Welcome back to Ahead of theCurve. I’m Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I’ll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.
I’ve got an Ahead of the Curve Lightning Round this week, with quick looks at how law schools such as Chicago-Kent College of Law figure out how to teach legal tech when they offer specialized degrees. Also, Ted Cruz has his sights set on Yale Law School for allegedly discriminating against conservatives and Christians. And can a dating algorithm help law students find the perfect mentor match? BYU Law is trying to find out.
Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at ksloan@alm.com or on Twitter:@KarenSloanNLJ
How to Teach Tech
Legal technology is developing so rapidly, how do you design a curriculum around it? Chicago-Kent law dean Harold Krent recently discussed that challenge with my colleague Frank Ready over at Law.com affiliate LegalTech News, which I found interesting. Chicago-Kent this fall will launch an LL.M. program in legal innovation and technology, which means the school has to figure out what to teach and how to teach it. But it’s not so easy to predict where the industry is headed. Constitutional law, for example, is far more static that, say, artificial intelligence. Here’s Krent: “We know that technology changes at warp speed. If you’re in business you make adjustments all the time too, and law schools perhaps for too long were exempt from those kinds of pressures. Now law schools have to keep an eye on the market.” Hence, the new program will emphasize the areas of legal tech that are hot right now, including predictive analytics, blockchain, and technology-aided accesses to justice. But the school will have to closely track to the market to see if the curriculum needs adjustment. Krent admits that in eight years blockchain could be a distant memory and the school might be teaching a subject area we haven’t even heard of yet.
The Ted Cruz Treatment
I’ve been avoiding writing about this for at least a week, but it seems the Yale Law School/Ted Cruz saga has blown up on the right, so here goes. (That lovely illustration above was created by my editor Leigh Jones, a woman of many talents.) Here’s the abbreviated version: Yale Law School last month announced a policy change whereby summer and post-graduate fellowships must adhere to the school’s non-discrimination policy. That means the school won’t fund fellowships at organizations that refuse to hire people because of their religion, race, sexual orientation, or veteran status. Now, Ted Cruz (a Harvard Law graduate, I’ll note) has launched an investigation into the policy and whether its intent is to punish students who would work in conservative or Christian organizations. For its part, Yale has said other law schools have similar policies and that it’s only trying to comply with ABA and NALP non-discrimination rules. I’ll be watching to see if this amounts to anything more than saber rattling from Cruz. Meanwhile, Yale Law recently announced—at a Federalist Society reception during an admitted students event—a semiannual conference on originalism. (The school said the conference was in the works long before it came into Cruz’s crosshairs, but it wouldn’t surprise me if administrators decided to announce it now to counter accusations that the law school is hostile to conservatives.)