Somewhere Farther Down the Line: MacCrate on Multiculturalism and the Information Age

A couple of months ago, sometime after I was invited by Symposium Editor Ruth Kennedy to participate in today's discussion, I got a telephone call from her. She wanted to know the title of my remarks. I, of course, had no idea, what I would entitle these remarks because I was still freshly in the throes of trying to write these remarks. Only moments before the phone rang, I had been preoccupied with several CDs that I had recently purchased and was thinking about the task ahead of me.

It did occur to me, however, that there was something I wanted to say about the logical premise from which the MacCrate Report proceeds. The very idea of "identifying the fundamental skills and values that every lawyer should acquire before assuming responsibility for the handling of a legal matter" struck me as a kind of hubris. The idea was just too pat—too linear—for me. Then too, it struck me that, if successful, this approach would, ironically be more likely to limit, devalue, and even caricature the very learning environment that the drafters sought to advance.