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2 Clinical L. Rev. 231 (1995-1996)
Educating the Reflective Legal Practitioner

handle is hein.journals/clinic2 and id is 245 raw text is: EDUCATING THE REFLECTIVE LEGAL PRACTITIONER DONALD A. SCHON* This is an edited version of Professor Sch6n's speech at the Mini-Workshop on Theory and Practice: Finding Bridges for the Classroom, held at the 1992 AALS Annual Meeting. In introducing this speech, the chair of the session, Professor Carrie Menkel- Meadow, told the workshop members that Professor Sch6n has spent his career studying how professionals work, and how technical rationality can be coupled with artistry to combine and develop pro- fessional confidence and professional judgment. Because his work spans a variety of different professions and tells us how we learn to be professionals and how senior professionals aim to teach that artistry and to transmit it to the next generation, the Professional Planning Committee thought it was particularly appropriate that he should come and teach us a little bit about how we as legal professionals- both as legal educators and lawyers-might transmit some of that learning, knowledge and creativity to some of our students. For the same reasons, the Clinical Law Review is pleased to publish the text of Professor Sch6n's remarks. I am not a lawyer although I think my father secretly always hoped that I would be one. He would have been glad to see me at this session, but he would have wondered what on earth I had to say to a group of distinguished law professors. The language of the workshop description talks about the need for new thinking in legal education. It talks about the lawyer of the twenty-first century and about how to educate him or her. It talks about bridging the chasm between the classroom and the real world -although I notice it carefully avoids saying what that real world really is. Where does the interest in new thinking in legal edu- cation come from? What I am going to try to do first is to give you some sense of the context, as I understand it, within which the concern for new thinking in education arises. It will be a context that encom- passes the professions and professional education generally. I'll try to make some connections from this broad context to what I understand of the law and legal education. You can judge for yourselves how well * Ford Foundation Professor of Urban Studies and Education, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The editors wish to thank Professor Richard Neumann for suggesting the publication of Professor Schon's talk here, and for getting it transcribed.