Training Lawyers to Be More Effective Dispute Preventers and Dispute Settlers: Advocating for Non-Adversarial Skills

After briefly recounting some milestones in the history of legal education, and especially efforts to train lawyers in non-Langdellian techniques, I will explore re-orientation of lawyer training, first globally and then more specifically. Most of the ideas in this article are not new. Many of them date back 50 years and more. Articles by Llewellyn and Frank in the 1920\u27s and 1930\u27s could be reprinted with modest changes and seem totally relevant. 3 This in itself bears serious pondering. We do have the advantage of some relatively recent studies which, in the main, tend to support Llewellyn\u27s and Frank\u27s intuitions. In the final portion of this article, I will describe some legal educational ventures I have been developing which represent a further step toward the kind of legal education which I believe must be embraced into the core of American legal education if we are to respond to the needs of lawyers and to the broader society