Something has gone radically awry with legal education and maybe even legal practice. For about a decade now, the loudest wailing over the state of affairs has come from Chief Judge Harry Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, who wrote a landmark article in the Michigan Law Review in 1992. As law schools have become obsessed with impractical theories and law firms with maximizing revenues, Judge Edwards argued, both have quit paying attention to the ethical practice of the law. Judge Edwards got it just about right. Rarely do today’s law students get an appreciation of the 18th-and 19th-century Anglo-American ideal of the lawyer-statesman—the community leader devoted to the law and its preservation and dedicated to using it to help conserve traditional values.

Today’s lawyers commonly regard the law as an infinitely malleable set of theories and doctrines which can be manipulated by judges at the prompting of clever advocates. With the triumph of legal realism at Yale and Columbia in the 1930’s and 40’s, law professors came to believe that there are no overarching ethical (or other) principles in the law. This led to a wholesale attack on the doctrines of constitutional law to permit, first, an extraordinary redistribution of wealth and political power under the New Deal and, eventually, the wholesale rewriting of the Constitution by the Warren and Burger Courts. By the late 20th century, such Yale law professors as Bruce Ackerman and Akhil Amar could explain with straight faces that we needn’t bother amending the Constitution—a “living Constitution” could be altered simply by judges recognizing the articulated desires of the people, which turn out to be the articulated desires of the Yale law professors.

During the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the Yale-Law-School-trained President’s defense—turning on his implicit acknowledgment that his guilt depended on what the meaning of the word “is” is—made it clear to almost everyone that American lawyering is no longer what it once was. Curiously, virtually no leader of the bench or bar condemned the President’s betrayal of the rule of law, and only a very few law professors and a slim majority in the House of Representatives seemed to sense that they were fighting for a legal ideal all but abandoned everywhere else.

The notion that the law is anything you want it to be has created a legal educational system that can only be described as anarchic. With no solid foundation left to stand on, law faculties in the 1960’s and 70’s abandoned their required curricula for the second and third years of legal education. After the first year—which covers the ancient common-law topics of property, contracts, torts, criminal law, and civil procedure—law students now pick and choose from a Chinese menu of options, most either exhibiting colorful theories or reflecting trendy new areas of academic and political concern. Sadly, most law-school courses after the first year do little to instill professional pride or even train students in their craft. Many students find themselves grossly unprepared for their bar exams, much less the practice of law itself.

Students must now spend several months and large amounts of money on bar-review courses and then undergo one or two years of acculturation in law firms before they are of much use to anyone. For too many, even when they learn their way around law offices, the practice of law has been drained of any joy or fulfillment other than what comes from reading their immense paychecks; their duties consist of putting in 60- to 80-hour weeks helping clients wage interminable battles against the clients of other law firms. Legal realism has resulted in great uncertainty in the law: Wide areas have been opened up to regulation by the federal government, and there is massive doubt over whether new federal rules or old state law governs. There is more than enough to keep platoons of lawyers busy simply crafting agreements which seek to insulate clients from legal liability.

For all these reasons, the practice of law has become more like working in some leather-upholstered, brightly lit, high-ceilinged factory and less like the calling it once was. It is often said that associates in the best law firms are cannon fodder; most hold their first jobs only for one or two years before they shuttle off to firms less prestigious but, perhaps, more humane. In the great law firms, which have roughly quadrupled in size since the 1960’s (500 lawyers in a big-city firm is not uncommon), very few associates are able to wait out the eight or nine years it takes to become partners, and those who do are often uncertain why they’ve done so. Of course, stunning salaries and partnership draws enable them to live in almost undreamed-of splendor, but until they reach senior partnership, they have little free time to savor those luxuries.

