The Town Council of Edinburgh established three Chairs, Civil Law, Universal History, and Scots Law, paid for from the Beer Tax.

“Scots law was generally covered in 50 lectures and taught in English. Civil Law was taught in two courses: the first, on Justinian’s Institutes, was also covered in 50 lectures, but was given twice in each academic year; the second, on Justinian’s Digest, lasted for around 100 lectures, both courses being taught in Latin.

Memorisation of what the students were taught was the ideal; it was thought to bring and to demonstrate understanding. To promote memorisation, professors would hold “examinations” or oral quizzes to test the students’ knowledge. The inculcation of a standard knowledge was the aim. This conformed with educational ideal and practices common in the age, though some, such as Kames, found it inexpressibly dull: “Law, like geography, is taught as if it were a collection of facts merely: the memory is employed to the full, rarely the judgment.”

What we should be asking is whether or not law schools are at all necessary. The idea that “the law” is wholly separate and insular body of knowledge that requires a specialized education is questionable.

It seems that law schools exist for three distinctreasons that don’t necessarily comport with society’s best interest.

First, it is a barrier to entry.

Second, it’s product may be more homogeneous thought than insightful thought and that isolation seems to produce graduates who hold a belief that their legal education makes them experts on law, government, etc and entitled, by virtue of graduation to assert primacy in such matters over the rest of the citizenry-in short, there’s a parasitical aspect to the practice of law.

Third,it may be a form of autoselection among people motivated to enact, interpret and enforce law, through the force of lengthy prose-what could be thought of as logomachy.

Few people today realize that until the late 19th century, the education of an attorney was principally through “reading the law”, i.e., apprenticeship.

Worse, while all law schools might be equal, some are clearly more equal than others. I wonder if it is a good thing that the vast majority of federal lawyers, legislators and judges are from a relative few schools. The old saw is that the law is what the judge says it is-it’s not like engineering, where persuasion has no bearing on the structural integrity of a bridge.

In short, I wonder if law schools produce ideological conformity only. Will john Roberts be confused with John Marshall?

But as a woman lawyer — married with a child — who continues to practice law, I look at the issue as one that’s much more about women lawyers trying to find the right balance in a profession that can be incredibly demanding, particularly in the private sector.

There are wonderful books that address this topic more broadly (a few by Sylvia Ann Hewlett come to mind) and a recent article published in the Atlantic by Anne-Marie Slaughter is deeply insightful.

But I think the bottom line is that, regardless of the profession, women who desire both a family and a career will, at some point or another, feel internal pressure to choose. There are simply not enough hours in a day to be both the wife/mother and the lawyer/professional that we aspire to be. So one of the roles will be cut — perhaps temporarily or perhaps permanently.

The research that emerges from the UVA Law School study suggests — and personal experience bears this out — that most women choose family over career, at least while their children are young. To my mind, this fact does not warrant a condemnation of law schools admissions departments. It merely reflects the personal inclinations of many women, including me.

What is troubling about law school admissions is that they’ve generally continued to admit the same number of students — both male and female — over the last 4 years as they did prior to the recession. The schools are well aware that there are simply not enough jobs in the private or public sectors to support the numbers of students they will graduate. Yet they’ve accepted students and taken federal loans that have placed students in significant debt, knowing all the while that only a small percentage of students will actually be able to support themselves — much less repay the loans — by working in the legal profession.

Solicitors brief advocates they think will win cases and part of their professional expertise is to know form and pick winners.

What is it that lead all of these women to apply to law school in the first place, when statistics clearly showed that many if not most of them would not stay in the profession full time? That’s the more interesting question to me. I think that part of the answer is that there isn’t a very good way to balance the aspirations and goals of very smart and capable women who also want a family life. Should such women be discouraged from going to law school? How?