How experiential learning became the norm

Ten years ago, Rodney Smolla was featured as a Legal Rebel for leading an innovative plan at Washington and Lee University School of Law to eliminate traditional third-year coursework and replace it with experiential learning. Many law schools opened clinics in the 1970s and 1980s, according to Smolla, but when Washington and Lee revised its 3L coursework in 2009, legal education for the most part had been unchanged for the past century. People had long thought that it was time for change, regardless of whether they were for or against experiential learning, Smolla tells the ABA Journal’s Stephanie Francis Ward.

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