HLS officials maintain that the plan was not designed to remedy a decline in the quality of HLS education-the move was instead an effort to make HLS even better.
"Using anyone's estimate [HLS] is at or near the top [of law school rankings]," says Robert Morse, the director of data collection at U.S. News, which ranks law schools. In this year's U.S. News ranking, HLS placed third behind Yale and Stanford.
But while there may not be a "crisis" which is prompting the reforms, some criticize the first year experience at the law school as harsh and alienating.
HLS professor Jonathan Zittrain, who graduated from HLS in 1995, recalls that his experience as a first year was not a comforting or nurturing one.
"To be sure, when I experienced Harvard Law School as a student it wasn't as a Carnival
Cruise," Zittrain says. "It's an intense and disorienting experience to come to a law school as big as this one."
Student discontent with HLS education has been simmering for many years. A 1999 McKinsey & Co. study, which surveyed current students and alumni as far back as the class of 1980, was commissioned to help with the development of the plan.
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