Radical Proposals to Reform Legal Pedagogy: Legal Learning for Life: Legal Immersion Fluency Education (LIFE)

The concept of “thinking like a lawyer,” the focus of traditional law school study, takes too narrow a view of how lawyers practice and the range and reach of legal work. Although critical legal thinking is important, it is merely one component of effective lawyering. In addition to learning how to “think like a lawyer,” law school is the place where students learn the language of the law. The author states that law schools should take advantage of the best known and most effective approach to learning a new language—the immersion method—and that the primary characteristic of the immersion method is teaching language and culture in contextualized combination. By creating an engaging learning environment where law students become fluent in the language and practice of effective and compassionate problem solving, the health and well-being of individual lawyers and the legal profession will improve.