Narrowing the Gap by Narrowing the Field: What's Missing from the MacCrate Report—Of Skills, Legal Science and Being a Human Being

I come here today, not to bury the MacCrate Report, but to criticize it, not for what it includes, although that is part of my critique, but for what it leaves out. I also want to situate my critique in the contentious intellectual history of legal education and legal scholarship, that, in my view, has too long polarized both the intellectual value and rigor of "law" (conceived of either as doctrine or theory) and "skills" (those nasty things that real lawyers have to do to express "the law" and represent clients). Among the most recent entries to this debate is a work I will juxtapose to the MacCrate Report, Anthony Kronman's, The Lost Lawyer, which argues, in its powerful section on law schools, for another dualistic conception of legal education: "scientific realism", and its progeny of the abstract theories of law and economics and critical legal studies, and "prudential realism," which focuses on the lawyer's judgment, experience, feeling, and character, as well as reason.