In response to past criticisms, professors rewrote the course, renamed it the First-Year Lawyering Program and brought in visiting lecturers to teach. In the past, while professors did lecture once a week, most of the instruction and all of the evaluation was done by older law students.
Altschuler says students have had significant problems with the new class.
The class lacks structure, and despite the visiting lecturers—who are all active lawyers—a real world connection, he says.
“Among law schools across the country no one can seem to get this right,” Altschuler says. “I don’t think the way [HLS constructed the new class] makes any sense.”
Alperowicz calls the changes to the class “a drastic improvement” over previous years, but agrees that the class requires further revision.
According to Rakoff, he and other faculty involved in the class expected from the outset that the class would require further tweaking.
“[The class] was a new group of faculty and an entirely new curriculum,” Rakoff says. “We’ll continue to rewrite the course, but this was a good first step.”
“The course was more ambitious [than its predecessor]—it took more student time,” Meltzer says. “The complaints may have gotten a little louder because the course took more time.”
Only the First Step
Rakoff says that no major changes to the first-year program are on deck for next year.
Class size will remain roughly the same. While he and others will discuss further the possibility of expanding on the idea of law colleges—with common spaces for example—no concrete plans have been made for next year and beyond. And while the First Year Lawyering program will continue to evolve there will be no total overhaul next fall.
But the changes to the first-year program are only the first in the series of improvements pledged by the Strategic Plan adopted by the school’s faculty last academic year.
Other changes include increasing the faculty size, improving loan forgiveness for graduates who go into lower paying jobs-—often public interest—and requiring students to do pro-bono service while at HLS.
The school has already begun work in all three areas. Last spring the school expanded its loan forgiveness program to include jobs outside the legal profession. Two new professors were hired last week. And Rakoff says he hopes to have the pro-bono requirement in place for the class entering next fall.
The Strategic Plan—which carries a hefty price tag to be funded by a capital campaign—also outlines a need for extensive physical expansion of the school.
According to both law school and University officials, the school’s plan was discussed by the Harvard Corporation at its Feb. 25 meeting. The Corporation must approve the plan and give the green light for any capital campaign.
But school faculty say that amount of work left doesn’t diminish the importance of changes made so far.
“We chose [the first-year program] to go after first because we thought these would have the biggest impact,” Rakoff says.
—Staff writer David H. Gellis can be reached at gellis@fas.harvard.edu.