There are still some happy and dedicated lawyers, but a majority of the profession understands that something important has been lost. Within the legal academy, there is a widespread acknowledgment that something has gone wrong, but very little agreement over what that is and whether it can be repaired. Two generations ago, these problems didn’t seem to exist; but two generations ago, it was not uncommon to hear even the Supreme Court declare that the United States was a Christian nation and that Christianity was a part of our law. Thomas Jefferson believed that to be in error, and he wrote a nasty little screed claiming that Christianity could not have been a part of the common law because the institutions of the common law began when England was still pagan. Jefferson had a point, of course, and there is also something to Benjamin Disraeli’s remark to an Anglican colleague that, when his ancestors were writing the Bible, the Anglican’s were living in trees and painting their faces blue. Nevertheless, Jefferson’s views were out of the mainstream in American law when he uttered them, and the idea that the law was concordant with Christianity was held by William Blackstone, Joseph Story, James Kent, and even Alexander Hamilton. The body of Christian moral doctrines gave context and shape to not only legal education and the content of the law itself, but to the ethical aspects of practice.

With the national revulsion at the treatment of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis during the 1930’s and 40’s, however, the idea of any one religion or creed playing a predominant role in American public life and American law lost ground. For a whole complex of reasons, the WASP legal establishment which had exerted influence and formed the culture for a century and a half seemed to evaporate almost overnight, and legal realism became the dominant ideology. The proponents of legal realism allied with progressivism, claiming that the new doctrine was much more democratic than the essentially aristocratic beliefs it had replaced. With the influence of legal-realist professors on the justices of the Warren Court, judges were emboldened, first to protect racial minorities by rewriting police procedures and election practices, and then to “protect” religious minorities by forbidding any school prayer or even compulsory reading from the Bible. By the 1990’s, the Supreme Court had declared it unconstitutional for school authorities to arrange for nonsectarian prayers at high-school graduations, and the divorce of law and the public sphere from religion was nearly complete.

With the passage of the civil-rights laws in the mid-60’s and the anti-authority animus spawned by the Vietnam War and Watergate, any legal philosophy that stressed hierarchies and timeless truths (as America’s Christian legal heritage did) seemed doomed. In recent years, the moral failures of American society (which led to events as diverse as the sullying of the Oval Office by President Clinton and the tragedies at Columbine High School) have been encouraged by the attitudes of American law professors, lawyers, and judges. Worse still, the utter indifference to the rule of law that President Clinton showed at home was replicated in his administration’s and NATO’s policies in Yugoslavia, where inconvenient requirements of the U.N. Charter and the pronouncements of the U.N. Security Council were simply ignored as we made war—without the benefit of an express congressional declaration—on a sovereign country which had never attacked us.

In response to Judge Edwards’ 1992 jeremiad, a dismally few legal educators offered the prospect of a return to the “good old days” of the 19th century, when ethics, morals, and even Christianity were a part of legal education. Judge Edwards, who is black, demurred on the grounds that, in the “good old days,” he would never have been able to practice law, much less make it to the bench. His alternative is to encourage more clinical legal education and less theory, so that law schools would begin to prepare students better for practice. He also seems dazzled by the efforts of New York University Law School, where he is an adjunct professor, to prepare its students for practice not only in the United States but around the world. N.Y.U. has billed itself as the first “global” law school (which has led some unimpressed legal academics to tweak its dean by suggesting that he had created the first “intergalactic” law school).

I think that American legal education should pay more attention to the practice of law in Europe and Asia; at Northwestern, we are attempting to build a “global” law school without any risk, I think, of turning the classrooms into the bar scene from the first Star Wars movie. Even so, I think there is something missing from N.Y.U.’s approach; the globalization of legal education is not likely to supply the ethical dimension that Judge Edwards wants and that the law sorely needs.

Like many other fancy American law schools, N.Y.U. claims that it is trying to promote justice as well as law, but for most current legal academics, “justice” means the redistribution of goods instead of the Aristotelian, Platonic, or Christian concept of ordering society according to a divine plan. The emptiness of the “redistribution” model has led to something of a resurgence in religiously based law schools committed to producing Christian lawyers. Thus, Pat Robertson has founded Regent Law School in Virginia; Pepperdine Law School in California has flourished (almost bagging no less than Ken Starr for its dean); and a recent start-up, Ave Maria Law School in Ann Arbor, will offer a solidly Catholic legal education.

