Disc 2 Track 05. Continuation of Glendon Schubert to Ricky Shwartz

Title

Disc 2 Track 05. Continuation of Glendon Schubert to Ricky Shwartz

Subject

Disc 2

Source

Series 1: Memorabilia
Oral History/Testimony - A Law School for Hawaii

Date

10/20/1969

Identifier

CJWSROH:D2T5

Interviewer

Hawaii State Judiciary Committee

Interviewee

Glendon Schubert and Ricky Shwartz

Transcription

Glendon Schubert:
(0:00-0:34) the program of the university, and particularly one that would be concerned with Pacific Basin and Asiatic legal social relations. And third, and last, I would put passing the bar exams. That is the technical legal apparatus. Now I think there are grounds of both prudence and strategy for reversing the sequence. I’ll mention the grounds for strategy first.

(0:35-1:24) I suspect that the forces favoring technical legal education are so extraordinarily powerful certainly there the ones with which most people are most familiar and have the most experience with, that really we don’t have to worry about assuring that that will take place. I think that will inevitably take place. And what must be concerned about, mostly, is how can other things be built into the program? And so the ground, the strategic ground, of reversing the order is that this will tend to ensure the end, I think, a better combination of components than what otherwise would be the case.

(1:25-2:31) On the interdisciplinary thing-the primary justification, I think, for having a program which is truly interdisciplinary, is so that it can solve Hawaiian problems. The very sort of Hawaiian problems that my associate from Oregon spoke about so eloquently. This is what lawyers being trained at a law school in Hawaii, in the next 10 years, and in the next 20 years, are going to be primarily concerned with. Not writing wills, and doing the other technical law jobs. Those will get done too but those aren’t the things that are really important. It’s coping with the social and the environmental-social problems that are now looming so very large before all of us, that lawyers must be trained. And I think this involves therefore, a very close integration of the study of law with not just the social scientists but with a total university. I’d like to give just one small example. The ways I think this is going on in fields other than law right now.

(2:32-3:51) The social science research council is planning to establish sometime this spring a conference between biologists and political scientists. At first blush, the people who were in positions of administrative authority, in the foundation, were surprised at the suggestion that there could be any sort of meaningful relationship between biology and political science. However, upon just preliminary sort of investigation they became convinced that at least this was a subject that ought to be explored and had never been explored in the past so that the ways in which biology could be fed into the theory of political science, and perhaps conceivably, some aspects of political theory fed into the work of biologists could be developed in a more systematic way than before and I offer this as only a small example out of almost countless ones which I think could be developed for the relationship between law as an approach to social change and the rest of the university which would not only include the social sciences but, in principle, the entire university.

(3:52-5:39) Now this leads me to, if I’ll be pardoned giving it, a kind of personal example. A year ago this fall, I was involved in teaching the joint seminar to law students and political science graduate students. There were about 20 people in the class and the other person teaching was a law professor and the two of us had struggled along for about 3 or 4 months and the time for fall examinations had come about. And these had taken place. And I was having a luncheon with the dean of Osgoode Hall Law School, which is the law school which is in the process of becoming integrated with New York University. And the Dean, a very astute, and I think very enlightened young French-Canadian lawyer Gerald Le Dain, said to me “what can we do so that the law students can compete on a more equal basis with the political science students”? Because as I understand, they had a pretty rough time in this course and many of them were dissatisfied with the extent of progress that they had made. Now let me make two things clear. The first place, I’m highly impressed with the competence as human beings of law students with whom I at least have been working the last couple of years. They’re bright and most of them are very much socially concerned, and they’re articulate. They’re also unskilled in the ways that are relevant by and large, I think, to help them do the kinds of jobs that they want to do.

(5:40-6:27) And the second thing I want to say is I don’t have all this high regard for the training of political scientists. My own education, as I see it now, is abysmal. What I’ve been trying to do for 25 years to extremely modest and very limited ways to try to sort of re-educate myself in a way appropriate to function in the modern world. I sure didn’t learn how to as a graduate student very well. And political science, in the pecking order of the social sciences is by no means the most sophisticated, the most quantitatively advanced and I sort of take as a benchmark, if we can just use a crude one the extent to which any discipline can state what it knows in terms of mathematical equations, that makes me radical in one direction at least, as an index of what kind of knowledge it has.

(6:28-8:15) And on this kind of a scale, political science is ahead of history but not as far along as sociology, not as far along as psychology, and so in making the comparison to go back to Dean Le Dain, I don’t in any sense mean to be derogatory. So he said what can we do about this? “Well” I said “there’s some obvious things that seem to be missing in the kind of training that the students from the law side had that seem to be more or less present among the political science students. They had some work in philosophy of science. That is to say, it wasn’t necessary every time a question was raised about the interpretation of a piece of research to go back to the 17th century. If you have no philosophy of science, then this is where you begin. You go back to Hume, you know? You start in with first principles but this makes it very difficult to talk about the particular empirical research in which you might be concerned. They hadn’t had statistics. They hadn’t had research design. They hadn’t studied computer programming, of course, and we could go down the list.
“Well” he said, “what could we do about this”?
“Well” I said “political science first year graduate students take anywhere from one to three or four, depending upon the place which they come, courses in research theory, research method and possibly we could squeeze in just one course in the first year of the law school curriculum.
His reaction was one of horror. “My God”! he said “We’ve gotta get these people through the bar examinations”.

(8:16-9:28) Now this is an old story to many of you. I tell it as a kind of a parable. But I think that there’s a possible solution for it and it’s the solution I wanted to lead up to. The solution is to think of law school as, most of the students who are going to go to the law school here in Hawaii, my hunch is, and I don’t think there’s anything in the report that is contradictory, are going to be students who probably will be graduates of the University of Hawaii and who will go on into the law school, at least for a while this will be true. Well this means that, I think, that we ought to think of law school training in terms of 7 years. Not in terms of 3 years. If we start thinking of it in terms of 7 years this means we must give up what has been the characteristic approach of continental law schools towards pre law training. If you read the typical law school catalog, I haven’t read any in the last year but i’ve read a lot of them in the preceding two decades, they say be broad. Don’t study constitutional law cause you’ll have to relearn it when you take it with us…

Duration

9 minutes 28 seconds
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Citation

“Disc 2 Track 05. Continuation of Glendon Schubert to Ricky Shwartz,” The Archival Collections at the University of Hawaiʻi School of Law Library, accessed March 28, 2024, http://archives.law.hawaii.edu/items/show/19357.