On-line Legal Education: Future or Folly?
The Georgia Supreme Court recently held that a graduate of an on-line law school can’t take the bar exam. See Georgia Supreme Court Blog report. Those applying to take the bar and become attorneys in Georgia must graduate from ABA accredited law schools, or obtain a rare exemption from educational requirements. Would this applicant’s online legal education prepared her for the bar exam and legal practice? We may never know. It raises a significant question: to what extent can (or should) on-line legal education serve as a substitute (or complement) to traditional law school education?
My inclination is to associate “online law degree” with spam mail soliciting me to obtain a online degree from home, possibly in as little as five minutes. I imagine a Canadian web marketer setting up online schools from a kit and shipping diplomas from his apartment. I graduated from a top-five law school and don’t want my J.D. cheapened.
I have no idea about the quality of online courses offered by “Northwestern California University School of Law,” the online school at issue in the recent Georgia Supreme Court decision. I emailed the school for a comment, but received no reply. I have, however, had the opportunity to explore some of the course course made available from other schools and am impressed by the quantity and quality of on-line education materials available.
Already, one can find the lecture content of an entire Ivy-League undergraduate education streaming online. Schools like Stanford, MIT, and Yale make entire undergraduate courses freely available online through YouTube EDU. Obviously, watching Stanford lectures online is not the same as attending Stanford: there is far less accountability and no credit is available, but the course content is nonetheless freely accessible for public education.
Law schools have not made as much course freely available as colleges and universities, but some complete courses are available. For example, one could watch streaming video of every one of USC Law School Professor Tom Lyon’s course on evidence. See Evidence course playlist. The Univ of California at Berkeley Law School also has made a number of complete environmental law courses freely accessible.
In Georgia, attorneys may satisfy some of their continuing education requirements by watching approved education videos. Fellow attorneys who took a Barbri course to prepare for the Georgia Bar Exam will quickly appreciate how helpful good instructional videos can be for learning the law. Interactive, online technologies are used everyday in corporations for training and education with positive results.
It is likely that the entire content of a law school education will be freely accessible online within the next few years. The core of law school education consists of a small set of well-defined classes. The core is largely based on federal law, common law and model codes and therefore fairly uniform across the country. If top-quality freely-accessible lectures were available online and paired with interactive features to monitor student progress, test understanding of the law and grade student work, it could potentially offer superior legal education at little to no cost. The obstacle to education would then become the ability and initiative of the student (and ABA accreditation), rather than the tuition and schedule of law school.