You don’t have to be Christian to be ethical, although the Framers believed (and I think they were right) that the law requires a foundation in morality, and morality requires a foundation in religion. Most of them—Jefferson is the notable exception—believed that Christianity was essential to that foundation, and even Jefferson, while eschewing Christian doctrine, embraced Christian morality. If legal education in this country is to be saved, it must return to its philosophical roots, which are deeply planted in Judeo-Christian notions and the aristocratic responsibilities commented on so favorably by Alexis de Tocqueville. Judge Edwards may not want the clock turned back because he remembers old injustices, but, as C.S. Lewis reminded us, we ought to turn the clock back if it’s showing the wrong time.

My solution for reforming legal education is to return to a required curriculum with a heavy dose of the history of American law. The connection between law and morality, it seems to me, is necessary and inescapable. Equally important, American constitutional history casts grave doubt upon such 20th-century legal-realist notions as a “living Constitution” or the recent infinite expansion of the 14th Amendment to prohibit the states from doing what they were meant to do. Legal realism’s greatest triumph—the use of the Bill of Rights as a club to beat back state and local governments—would be exposed as judicial usurpation, and perhaps the next generation of lawyers might then be inclined to return the Bill of Rights to its original understanding as a limitation on the federal Leviathan.

Parts of the current first-year curriculum of common-law subjects still merit their places of honor, particularly if they are taught with attention to their origins. We could dispense with much of the potpourri that clutters up the second and third years. Instead, those years could be combined with legal internships, so that much of the student’s education would be supplied by practitioners themselves.

Currently, an oddity within the legal academy is that fewer and fewer tenure track teachers have much experience in practice. At Northwestern and other schools, we have begun to recognize that adjuncts who practice can often do a better job of training than can tenure-track faculty, and we are in the process of reordering our curriculum accordingly. The movement toward more ethical approaches to the study of management in the nation’s business schools offers an opportunity to combine moral approaches to the law with moral approaches to business. There is a turn at the University of Michigan and Northwestern, for example, toward understanding that, since most managers must deal with law and regulation, they also need some legal training—if only to discern when they do or do not need to bring in the lawyers. I now spend more time in the classroom at Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management than I do at the law school, and I suspect economies of scale and convergence of concerns will, in the next century, lead some universities to combine law schools and management schools into single entities.

Reforming law schools is not an easy undertaking, however, because of the unwillingness both of individual professors to alter what they teach and of accrediting associations to permit change from the standard three-year period of student purgatory. Before long, though, some brave institutions will likely experiment with a different three-year pattern—perhaps a year to learn the fundamentals (the liberal-arts aspects of the profession of law); another year of supervised internships, clinical practice, and upper-level courses while the student remains at the law school; and then two or three years in practice, followed by a return to the academy for at least a year of further specialized training or preparation for a teaching position or one on the bench. As legal education now stands in America, there is no particular training for law-school teachers or for judges (both of whom are haphazardly elevated from the mass of lawyers), and this may account for the chaotic nature of American judicial practice and legal education.

There are some internal pressures for change (Northwestern’s law-school dean dragged us kicking and screaming into the production of a “strategic plan” to accomplish some of the goals I’ve listed here, and several other law schools are doing the same), but external factors are likely to determine whether the law schools will save themselves. Most law school deans lament the annual U.S. News and World Report rankings which seek to establish a hierarchy of law schools, but flawed as these rankings are, they may be the best means we have for rewarding positive efforts for change. The recent rise in the rankings of some schools (N.Y.U. and Duke, for instance) seem to reflect their attempts to address at least some of the current shortcomings of legal education.

We Americans have no monarchy, hereditary aristocracy, or established church. Since the beginning, just about all that has held us together (and that tenuously, as the Civil War showed) was a national commitment to the Constitution, the rule of law, and the morality and religion that undergirded them. As the rule of law has eroded in recent years and the Constitution has been pummeled, it is no wonder that we have trembled on the edge of urban unrest, plunged into the crass excesses of materialism, and completely lost our moral bearings. Men trained in the law and its history were indispensable to the writing of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. None of them were trained in law schools, of course, since the American law school didn’t exist until the middle of the 19th century. But unless the American law school can reinvent itself, drawing from the classical moral and religious traditions of the 18th and 19th centuries and recapturing the benefits of professional apprenticeship as a means of legal education, it may not last another century—and it will have few mourners.