The newest issue of the online magazine The Complete Lawyer poses the question, "What Can Law Schools Do Better?" In the magazine's lead article, Roy Stuckey, Professor of Clinical Legal Education at the University of South Carolina School of Law, sums up one of the biggest problem facing law schools:

In March, 2007, two reports on U.S. legal education were published, each following five years of study and employing very different methodologies. Yet their recommendations were essentially identical. Both concluded that law schools overemphasize teaching legal analysis and doctrinal knowledge, and virtually ignore teaching professional skills and values. Law schools, the reports advocated, should broaden their educational objectives and make greater use of experiential and context-based learning in order to improve the preparation of students for practice.

Stuckey should know: he was the lead author of one of the reports.

The theme of experiential and context-based learning spills over into the other articles, each authored by a law school dean or program director, which summarize the efforts of several law schools to improve their student's education. For example, Larry Kramer, Dean of Stanford Law School, speaks on his institution's initiatives:

Our first initiative is to begin teaching law students how to solve problems. How should we do that? After all, problem solving isn’t a generic skill: there’s not one set of techniques applicable to everything. It depends on the problem, and the problems differ depending on the client or kind of client. So that’s the first initiative: teaching students to think like clients as well as like lawyers. And this takes us to interdisciplinary education. Because what does the rest of the University do other than train the clients? What are they doing at the business school and the medical school and the engineering school and in economics and so forth? These schools and departments are training the people our graduates will work with and for, and we need to teach our students to understand what they do and to be able to work with them.

Dean Kramer mentions three other initiatives currently being undertaken at Stanford: international law, experiential learning and a focus on values.

The magazine includes similar articles by Lisa A. Kloppenberg (Dean of the University of Dayton School of Law), Donald J. Polden (Dean of the Santa Clara University School of Law), Daisy Hurst Floyd (Dean of Mercer University’s Walter F. George School of Law) and Kenneth R. Margolis (Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law)