Mid-City Law Center: Opportunity For Academic Innovation

This paper will explore some aspects of legal educaton in the context of the Norton Clapp Law Center, a new mid-city law school complex. The innovations in this Center will bring certain educational hazards, many of which are at the center of recent pedagogical discussions about law schools. This paper attempts to identify these hazards and contemplate ways to forestall them. I will not explore these issues as either a lawyer, an economist, a sociological or anthropological analyst.

Rather, my observations will be those of a working psychiatric clinician who is a long-time member of a law faculty, and who is used to listening to complex troubles, trying to make rational sense of them, and then collaboratively evolving new ways to get issues back into a more satisfying and less painful adjustment.