Legal Theory and Legal Education

The current call for a legal profession and a legal education dedicated to such values as the public interest and social justice raises in a dramatic way well-known themes in our professional history. For at least forty years-arguably for much longer-American lawyers have been struggling with the realization that our legal system is not a dosed, formal system of rules.' On the contrary, a distinguishing feature of the American legal system and legal profession has always been their close and complex relationship with openly political issues. De Tocqueville's famous observation in 1835 that "scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question, was echoed a century later by Morris Cohen's argument that "we cannot pretend that the United States Supreme Court is simply a court of law .... [T]he issues before it generally depend on the determination of ... facts, their consequences, and the values we attach to these consequences. These are questions of economics, politics, and social policy which legal training cannot solve unless law includes all social knowledge. ' 3 While these questions are particularly apparent in Supreme Court decisions, they are also increasingly present throughout the work of the legal profession in the lower courts and in numerous agencies, commissions, and private organizations whose goals include making and influencing legal-political decisions.4 The nagging question for the law schools is: what kind of professional training is appropriate to this kind of legal system?