One interesting feature of Harvard Law School’s first-year curriculum reform initiative is that, while it purports to make legal education more closely match the needs of first year law students, it moves against longer term trends in legal education that made the curriculum conform to the needs and interests of law professors.
As legal scholarship became increasingly specialized and interdisciplinary, it consumed an increasing amount of time and attention of law professors, particularly the most ambitious professors seeking to make a name for themselves for their scholarship.
As a result, many law professors found that teaching traditional subjects that were not the primary focus of their scholarship became a burden. Because research and writing increasingly became the demarcators of status in the profession, this created ever greater pressures for the law school curriculum to match more closely what law professors were writing and studying in their research. Hence the proliferation of seminars on the one hand, and specialized upper level courses on the other.
All the theory that fits.