Time is the friend of learning and the enemy of teaching. Learners learn best when they have ample time to explore, experiment, fail, and reflect. Teaching, at least teaching in a graduate professional program like law school, is time-limited: a class meets for a certain number of hours on certain days of the week for a certain number of weeks. This is, of course, a ubiquitous challenge in legal education, but experiential and skills courses present particular time-related challenges. On the other hand, these courses also provide rich opportunities to give students activity- and skills-based learning environments. This Article is about one law school’s development of such a course and what we have learned through implementing it.
In 2019, the University of New Mexico School of Law (“UNM”) inaugurated Lab, a new three-credit experiential course as part of the required first-semester curriculum. The course has many goals, but its over-arching purposes are to “enhanc[e] student readiness to practice,” to “create opportunities for ‘near transfer’ of clinic lawyering skills,” and to “address student concerns that they are prepared to work in the roles of lawyers, introduce students to the challenge of lawyering, and incorporate and inculcate students in lawyer professional roles early and often.” Lab has been successful in capitalizing on the opportunities experiential learning creates for teaching and learning these things; however, it has also confronted the challenges entailed in such a course—especially the challenges of such a course in the first semester.
In broader terms, the educational goals of a course like Lab represent a desirable shift in focus for legal education, one that, if fully realized, has the potential to transform law teaching and learning. In the meantime, however, this same shift in focus brings to greater light pedagogical and structural impediments to fully embracing experiential learning and skills education that are inherent in the dominant mode of legal education. The larger purpose of this Article is to begin a conversation about those impediments and how they may be addressed.
Part II of this Article details some of the impetus for experiential learning in legal education and at UNM. Part III then describes the course at UNM that resulted from this and reflects on some of the lessons learned about the specific course. Then, Part IV considers some of the benefits and challenges of experiential learning early in a student’s legal education. Finally, Part V proposes some curricular approaches that point towards a radical reimagining of the law school curriculum through the lens of experiential and skills education and concludes that this approach entails a massive reconsideration of the current allocation of instructional resources.