Looking Back, Looking Forward
Dean Onwuachi-Willig reflects on the future of legal education.

Photo by Dan Levy
Looking Back, Looking Forward
The future of legal education.
One hundred and fifty years ago, our founders put forth a bold vision that would transform the future of legal education. They established entrance requirements to ensure students were well equipped for the intellectual rigor of law school, and they introduced a sequenced, three-year curriculum that would soon set the standard for legal education in the United States. Alumni from our early years would go on to found other law schools in Boston, across the country, and around the world, extending the influence of BU Law’s innovations even further.
Yet, despite their extraordinary vision, neither our founders nor the 60 students who comprised the inaugural class could have imagined the BU Law of 2022—a school of more than 1,000 students, over half of whom are women and more than 35 percent people of color, operating under the leadership of a Black woman.
The complexities of today’s legal landscape may have confounded them as well. In the interconnected world of the 21st century, our faculty, students, and alumni are engaged in cutting-edge scholarship and practice related to data privacy and cybersecurity, free speech in the internet age, and artificial intelligence. Such topics may well have been inconceivable to students pursuing law school before the advent of the telephone.
Today, as I sit in the law tower overlooking the Charles River and reflect on the school’s 150-year legacy, I am reminded that I am but one of 18 deans privileged to steward this venerable institution for a time, and that many more will follow in the decades to come.
Admittedly, I cannot begin to imagine the law school of 2172 any more than George S. Hillard could have envisioned the law school of today when he took the helm as founding dean in 1872. But, given trends I have observed in recent years, I can identify some changes that are likely to occur.
No one knows for certain what the future will hold, but BU Law’s history is one of continuous adaption and innovation, and I am confident that we have the will and the talent to meet any challenges that may come.
Students entering law school today have a highly developed understanding of their identities, the ways those different identities intersect, and the way that their identities have influenced—and have been influenced by—their place in society. These students recognize that there are inequities built into our legal system and embrace an approach to law school that accounts for identity and its influence on legal doctrine. In turn, they reject the long-held notion that the law is inherently neutral.
In response, I anticipate that law schools will do more to interrogate the neutrality of legal doctrines and reconsider the traditional manner in which we teach the law, drawing from approaches like critical race theory, feminist legal theory, and queer legal theory to reshape core elements of pedagogy. New accreditation standards adopted by the American Bar Association earlier this year are already causing law schools to take steps in this direction.
There are other ways in which legal pedagogy is on the precipice of radical change, due in large part to emerging technologies. As of this past spring, the ABA had accredited nine JD programs delivered primarily online, some with as few as 10 in-person sessions required to earn the degree. The pandemic may have accelerated growth in demand for such programs, but the trend toward adopting online options was already well underway among US law schools.
Technological advancements are also impacting the job market. Firms have begun to use artificial intelligence to review documents and handle other routine work that was previously assigned to associates, and we anticipate that AI will handle more legal work over time. Law schools will need to help students deepen their practice-ready skills, such as critical thinking, that cannot be replicated by machines.
Environmental shifts like these will continue to increase the emphasis on clinical and experiential education as well. At the time of our founding, most lawyers learned the trade as apprentices to practicing attorneys, an inherently experiential approach. As formal education in the law became ubiquitous, legal training shifted primarily to classroom instruction. Today, in order to meet the expectations of both students and employers, clinical and experiential education are once again considered essential components of the law school experience, though they are often disconnected from doctrinal education.
At BU Law, experiential and doctrinal faculty are now working together to integrate theory and practice in new ways. Experiments like these, both here and at other schools, will lead to more integrated coursework of this kind, and I expect the lines between doctrinal, experiential, and other faculty will begin to blur.
Future generations of students, faculty, and alumni will undoubtedly witness many fundamental shifts in law and society over the course of the next 150 years. No one knows for certain what the future will hold, but BU Law’s history is one of continuous adaption and innovation, and I am confident that we have the will and the talent to meet any challenges that may come.

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