Harvard Law Bulletin: A Curriculum of New Realities
For more than 130 years, Harvard Law School’s curriculum has been modeled on the plans drawn by Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell in the late 1800s: intense immersion in property, contracts, torts, civil procedure and criminal law during the first year, followed by two more years—less structured than the first—in which students have been free to choose most of their courses from an increasingly extensive catalogue of specialized offerings.
Much of the teaching has employed the case method, born of a belief that law students can best gain the ability to “think like lawyers” by learning to make subtle distinctions between the facts and language of cases and judicial opinions.
But over the last several decades, with the rise of specialization, globalization and an increasingly regulatory environment both at home and abroad, the practice of law has become more international in scope and has come to require a systematic grasp of statutory and regulatory institutions and practices as much as an ability to glean principles from appellate decisions.
As a result, there has been a gathering consensus on the Harvard Law School faculty that the curriculum should better ensure that students are introduced to administrative, international and comparative subjects when forming their maps of the legal world. There has also been a growing sense that the traditional focus on court opinions should be supplemented more by materials and methods that better address the role lawyers play as problem-solvers and leaders in public and private settings.
That’s why, in two separate votes over the last 18 months, the faculty voted—unanimously—first to implement new, optional programs of study for second- and third-year students, and then to retool the first-year curriculum for the first time since the late 19th century.
The Process
The unanimous faculty votes made the process of curricular reform look almost breezy. In fact, the votes were the culmination of a three-year process of intensive review and information-gathering.
Proposals for curriculum reform have been discussed at HLS for several decades. In the 1980s and early ’90s, one section of each first-year class pursued experiments in collaborative and interdisciplinary teaching. But the efforts aimed at reform didn’t gain enough traction among the faculty until Kagan became dean, says Professor Martha Minow.
Kagan set her sights on curricular reform just as she took the helm of HLS four years ago, appointing a faculty committee to study the issue. She asked Minow to lead it.
“After becoming dean, I spent a lot of time talking to alumni and faculty who felt that our curriculum needed to catch up with the changing nature of the law in the world,” said Kagan. “It was time for some change.”
