Dean of Law School Urges `Less Detail' In Law Curricula

Law school faculties should allow students to focus their attention on fundamentals rather than detailed facts, Erwin N. Griswold, Dean of the Harvard Law School, declared Friday at the Centennial of the University of Michigan Law School.

Criticizing the present system of legal education, Griswold asserted, "What we ought to be teaching is how to go about attacking and resolving new problems, not the specific details about a vast number of problems which happen to be current now." Students, he warned, should realize "that we are not teaching them everything about everything."

Griswold added that law school students have to work too hard trying to absorb and digest a welter of facts. As a consequence, they have little opportunity for thought and the development of understanding. "Our present system," he said, "may give an undue advantage to a certain type of mind which can handle large quantities of details readily, while unduly minimizing the performance of some other men who may really be better potential lawyers."