Osler's Razor

Richard Bales at Northern Kentucky University's Chase College of Law invited me to speak to the Chase faculty last Friday as part of their "faculty workshop" series. Prof. Bales had noticed some of the ideas I had posted over at the Law School Innovation blog, and thought it might be interesting for them to hear more.

The NKU faculty seemed to like it, and I know that I did. I really enjoyed the audience I had there, and was impressed by their faculty. Like Baylor, they focus on the practical aspects of legal education, and after my talk I received some questions about exactly that. There is a growing divide in legal education between those schools that focus on skills and doctrine (the "professional school" approach) and others which spend more effort through teaching and scholarship on interdisciplinary study of economics, gender, race, literature, and philosophy (the "graduate school" approach). Baylor is firmly on one side of that divide, and I am proud of that, though I also value the education I got as a law student at the paradigm of the graduate school model.

Next week I will get a taste of the other side of this debate when I moderate a discussion of natural law at Pepperdine among several prominent philosophers, including Dallas Willard. More on that later in the week.