Law School in 2 Years (Same $$?) — Assessing Northwestern’s Program

[WSJ_law_blog]

“For us to be successful, we have to be producing students that the rest of the world wants. Just producing people who are great at legal analysis, they are a dime a dozen out there now,” David Van Zandt, Dean of Northwestern law, told the Chicago Tribune about his new his plan for a two-year JD program.
“My sense is that compressing the educational process is likely to seriously derogate from the quality. What is lost is likely to be much more than anything that is gained by hustling the students through more quickly,” Geoffrey Stone, U. of Chicago law prof and former dean, told the Trib about Van Zandt’s plan for a two-year JD program.



News of Northwestern’s ambitious new program to offer a two-year JD circulated this morning. (See Insider Higher Ed, the Chicago Trib and NU’s press release.) The idea is not new, but Northwestern, according to reports, will be the first top-tier school to offer both two- and three-year programs.

Is the plan, spearheaded by Dean David Van Zandt, an innovative break with the conservative, time-honored traditions of law school? After all, how much law is learned in that third year? Or, as Chicago’s Professor Stone suggests, is the two-year program an “irresponsible” ploy that risks churning out substandard lawyers?

Here are the details of the program, according to Van Zandt:

Tuition: Don’t expect to save money. Northwestern announced the program but won’t answer the $42,672 question of whether the compressed plan will be cheaper. Van Zandt told the Law Blog that, rather than the prospect of a cheaper degree, the financial attraction of the program is more likely to be the ability to be earning a salary a year earlier. (And yes, the $42k figure is NU’s annual tuition.)

• Time This is a five-semester program that will begin in May. The 25 to 60 students expected to join will take the same number of credits as students in the three-year program. They’ll take extra courses each semester and pick up one or two credits through mini-courses between semesters.
• Curriculum While the two-year option will have the same curriculum as the traditional program, the two-year students will be the first to test two new required courses: quantitative reasoning, including accounting, finance and statistics; and the dynamics of legal services behavior, including skills such as teamwork, leadership and project management.
• Admission Applicants will be required to have two or three years of “substantive work experience” after college. People with work experience are likely to have “the good time management” necessary to success in the program, Van Zandt told Insider Higher Ed.

Terri Mascherin, a Jenner & Block partner and Northwestern alum who helped shape the new curriculum, told the Trib: “We don’t intend to put out a generation of accountants or business analysts, but we do hope to put into the workplace alumni who have a better grounding in the kinds of issues that they will face from their client’s perspective. Clients don’t like lawyers who can spout legal analysis but can’t do strategic analysis.”