Law Schools Urged to Provide Practical Courtroom Experience

The head of the American Trial Lawyers Association announced Sunday a plan to rectify the omission of practical courtroom training in American law schools.

Jacob D. Fuchsberg specifically mentioned Harvard as one of the schools which "recognizes the problem as serious" but "hasn't known where to turn" for a solution.

He called the lack of courtroom experience "one of the great failures of the nation's law schools."

Under Fuchsberg's plan, law students would take "field trips" to courtrooms and work on cases under the supervision of trial lawyers in an apprenticeship program.

Fuchsberg asserted that the legal profession had nothing comparable to the internship program of medical schools. "As a result," he told the ATLA's nation al convention in New York, "our courts are not manned with skilled advocates who can assure the public that the courts are becoming true testing grounds for justice."

"But Little Else"

Fuchsberg said his plan had been suggested to about 100 law schools, of which 20 expressed an interest in the plan, including Southern Methodist, Stanford, Boston University. Harvard was not among the schools responding. "The best schools," Fuchsberg asserted, "have produced a good deal of writing in the law journals on the subject, but little else."

"Leading judges have been criticizing the law schools on this ground for years," he said. "It's like letting medical students practice on the basis of theory alone. Law school moot trials are merely glorified debates, because they are patterned on the appellate courts, which are not concerned with the gathering of evidence and the marshalling of an argument. A legal internship is what we're after."