Harvard Law Gets a New Face

For many years, Harvard Law School (HLS) seemed as stable and constant as the stone pillars of Langdell Library. The old and venerated school, where five of the nine current Supreme Court justices studied, was considered by many to be the preeminent law school in the world.

But HLS could not hold change at bay forever. The stately buildings, home to some of the worlds finest legal scholars, hide the revolution—spurred partly by outside competition and unhappy students—that is now occurring within.

Under an ambitious new plan pioneered by HLS Dean and Royall Professor of Law Robert C. Clark, the school will slash first year class sizes by half, institute a system loosely based on Harvard college’s residential houses to try to build community spirit, expand the international dimension of the school by creating new research centers, and dramatically increase financial aid.

Changes of this magnitude have not swept HLS for 130 years, according to institutional historian and visiting HLS professor Daniel R. Coquillette. The school’s last dramatic overhaul occurred in 1871, when former Dean Christopher C. Langdell instituted the Socratic and case study methods—which would be copied by professional schools around the world—to HLS.

The recent strategic plan was backed by HLS faculty and students alike. A 1999 McKinsey & Co. study, commissioned by Clark and his colleagues to help guide their efforts, identified a number of student complaints. Students overwhelmingly called for more feedback on their work and smaller classes, especially for first year students. The resulting changes to the first year experience were unanimously approved by the faculty—an unprecedented event in many professors’ memories.

Faculty support was crucial to the success of the plan, which will require current faculty members to assume extra duties until new professors are hired. But no one is complaining.

“It’s a really exciting time to be here, especially as a newcomer,” says HLS Assistant Professor Heather K. Gerken, who gained fame commenting on the Presidential election controversy shortly after joining the HLS faculty last September. “The whole faculty is devoted to re-thinking the law school experience. It feels like there is new life in the school because of all the plans for the future.”

Berkman Assistant Professor of Law at HLS Jonathan Zittrain, a cyberlaw expert, says HLS is in a “spring cyle” in which many innovative ideas about law school education are coming to fruition. “I sense a certain measure of ambition to grow and build which doesn’t seem to be motivated by fear or worry.”

In 1997, Clark decided that things needed to change. He convinced the faculty to begin a long-range planning process, which many professors say is necessary for any institution—even a successful one—to undergo at times.

“A big organization should every once in awhile do this sort of thing,” says Byrne Professor of Administrative Law and Dean of the J.D. Program Todd D. Rakoff ’67. HLS hired a variety of consultant firms to help the school assess where it stood and what should be changed.

“We had to call in a neutral third party to make sure we understand all the facts before we made any big planning decisions,” says HLS professor Einer R. Elhauge ’83.

So HLS hired McKinsey to conduct a broad survey to measure the quality of education at HLS. Previous informal surveys had suggested that students were unhappy with certain aspects of the HLS experience.

The survey uncovered student complaints about oversized classes and not enough student-faculty interaction—problems the strategic plan was primarily designed to fix.

The plan was finalized earlier this year, and HLS began devising ways to raise the $400 million necessary for the plan, which, if successful, would be the largest capital campaign in the history of graduate or professional schools, according to HLS Associate Dean for Development and Alumni Affairs Scott Nichols.

Most of the money will go towards the hiring of new faculty to teach smaller classes, creating space on HLS’ crowded campus, and increasing financial aid. According to Nichols, HLS is confident about raising the funds because of the significant resources controlled by HLS alums. The probability of not raising the requisite funds to carry out even the most expensive parts of the plan, Nichols says, is “remote.” And while only preliminary research has been done on fundraising prospects, Nichols says that the alumni seem enthusiastic so far.

The Rivals

Many at HLS were rankled by an April 16 New York Times article on the strategic plan, entitled “Harvard Law Tries to Increase Appeal,” which portrayed HLS as a leader in decline that was trying to keep up with rival schools. The article hit HLS’ soft spot, and many dismissed it as offbase and misguided.

“Our strategic plan is not motivated by competition with anyone,” says HLS professor Christine M. Jolls, who was recently granted tenure by the school. “It was motivated by people saying we have a great institution and we want to make it even greater.” Rakoff, however, agreed that outside competition might have motivated the plan “a bit.”

“We are inherently in a market situation,” he says. But Rakoff agrees that the threat from competition is not serious. “I don’t think there is any sense that we were in a threatening competitive environment where, if we didn’t do something big fast, we were going to be in bad shape.”

The changes at HLS certainly weren’t made in a vacuum. Other law schools began to change in the past few years, and competition became stiffer as the number of applicants to law schools nationwide dropped. “There’s no question that it’s much more competitive for law schools now than it used to be,” says David W. Leebron ’77, Dean of Columbia University Law School and 1979 HLS graduate. “Harvard is in some sense responding to the competition, and that’s a good thing,” Leebron says. “That’s not to say it isn’t a great school.”

Much of the new competitiveness among law schoools can be traced to the ambitious moves of New York University (NYU) Law School, which in the past decade has employed an aggressive self-promotion program and dramatically bolstered its reputation. The school also attempted to lure top professors with lucrative offers. Earlier this year, Joseph H.H. Weiler, an HLS professor and prominent international law expert, announced he would leave HLS for NYU. While NYU at least in the foreseeable future has little chance to boost itself to HLS’ level, its new methods turned heads at HLS.

