… I think this is one of the best books on legal education to be published in a long time, and here’s why. … First, it’s educationally literate … Second, the book is frank about the shortcomings of the J.D. as well as its strengths. … Third, it’s based on field work. Just not enough of that around in legal education — the findings of the UK Nuffield Report on the dearth of empirical sociolegal research applies as much to legal education too. … [Finally], the book has a transformative agenda. … The Carnegie book takes the first courageous step — the important and public acknowledgement that legal education has to change at fundamental levels in our society. It is too elitist, too bound up in academic culture, not sufficiently engaged in social concerns. I like to think that academics like me have something useful to say on the subject (though perhaps that’s just vanity) but the key point is that legal education, as with art education or teacher education or any other type of education is too important to leave in the hands of specialists. …

My sentiments exactly; I wish I’d said all of that (though for what I did say about the Nuffiled sociolegal study, see my post Law in the Real World).

Seth Freeman has deposited Bridging the Gaps: How Cross-Disciplinary Training With MBAs Can Improve Professional Education, Prepare Students for Private Practice, and Enhance University Life in SSRN. Here’s the abstract:

What can law schools do to address the criticisms in the Carnegie Foundation’s January 2007 report on legal education? That report found that law schools are not teaching students how to be competent lawyers. One particularly promising answer is cross-disciplinary training with MBAs, which leading law schools such as NYU, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard have embraced in recent years. In this article, I explore the value of such courses, and discuss a cross-disciplinary course that I successfully debuted in the Fall of 2006 at NYU entitled, "Negotiating Complex Transactions with Executives and Lawyers." More generally, I argue that cross-disciplinary courses offer special advantages for students, schools, universities, and employers, and deserve much more emphasis in professional training and higher education.