Barriers to Adaptation in Legal Education and the Critical Importance of Simply Caring

Abstract

In her provocative book Rules for a Flat World, Professor Gillian Hadfield makes the important point that our ossified legal system does not meet the needs of our dynamic society. And she rightly notes that legal education is not an ally in meeting this challenge. To move forward, then, legal education must innovate. This essay offers the modest hunch that non-profit higher education can innovate at lower cost by mimicking the successes of their for-profit peers, in effect leveraging for-profit higher education as a form of research and development. Even if this hunch has some validity, though, it does not say what shape that innovation will take, and whether it can promote the needed change that Professor Hadfield urges.