My friend Rory Skaggs mentioned how interesting he finds it that so few law professors ever were (as he put it) actual lawyers. I am still collecting my thoughts on this matter, but wanted to open the topic up to general discussion. What role does this play in our legal education? To what extent is this a disadvantage? Is it even a disadvantage? Advantage?

-- RobLaser - 15 Feb 2010

Might it be a little tough to discuss this point intelligently after sixteen weeks of law school? Might you, indeed, be having a little trouble telling actual from not actual lawyers at this point? I think it is time to stop expecting to acquire commitment points by writing extensively about how to improve law school without having "actually" been through it. On the plus side, given the baseline you and your friend Rory and some other usual chatterers have laid down, you can get improvement points at this stage by writing even badly about substantive subjects.

The answer to your question (because there's only one question multiplied into three by careless repetitive writing) is that what matters to you is the quality of your teachers' teaching, not the quality of their lawyering. What matters to the quality of their teaching—despite all the unnecessary verbiage that has been expended on discussing the grading curve and a hypothetical (and quite ridiculous) initiative to use "course evaluations" to improve the quality of educational evaluation—is still obscure to you, as it is to most of your teachers. That's not important here: you're studying to be a lawyer, not an educational reformer. You might want to take up the task in hand.