including those which reach the point of filing a complaint, 3 resolution will rest increasingly on the lawyer's powers of prediction, detachment, patience, persuasion, and conciliation.
• Experience teaches that the affording of procedural safeguards, which by their nature serve to illuminate the underlying facts, in itself often operates to prevent erroneous decisions on the merits from occurring.
• "He was presented with no prior statement of written charges and received no opportunity to reply to charges before a faculty committee or other properly constituted body.".
• Federal employees are entitled to dismissal hearings under the federal civil service system.

2. Development and Application of New Fortes

• 26 Even though technology resulting largely from the scientific eclat of the past quarter century has already produced social change at an unprecedented rate, new possibilities for greater change from an increase in scientific and technological activity are already apparent.
• All signs portend a proliferation of the situations in which the just and nonviolent reconciliation of asserted interests with common interests will pass with greater difficulty through the "eye" of a court, or even of an administrative agency as conventionally constituted.
• Law will have an important, albeit not exclusive, role in grappling with the problems mentioned above.
• Previously unknown combinations of social, religious, political, medical, psychological, educational, and legal controls will be necessary.

B. Curricular Advances

• The curriculum offered during the second two years of law school displays a greater awareness of the inadequacies of old fortes alone.
• A second effect is to orient students to actual problems of international and foreign practice.
• Broader understanding of criminal law problems as well as of other legal problems may also come from such courses as Legal Medicine (Wes tern Reserve, Maryland), Legal Aspects of Mental Illness (Southern California), Scientific Evidence , Mind and Deed (Southern California), and Anthropology and Law (, Minnesota, California at Berkeley).
• The Supreme Court decision in Gideon v. Wainwright 35 will spark renewed interest in this field.

C. The Legal Education of Tomorrow

• From these beginnings, therefore, the face of legal education may be expected to undergo further change toward the extension of skills and attitudes developed largely in concentration on the stillimportant party-to-party controversies.
• More naturally familiar with, and more proficient at working on the social "macro-controversies.".

I. Interdisciplinary Communication and Cooperation

• Since many of these recent developments involve interdisciplinary activity, they also present possibilities for reducing the insulation of the legal profession.
• The truth so far, however, is that only modest results, and no over-all formula for effective interdisciplinary cooperation, have been reported.
• These attitudes, although not invariable, are common enough and limit the number of persons who are favorably disposed to a joint edu-cational venture with lawyers and who are ready to give such a venture sustained priority over more rewarding academic commitments.
• On the lawyer's side there is at least a presumption of customary dealing with other specialists, but usually in an inquiry having tighter boundaries than those that circumscribe a large-scale social problem coiled into legal and non-legal skeins.
• 43 After first contact, there is an inclination on both sides to back off in obeisance to years of academic and professional isolation.

2. Cooperation Among Law Schools

• Moreover, law school enrollment is currently undergoing a sharp rise.
• Even the front group schools are under-financed when compared to any standard other than their less fortunate counterparts.
• New programs have been financed in some instances with non-recurring grants, so that extraordinary fund-raising will become necessary to maintain existing programs.

47. See MASON, HARLAN FISKE STONE-PILLAR OF THE

• "The development of an effective recruitment program appears to require long-range planning and action, national in scope in numerous respects, and involving concerted action by the law schools and the bar of the country.
• The law schools appear to have an important sphere of activity fully to inform and work with.