Learning from and About the Numbers

In this article, we enter the debate about the value of legal education, taking aim at the issue of the ways in which law schools prepare students for practice. But rather than focusing on skills training, our concern is with the approach of law schools to preparing students to understanding the context of the legal issues they will encounter, and specifically on their preparation for working with numbers, whether with regard to business, finance or information presented in statistical form generally. Our contribution to this debate is to emphasize the importance of data in analyzing the value of law school, and we do that here with data on what law students think they are learning in law school with regard to business and financial concepts and quantitative information. In addition to explaining the experiences and perceptions of a sample of more than 8,000 law students, the importance of these data relates to the larger framework for explaining the value of legal education to prospective students and to the hiring market of law graduates