The rule of law is in crisis.

And two University of Pittsburgh Law Professors, Richard Weisberg and Bernard Hibbitts, are planning a conference for April 2023 to address the issue head on.

The conference is titled – Disarmed, Distracted, Disconnected and Distressed: Modern Legal Education and the Unmaking of American Lawyers.

Disarmed?

“Lawyers have largely lost the ability to speak and write effectively for public as opposed

to professional audiences, and this has seriously limited their influence and impact outside the confines of their own profession,” Professors Weisberg and Hibbitts write.

Distracted?

“Almost from the moment they start law school, law students are groomed for professional success working for clients, not public leadership or responsibility of any sort. They are actively oriented away from the community, tantalized by the prospects of money and professional prestige.”

Disconnected?

“Law students in professional school are pointedly segregated and taken away – from the rest of the community, and from the rest of the university, breeding a self-image far removed from public concerns or interests. . . Lawyers have learned to work and live apart from others – in dauntingly massive firms that are large, inaccessible to visitors or the public, and even in parts of their physical communities where ordinary people are rarely encountered and cannot access.

Distressed?

“Law school makes lawyers distressed on many levels – by being separated, by being humiliated, by being broken down, demoralized and devalued and ultimately dehumanized. A lot of this distress is caused by and reflected in lawyers’ public isolation,

and they are disconnected from their physical communities and broadly disparaged.”

If there was a measure of the rule of law, could you put a number on it? Let’s say zero is no rule of law and 100 is a very robust rule of law. Where are we today?

“Obviously, it depends on where you are in the world, it depends upon how you measure it,” Hibbitts told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last month. “But I’m pretty confident in saying that there has been a decline across the board in the last ten years.”

“We are picking this up from around the world. In Myanmar after the military coup in 2021, we saw people carrying bodies past the homes of our law students in the major cities. And that situation continues to be bad. Obviously, Ukraine is a disaster from the point of view of rule of law. Things are happening in the United States which are, at best, highly dubious.”

You are referring to Trump. But in the field of corporate crime, we have seen a situation over the last thirty years, where the rule of law has been undermined by corporate power. Now corporations get these sweetheart deals like deferred non prosecution agreements. You can make an argument that the power of the corporations over the legal system has eviscerated the rule of law. It had nothing to do with Trump, it had to do with the power of corporations.

“Both are true. Trump is a symptom. He has made some of the problems that we’ve had recently more obvious. He’s a symptom, not a cause.” 

“I have a good friend at the University of British Columbia, Joel Bakan. You interviewed him. He would talk about corporations as pathological beings.”

“He would emphasize how they were doing things that were dangerous and extremely problematic to society. And that’s true. Look at what the big law firms are doing. Look at how they are catering to corporate interests. They always did, but now they are doing it even more.”

“They are aping corporations in their organizational methods, in their values, in their priorities. That has created problems for the legal system.” 

“Obviously what the big firms do affects a lot of other actors in the legal system. It has an impact on legal education, it has an impact on law students.” 

“Trump has forced the issue. American law students want to be involved in what is happening to them in this country and to the legal system here. The first step is to document what is going on. And the next step is to engage and work on reforming the system.”

“The idea of the conference is to look hard at what is happening in American legal education at the moment and to think about how it is going wrong in ways that have fundamentally hurt American lawyers and potentially also hurt the country.” 

“We tend to be complacent about legal education. Law students are not being trained in a way which encourages them to see the larger issues. They are being trained in the same way they were being trained in the late 19th century, to parse cases, interpret appeals judgments for supreme courts. They’re not looking at the bigger issues. And this is increasingly frustrating to some of us now because law students come into law school wanting to do so much, they do want to change the world. But they come out jaded, and they come out depressed in a variety of ways.” 

“And just listening to our own students, some of us are wondering, haven’t we just got this wrong? Do we need to change things in a way to reanimate our students, to re-energize our students?”

“If you look back to before the Civil War, you see lawyers doing much more ambitious things. You see them really shaping society at a fundamental level. You see them taking responsibility, and being told to take responsibility. We don’t do that anymore in a big way.” 

“And you get a sense that the law schools are to some extent, fiddling while Rome burns. Whether you’re talking about the rule of law in a political sense, whether you’re talking about the future of American democracy, whether you’re talking about corporate corruption, whatever you’re talking about,  we’re not meeting the challenge and we’re not taking our responsibilities as stewards of the republic seriously at all.” 

“Instead, we’re sending students down to the big firms and hoping for the best and maybe thinking that a couple of people will do good things at some point, but we’re not trying,  we’re not equipping them, we’re not encouraging them to think in a way that will allow them to grapple with these issues.” 

“This conference is designed to address some of those problems.”

[For the complete q/a format Interview with Bernard Hibbitts, see 36 Corporate Crime Reporter 37(12), Monday September 26, 2022, print edition only.]