Failing Marks

Is the legal system working?

"There is far too much law for those who can afford it and far too little for those who cannot." That trenchant, if familiar, complaint was voiced last week by Harvard President Derek Bok, in his annual report to the university's board of overseers. During his twelve years in office, Bok has often employed the report as a forum for speaking out on broad social issues (among previous topics: the need for professional education in the field of public sevice, the relationship between the university and government). This year's installment, one of his most challenging yet, is a sweeping indictment of the legal profession in America. Writes Bok: "The blunt, inexcusable fact is that this nation, which prides itself on efficiency and justice, has developed a legal system that is the most expensive in the world, yet cannot manage to protect the rights of most of its citizens."

A lawyer and former professor and dean at Harvard Law School, Bok, 53, criticizes the U.S. legal system for being too complicated and overcrowded with lawyers, and for failing to be accessible to the poor and disadvantaged as well as the middle class. He also maintains that the profession attracts too many of the best college students at the expense of such other fields as engineering, business and teaching. The result, he argues, is "a massive diversion of exceptional talent into pursuits that often add little to the growth of the economy, the pursuit of culture or the enhancement of the human spirit."

Bok lays much of the blame on the policies and curriculums of the nation's law schools. By emphasizing conflict instead of "the gentler arts of reconciliation and accommodation," he charges, legal educators teach their pupils to think in terms of the interests of individual clients rather than the whole of society. For help in better understanding and improving the system, Bok urges law professors to make greater use of the "steadily more refined" analytical techniques of the social sciences.

Although most of Bok's points are not new, they are all the more forceful because of his position and the occasion he chose for airing them. Maurice Rosenberg, professor of procedural law at Columbia University and a former official in the Carter Administration, suggests that the increase in litigation and in the complexity of the law is due partly to greater public awareness of rights and a willingness to try them out in court. "That," says Rosenberg, "is certainly preferable to having them tested in the streets." Rosenberg agrees with Bok, however, that "law schools should do more to sensitize students to other possibilities besides fighting in an adversary frame." Bok will no doubt be even more heartened by the reaction of colleagues like Laurence Tribe, professor of constitutional law at Harvard. Bok's criticisms, says Tribe, are "if anything, an understatement." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.