Despite the excitement of the moment, the professors are aware that their colleagues are not all so enthusiastic. And enthusiasm, they add, is a prerequisite. "It's not the kind of thing you push someone into," says Rakoff.
The Harvard Law faculty is postponing judgment on the experiment until after a thorough evaluation planned for the spring. "It's proceeding just the way a new educational approach should proceed, on a pilot project basis," Law School Dean James Vorenberg '49 said last week.
It is interesting that although all four professors are fairly liberal, the experiment was not a politically divided issue on the Law faculty. When the plans were presented at a faculty meeting last spring, reaction was for the most part positive, says Secretary to the Faculty Stephen M. Bernardi '52. At worst, he adds, some faculty members said to themselves, "If a group of colleagues wants to try something new, they should be free to do that."
On a theoretical level, the experiment is trying to break out of the doctrinal rut identified by the Michelman Committee last year. That committee studied legal education at Harvard for three years and issued a wide-ranging critical report in spring, 1982, writing that "Most-Committee members find that the more critical hypotheses about the first year...are plausible and troubling enough to warrant further exploration."
One of the problems is that first-year students learn only-doctrine, without theory on the one hand and clinical hands-on training on the other. The experiment is thus moving in both directions, injecting theory of the law into classes and adding clinical training to the agenda.
The professors feel the experimental section will make students better lawyers. If everything works as planned, the students should go into their second year with as much doctrine, more knowledge, and more enthusiasm than the students in the other three first-year sections.
The four professors are optimistic, and they are not afraid to speculate on the total abolition of the traditional first-year categories. "There are some real problems with throwing them away," says Rakoff. For one, every current lawyer and judge was trained the old way. "It's like bringing people into a religion and teaching them new rituals. Will they be able to relate?"