At last month’s meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, the Section on Agency, Partnership, LLCs, and Unincorporated Associations sponsored a program on “Bringing Numbers into Basic and Advanced Business Associations Courses: How and Why to Teach Accounting, Finance, and Tax.”
I, like many business law professors, believe that at least some basic knowledge of accounting and finance is necessary to really understand business associations, securities regulation, and other business law courses. Unfortunately, many of my students have not had any accounting or finance, and many law students’ eyes glaze over whenever they see numbers.
The AALS panelists’ discussion of how to teach quantitative concepts to law students is excellent. The podcast is now available on the AALS web site, but, it’s password-protected, so only AALS members can access it. The audio is low quality, but it’s definitely worth listening to if you have access. (It’s not easy to work your way through the list of podcasts on the AALS site, but the program was on Sunday, January 4, at 10:30-12:15.)
The problem business law professors face is similar to that faced by undergraduate departments in dealing with underprepared high school students—those who have insufficient math or reading skills, for example. Like those undergraduate departments, we’re forced to offer remedial lessons to students who really aren’t adequately prepared for law school. And, as anyone in those undergraduate departments will tell you, the ideal solution is not remedial courses. The ideal solution is to make sure those students are adequately prepared in the first place.
The ideal solution to the law school “numbers problem” is at the undergraduate level. No student should come to law school without some basic exposure to accounting. And accounting and other quantitative courses aren’t the only areas where some law students are deficient. Every student going to law school should have taken at least one course in
- American government;
- Political philosophy;
- Accounting;
- Microeconomics; and
- Logic (both inductive and deductive).
In addition, law students should have taken at least one course, and preferably several, that required them to do extensive writing. Finally, in this day of globalism, a strong case could be made that students should have taken at least two years of a foreign language, although that obviously wouldn’t be needed for most law school courses.
If students came to law school with a broad educational background like this, we could eliminate much of the remedial work. Law school courses could spend significantly less time on basic principles and much more time on legal applications and higher-level analysis.