“NYU made a big splash,” Gerken says. “Everyone was taken aback. It wasn’t the old school approach.” And while Gerken says HLS “is comfortable with our place in the world,” it cannot sit back and watch the world change around it and do nothing. “NYU has presented itself more successfully than any school in the nation and you can’t stand silent while that’s going on if you want to keep up.”

Harvard is Harvard

Taking a hint from NYU, HLS decided in the spring of 2000 to hire a communications director, Michael A. Armini, to coordinate the school’s press coverage and keep developments at the school in the forefront of public consciousness.

Before Armini’s hiring, the school’s media coverage was erratic and often focused on individual professors rather than the school as a whole. “We weren’t getting our story out,” Rakoff says. “We weren’t getting much press coverage.” In the 1980’s, the school suffered from the controversy of a perceived lack of female or African American faculty members. Negative coverage was precipitated by faculty members complaining to the media about the situation, which some worried could hurt the school’s image.

“If that’s all people are reading about Harvard Law School, it can become a problem over time,” Armini says.

Armini, whose favorite saying is Vince Lombardi’s “the best defense is a good offense” has been pro-active in promoting the school to the national media, according to many professors. Armini says he doesn’t feel that HLS has to play catch up to NYU or any other law school. Even the best, he says, have to promote themselves. “Coca-Cola spends more money on advertising than any other soft-drink company and they still sell more,” Armini says.

His job as he describes it is to “be more aggressive telling the world what is going on at HLS. We are in many ways on top already but we need to stay there,” he says.

Armini says the need for a communications office does not signal a problem with the school or a need to repair its image.

“Harvard Medical School, which has never been ranked lower than number one, has the biggest communications office in the University.”

But others at HLS, perhaps less enthusiastic about borrowing as much strategy from corporate America as Armini, look at his role as primarily educational. “I look at it as less self-promotional than it is hooking the many things going on here with the world at large,” Zittrain says. According to Zittrain, HLS deals—primarily in an academic sense—with “a ton of hotly contested policy issues” and it would be beneficial both to the law school and to the outside world to have a more effective link. Many professors feel that Harvard does not need to battle schools like NYU for publicity—there’s already enough of it.

Jolls says she gets 10 or 15 calls every week from reporters for looking for comment—and she has only been a professor for five years. “Its different when you are NYU and you have to play that game,” she says. “Harvard is Harvard and that gives a certain luxury.”

Room for Improvement

If a new HLS emerges in the next few years, many professors say that the school’s core will always be the same. “The best thing about this place is the raw material—a fabulous student body and a fabulous faculty,” says recently hired HLS professor William Stuntz, who has also taught at Yale Law School and the University of Virginia Law School. Stuntz says this quality forms the bedrock of HLS and will always distinguish it from other schools. This “raw material,” Stuntz claims, is better at HLS than at Yale, which some consider HLS’ chief rival. HLS student Clifford M. Ginn, who was accepted to both NYU and HLS, also says Harvard’s fundamentals surpass that of its New York competitor. “Harvard has a stronger faculty and a stronger and more diverse student body,” Ginn says.

Gerken’s first impression of HLS upon arriving was how much importance is placed on the quality of teaching, which she says is better than at most other top law schools, where the focus among the faculty is research and writing. One of her collegueas at another law school, she says, told her that teaching ability “was about as important as being able to hit a home run at the faculty softball game.”

At Harvard, on the other hand, Gerken says the first test of prospective faculty members is how they would act in front of a classroom.

Zittrain agrees that the HLS education is top quality, but that there is room for improvement. “The fundamentals are pretty good,” he says. “I can see lots of experimentation within the first year curriculum without disrupting the central features of the Socratic method,” Zittrain says. Zittrain says he hopes the strategic plan, which cuts first year class size by half, could foster increased student-faculty interaction.

He says he also hopes that students will have more opportunity—with the 40 hours of free legal work that will be required by the plan—for clinical pursuits.

But in order for these changes to work, the faculty will have to make sacrifices. Cutting first year class size in half means that more classes will have to be taught, and many professors will accept a heavier teaching schedule next year. Stuntz says he is impressed by what he calls the “selflessness” of the HLS faculty.

“I was really impressed by the conversations and suggestions among the faculty about how to make life better for students rather than for themselves,” Stuntz says. Based on his experiences at other law schools, Stuntz says this is rare. “That’s not something to be taken for granted,” he says. Such devotion to students, according to third-year HLS student Rayan R. Joshi, is a refreshing change at a law school that at times seemed large and impersonal. “It’s good that the law school is actually showing signs that it cares about student dissatisfaction,” Joshi says. “In years past, that probably hasn’t been the case.”

Both outside and within HLS there seems to be a consensus that the new strategic plan is aimed not at enhancing HLS’ reputation, but at improving student life. Leebrand says HLS’ reputation is already excellent; its only weakness, he says, is student discontent. While he doesn’t think that the plan is a novel idea, he calls it a “sensible and creative” way to improve the student experience. If the plan succeeds, 2001 will have to be added to 1871 as another landmark year in HLS history.

—Staff writer William M. Rasmussen can be reached at wrasmuss@fas.harvard.edu.