Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Winter 2021

Abstract

Just over twenty years ago I gave a talk to the AALS called The Virtual Law School? Or, How the Internet Will De-skill the Professoriate, and Turn Your Law School Into a Conference Center. I came to the subject because I had been working on internet law, learning about virtual worlds and e-commerce, and about the power of one-to-many communications, and it struck me that a lot of what I had learned applied to education in general and to legal education in particular.
It didn't happen. Or at least, it has not happened yet. In this essay I want to revisit my predictions from twenty years ago in order to see why so little has changed (so far). The massive convulsion forced on law teaching because of the social distancing required to prevent COVID-I9 transmission provided an occasion for us all to rethink how we deliver law teaching. After discussing why my predictions failed to manifest before 2020, I will argue that unless the pandemic can be controlled, the market for legal education may force some radical changes on us-whether we like them or not-and that in the main my earlier predictions were not wrong, just premature.

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