Sometimes you can identify trends in technology simply by looking around. And if it seems like every freshman on your campus owns a laptop and has a Facebook account, you might not be hallucinating—at least not at Amherst College, where 432 out of 438 freshmen had joined the “Amherst College Class of 2012” Facebook group by the end of August.
So, that means the Class of 2015 for law schools. Just what will they be expecting when they hit legal academia in the fall of 2012? And what will we give them? More Socratic method? No laptops in the classroom? Throttled wireless? 100 pounds of printed casebooks? Handouts from the copy center? I don’t think so. We need to be working on this now. How do we bring technology into legal education in a way that educates and trains lawyers and legal thinkers and makes the best use of the best traditions and practices legal educators have developed over the past 120 years? This is the question that should be the central focus of law schools as they struggle with the changes and challenges being presented by new generations of students and technologies.