Yesterday afternoon Radio Boston’s Meghna Chakrabarti interviewed Jon Hanson and Jacob Lipton, the Co-Directors of the Systemic Justice Project, in a story they titled “Harvard Law Flips Legal Education on its Head with ‘Systemic Justice.'”
Listen to the interview here.
Here is the show’s preview:
Any way you look at it, law school is in trouble. Schools nationwide received the lowest number of applicants in four decades this year. Graduates are struggling to find jobs. Debt is skyrocketing.
Meanwhile, law is being subjected to the same relentless global trends that have devastated the manufacturing sector: outsourcing and mechanization.
Why pay for a white shoe lawyer in a Boston skyscraper to write your will when an attorney overseas can draft it for a fraction of the price? Better still, go on LegalZoom.com.
The legal profession is due for a rethink. There’s a new idea on how to do that, and it starts with flipping the legal education on its head. Rather than teach students the law and how to apply it to the world, they want students to focus on problems — income inequality, climate change, racism — then see how they can use the law to solve them.
It’s called systemic justice and it’s a new program at Harvard Law School.