Tag: Legal Education

Woman sitting at desk experiencing back pain.

Can Lawyers Help Fix Back Pain (No, Not By Suing)?

Jack Becker Leave a comment

By Jack Becker

A Pain in the Back

Back pain is a real pain in the back. Comprehensive data is tough to collect, but an estimated 60-80% of people will have to deal with back pain at some point in their life. Lower back pain, in particular, is the leading cause of global disability.

This issue has serious impacts beyond individual pain and suffering. According to a 2018 report by the Bone and Joint Initiative, Americans lost 264 million work days in a single year due to back pain. The report also claims that in 2014, the direct and indirect costs of musculoskeletal disorders were a staggering 5.76% of U.S. GDP, totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. While more conservative estimates put the costs closer to $125 billion, the impact is significant.

There are clear incentives for business or government actors to intervene, but where can they start? One option is to let lawyers lead the way.

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The Law School Reform Panic

Temple University Center for Public Health Law Research 11 Comments

By Scott Burris

I am going to take a slight detour from health law to talk about legal education. This week the Times was all over a story about the need to drastically reform law school right now, and in the classic panic mode, one particular model was being embraced with the same unmixed faith with which a drowning person embraces a life preserver: cutting law school to two years. This was a main suggestion of the poster boy of reform, Brian Tamanaha.  I liked his book as a call to arms and expose. I learned, for example, that I was employed by one of the few schools that did not run up faculty salaries. What I didn’t like is the focus on cost: there’s probably a lot more wrong with law school than the price tag, and, in the absence of  evidence or even a serious theory, I don’t see how shortening law school would solve its problems.

Brian talks a lot about cost and time spent in school, and much of this discussion seems to me to assume that law school is mainly about training people to be lawyers within a fairly traditional conception of what the proper training for a lawyer should be.  He recounts disagreements, repeated many times over a century, between a “trade school” and an “academic” model. In the former, students learn the basic skills of research and writing (and we’d add nowadays things like interviewing and counseling and trial practice), while in the latter there is also some sort of additional training, or an approach to learning, that entails getting a broader understanding of the legal system.

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