Abstract
Professor Long urges everyone involved in legal education, including professors, lawyers, students, and judges, to ask just one question: Of what use is a law school education? Those involved with law school educations should strive to be intellectually curious and well-rounded in education, and not to maintain the narrow view of simply “training lawyers.” For the benefit of society, consumers of legal services, lawyers, and law firms, we must encourage the pursuit of legal literacy. Law students should be encouraged to explore American literature and traditions of Anglo-American law to facilitate their legal literacy and to become cultural elitists. Students and law professors today, in attempting to broaden their legal knowledge, are starting off with already narrow general law knowledge which then continues to get narrower, when, in fact, they should be starting with a broad range of general law knowledge which then becomes narrowly tailored into a few specific areas to nurture their intellectual curiosity and be classified as culturally elite. Unfortunately, law professors, school administrators, and members of the legal bar today do not, for the most part, value legal literacy because they have not embraced such a notion themselves and, consequently, they do not encourage it in the majority of legal education institutions. Legal education is not just about obtaining a job after graduation, making money, or acquiring social status, power or influence, but rather, it should nurture law students’ ability to better address complex social and legal problems affecting real people living real lives and further enhance their legal literacy.
Recommended Citation
Leonard J. Long,
Resisting Anti-Intellectualism and Promoting Legal Literacy,
34
S. Ill. U. L.J.
1
(2009).
Available at:
https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/siulj/vol34/iss1/1