With this fall's class at my law school, we reached an interesting milestone. Roughly half of the entering students are in programs other than the standard three-JD program. In our case, this is the result of several programs, including LLM for foreign lawyers, dual degree students, LLM Tax, a 2-year accelerated JD, and our next program, a Master of Science in Law for STEM professionals. Although this particular mix of programs is unique to us, I know that a growing number of other law schools have a combination of innovative programs that, too, bring in a sizeable cohort of "other" students.
An acute challenge is how best to integrate these students into the law school community. I should begin by articulating and defending the premise. The law school community benefits from the perspectives and backgrounds that students in what I will call, clumsily, non-core programs, provide. In our experience, JD students learn in important ways from non-US students sitting side-by-side with them in their courses; they also learn from students whose professional ambitions are sufficiently distinct that they are drawn to non-core programs (such as, for instance, a dual degree with a management or engineering school). Moreover, if a law school is deliberate about fostering teamwork and modalities of blended learning, then the diversity of the law school cohort is enormously advantageous. As in so many other walks of life, diversity = strength.
That all said, integration provides significant challenges to the modern law school. For example, career services is bound up inextricably with the rather conventional job search by 2nd and 3rd year JD students. This group is high maintenance and rightly so. And the job search for law firm positions (especially for those law schools with a reasonably robust OCI scheme) are within the wheelhouse of career services pros. Students in non-core programs will face unique challenges and a law school needs to be fairly strategic and intentional about how they assist students in their employment objectives.
Students services presents another piece of this puzzle. Foreign students present unique challenges and, in my experience, only the most well-resourced schools have truly undertaken to provide special, purposive support — beyond English language and immigration assistance — to students who come to our U.S. law schools for a year. There are indeed a myriad of challenges and one of the most vexing ones is how to integrate a critical mass of foreign law students into a community of law students and faculty so as to capture for all community members the true benefits of an international diverse and engaged student body. Law schools are in dire need of attention to "best practices" in this space, for the challenges of integration are substantial.
Law faculties are experienced primarily with JD students. They were all JD students once upon a time, and most of them too were lawyers, thereby doing (even if briefly) the jobs to which the traditional JD students aspire. Calling upon them to teach and mentor a distinct cohort of non-core students presents some unique challenges. In the case of our new MSL program, we have elided this challenge somewhat by putting together a retinue of separate courses (more than thirty this year!) for which the faculty, a mix of full-time and adjunct, are very carefully selected. But, in reality, most of the work of teaching non-core students will fall on the shoulders of the core law faculty. We would do well to think strategically and structurally about how best to help faculty in tackling what are clearly unique challenges.
Last, but not least, there is the matter of the social. The strength of our respective student communities is in no small part tied to the lengths we go to be supportive of our students' well-being. Creating and nurturing a collaborative student culture is a part of this; designing mechanisms to deal with crises and difficulties (through counseling and such) is a part as well. Creative efforts are necessary to ensure that the integration of diverse students into the complex cohort of our omnibus student community is successful not only in bringing all students to graduation, but in shaping a community in which all of our law students thrive, professionally and socially.
This post is mainly a polemic, any way you slice it. But my plea is that we as deans think of new ways to share information and ideas to improve integration in our law student communities. As new non-core programs proliferate, the imperative of doing so can only grow.