Legal Education for All (or More than Just Lawyers)

Abstract

Many sectors in today's economy would benefit from employing workers with more than superficial knowledge of the law. Fields potentially ripe for the concept include health-care policy, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, public affairs, banking, and environmental sciences, etc. While the need to acquire a working understanding of our laws and regulations seems only to grow, access to legal information is still largely kept at a premium by legal educators, who provide it almost exclusively through the juris doctorate degree. However, the J.D. is less well suited to students who want simply to acquire legal knowledge. Only a small percentage of American law schools offer master's-level legal-studies degrees, which are typically equivalent to taking two semesters' worth of law-school courses. These non-J.D. graduate degrees are aimed at students seeking knowledge about law, but combining such programs with subject matter drawn from other disciplines to create discrete programs remains rare. Creating exciting programs that combine legal information with the arts, sciences, and other professional programs will help reframe what legal education means.

Keywords: Legal Education