Rethinking the Academic Term

Why the Semester and the idea of Required Contact Hours is an Arbitrary and Anachronistic Construct

The modern law school academic calendar, with the vast majority of law schools split into two fifteen-week semesters and a smattering of schools (Chicago and Stanford notably among the so-called “elites”) divided among three terms (somewhat confusingly called “quarters”), is largely taken for granted.  Those of us long in the saddle have naturally absorbed the cadence of the calendar, and expect that the fall will wrap up at the cusp of the winter holiday, and the spring term will wind up some time in May.  Those teaching on the quarter system will have adjusted this timetable, but the overall structure in either semester or quarter form is defined by these propositions:

1)    Each academic course should be of equivalent length measured in weeks, even if the assigned credit load changes the overall “contact” hours required.  Although not unprecedented, law schools in practice will generally frown on courses beginning later or ending earlier.  When that happens, it is a rather clear departure from the norm and law school curricula catalogs suggest that it happens rarely, and mostly in order to accommodate faculty visitors from practice;

2)    Credit hours, so sayeth regulatory authorities, including the ABA and the Department of Education, should be measured by a combination of in-class instruction and out-of-class study.  Standard 310 of the ABA accreditation rules is particularly fierce in its specificity, defining a legitimate “credit hour” as including at least an hour of instruction and two hours of external study.  While the guidance memos speak of some flexibility, the requirements are indeed rigid.

Administrators and law faculty have long built their curriculum and professional schedules around the ritual of an equally divided term of 15 or 9 weeks (approximately).  But we should ask ourselves whether this straightjacket is worth it.  Ought we to rethink this ritual and consider whether some creativity in reworking our academic schedule is warranted, given what we insist is the imperative of innovation and adaptation?

Like many others, I have taught courses in many different temporal packages.  This includes an otherwise semester long course in a summer period (six weeks), in the fall-spring intersession (two weeks), in the first or second half of the term (seven weeks), in what one of our law schools calls a “power week” (one week), and also courses at law schools abroad in various iterations, ranging from four days to three weeks.  In my own experience, a course can be configured in many different ways, and, when carefully constructed, a suitable amount of material can be provided for study and discussion in different time blocks.  (For the purposes of this discussion, I will leave to one side the different question of whether in-person, fully remote, or some kind of hybrid works equally well).

The ABA makes clear that compressed courses, which are not at all prohibited, must still meet the requisite contact hours.  And so a short course necessarily entails lots of more concentrated student in-class time and an intense amount of out-of-class work.  Students will predictably adjust their workload to account for this arithmetic, and so an omnipresent constraint on modular teaching as a common curricular technique is the ability of students to juggle multiple classes that require the magic number of 42.5 hours for a one-credit class.

Without this contact hour constraint, however, a law school would be able to furnish students with a cluster of courses, many more than, say, three or four per term, and they might benefit from studying a wider mix of subjects or courses in a term’s time. 

Consider two hypothetical law students, each with different objectives:  Student A is someone determined to develop expertise in business law, preparing for a career as a corporate attorney.  Having fulfilled her requirements and other core electives, the student is anxious to learn a significant amount of the subject matter of business law, with courses built to introduce students to specific topics across a wide range of the subject matter.  A course, for example, on crypto-currency may not warrant a 15-week treatment, but a concentrated course spanning a shorter time period and with more abbreviated class  time might be just what the doctor ordered. Mini-courses, perhaps a mix of doctrinal and simulation, would better fit this student’s objectives.  In a given term of fifteen weeks, maybe as many as eight courses would be ideal.  Some are worth stretching out over fifteen weeks; some would warrant half of that time; and a few would be best taken in a much shorter form – say two weeks, with four hours of in-class and external study combined.  You could develop with a decent imagination a schedule that would be no more burdensome than a typical four or five-course load, but would give this eager student a much more impactful fifteen weeks, with exposure to a much richer assortment of business-law related courses.  Such a schedule would, however, require unshackling the curriculum from the tyranny of the ABA’s credit hour requirement.

Student B is a dabbler.  Uncertain about where he will end up after graduation, this student wants to sample a large array of courses and seminars that populate the curricular catalogue, but to do so would need the flexibility that the ABA current forbids.  He might want to take two seminars in which the focus would be on the out-of-class research and writing, rather than in-class meetings, and maybe a third seminar in, say, a 5-week block that would provide a shorter attention to a concrete topic.  Perhaps the topic’s inquiry, including the time devoted to research and writing, necessitates only 3 hours, in two separate sessions, with the instructor, during which time there could be a concentrated lecture and some fruitful discussion, then sending the student out to do this work.  At the same time, the student would like to take an eclectic assortment of courses that expose him to various legal topics, maybe adding up to six or seven short courses, each manageable in length and coverage.

The modern U.S. law school includes these hypothetical students, and variations on other types with heterogenous agendas.  A curriculum could be designed to accommodate a larger bucket of courses, seminars, and other experiments.  A student could well design their law school schedule much like she would tackle a buffet or a music festival, looking for many smaller experiences, maybe as a means of sampling across many subject matter domains or maybe as a deeper dive into a curricular concentration.

Whether and to what extent such a radical reshaping of the academic term around avowedly modular teaching would provide benefits to faculty members depends ultimately upon the teacher’s approach to assembling the course.  In the current system, the structure of the course around a highly mechanical formula – 42.5 hours per credit hour – is fundamentally arbitrary and innovation-limiting.  I have taught administrative law as a course in various time configurations, including in schemes that are not regulated by the ABA (foreign courses, non-JD programs) and so the allocation of in-class and out-of-class time has been flexible.  I have been able to give students exposure to fundamental issues within the general subject matter, but acknowledging that a deeper would require additional courses.  It is hard to imagine that the same would not be possible with nearly every course in the law school curriculum. 

So, too, is the requirement of a certain amount of in-class meeting arbitrary.  Some courses benefit from the intensity that comes from meeting with students together and with discussion and lecture at the center.  And so for these courses the primary learning vehicle is in-class (whether face-to-face or remote) instruction.  Preparatory reading may be more modest, and the expectations of substantial out-of-class study modest as well.  Other courses require much thinner in-class experience, perhaps with the focus on framing the issues and guiding the students toward external research, research which will furnish much of the learning that is needed and wanted. This may be the case for seminars on a discrete topic; it may also be the case for experiential learning courses where the bulk and balance of learning takes place with the students encountering legal concepts and lawyering tactics in the natural, rather than academic, world.

The argument here is more a meaningful turn toward flexibility, and ultimately toward experimentation.  The development of modular courses untethered to a bureaucratic accounting of exact time in the classroom and expected time of preparation and study can help shape a contemporary law school curriculum around the variegated priorities of students. It can also exemplify a fundamental reconsideration of the goals and objectives of particular courses and, more broadly, of the overall project of practical and doctrinal training and relevant legal education in a changing world.