1 Even in Roman times there appears to have been much controversy about the merits of training in rhetoric, aimed at the development of skills in advocacy, and training in the “science” of the law, aimed at a knowledge of the structure of Roman law and the history of legal precedents, in the education of lawyers. See Henri Irenée Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, esp. ch. 6 (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1956).Google Scholar

2 I refer the interested reader who is not yet familiar with the issues regarding the best forms of legal education to the sources described below. (As a starting point to the literature on this controversy see: Francis A. Allen, Message from the President, AALS Newsletter, May 12, 1976, at 1.) Herbert L. Packer & Thomas Ehrlich with the assistance of Stephen Pepper, New Directions in Legal Education (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1972); Barry B. Boyer & Roger C. Cramton, American Legal Education: An Agenda for Research and Reform, 59 Cornell L. Rev. 221, esp. 227–35 (1974); Andrew S. Watson, The Quest for Professional Competence: Psychological Aspects of Legal Education, 37 U. Cin. L. Rev. 91 (1968); Duncan Kennedy, How the Law School Fails: A Polemic, 1 Yale Rev. L. & Soc. Action I (1970).Google Scholar

3 Seymour Warkov with Joseph Zelan, Lawyers in the Making (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1965).Google Scholar

4 See Kenneth A. Feldman & Theodore M. Newcomb, The Impact of College on Students, 2 vols. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1973), and Alexander W. Astin, Four Critical Years: Effects of College on Beliefs, Attitudes, and Knowledge (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977), for recent attempts (from somewhat different conceptual bases) to summarize and evaluate these data.Google Scholar

5 Feldman & Newcomb, supra note 4, vol. 1, ch. 2; Astin, supra note 4, ch. 2.Google Scholar

6 See, e.g., Alexander W. Astin, Influences on the Student's Motivation to Seek Advanced Training: Another Look, 53 J. Educ. Psych. 303 (1962); id., Undergraduate Institutions and the Production of Scientists, 141 Science 334 (1963); id., supra note 4; Alexander W. Astin & Robert J. Panos, The Educational and Vocational Development of College Students (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1969); John L. Holland & Alexander W. Astin, The Prediction of the Academic, Artistic, Scientific, and Social Achievement of Undergraduates of Superior Scholastic Aptitude, 53 J. Educ. Psych. 132 (1962).Google Scholar

7 Feldman & Newcomb, supra note 4, vol. 1, ch. 2; Astin, supra note 4, ch. 2.Google Scholar

8 See, e.g., data summaries in Feldman & Newcomb, supra note 4, vol. 2, pp. 1–79.Google Scholar

9 C. William Huntley, Changes in Study of Values Scores During the Four Years of College, 71 Genetic Psych. Monographs 349 (1965). A discussion of the Huntley findings and additional analyses of the Huntley data with respect to the accentuation hypothesis is reported in Feldman & Newcomb, supra note 4, vol. I, pp. 175–82.Google Scholar

10 Although data on undergraduate value and personality changes are available from a large number of colleges and universities, attempts to determine from these data (1) the distinctive impacts of individual institutions on the development of such student qualities and, more importantly (from the point of view of both educators and educational psychologists), (2) the precise causes of such impacts, and (3) strategies for accelerating or retarding such changes have, for a variety of reasons, met with little success. Among the reasons for this lack of success: (1) different schools enroll different kinds of students, thus, if students at school A change in different ways from students at school B, it is hard to distinguish school “effects” from initial differences in students; (2) student samples used in studies at different schools have been (a) selected in different ways and (b) suffer attrition over the four college years of different kinds of magnitudes; (3) different studies have used different measures of values and personality and different methods of assessing changes; (4) many studies involving several schools have focused on common changes and have not presented sufficient data to permit discernment of change differences for individual schools; and (5) individual colleges and universities, especially the larger ones, provide varied classroom and residential environments that can produce varied patterns of student change, so that measures of student changes averaged over a random sampling of students within a single institution can mask strong but distinctive changes occurring in “subenvironments” within the school. See, e.g., George G. Stern, Environments for Learning, in Nevitt Sanford, ed., The American College: A Psychological and Social Interpretation of Higher Learning (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1962); id., People in Context: Measuring Person-Environment Congruence in Education and Industry (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1970), esp. ch. 8; Robert Pace, The Influence of Academic and Student Subcultures in College and University Environments, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Cooperative Research Project No. 1083 (Los Angeles: University of California, 1964).Google Scholar

11 Philip E. Jacob, Changing Values in College: An Exploratory Study of the Impact of College Teaching (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1957).Google Scholar

12 See, e.g., Thomas R. McConnell, Burton Clark, Paul Heist, Martin Trow, & George Yonge, Student Development During the College Years (forthcoming).Google Scholar

13 See studies cited in note 6 supra.Google Scholar

14 For a discussion of some of these characteristics and attempts to generate predictions based on their manipulation, see Astin, supra note 4.Google Scholar

15 E.g., Robert D. Brown, Manipulation of the Environmental Press in a College Residence Hall, 46 Personnel & Guidance J. 555 (1968); James K. Morishima, Effects on Student Achievement of Residence Hall Groupings Based on Academic Majors, in Clarence H. Bagley, ed., Research on Academic Input: Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Forum of the Association for Institutional Research 163–70 (Cortland, N.Y.: Office of Institutional Planning, State University of New York at Cortland, 1966); and A. E. Siegel & S. Siegel, Reference Groups, Membership Groups, and Attitude Change, 55 J. Abnormal & Soc. Psych. 360 (1957).Google Scholar

16 Morishima, supra note 15.Google Scholar

17 Siegel & Siegel, supra note 15.Google Scholar

18 Paul VanR. Miller, Personality Differences and Student Survival in Law School, 19 J. Legal Educ. 460 (1967), and id., A Follow-up Study of Personality Factors as Predictors of Law Student Performance, in Law School Admission Research: Reports of ISAC Sponsored Research: Volume 1, 1949–1969, at 403 (Princeton, N.J.: Law School Admission Council, 1976) [hereinafter cited as LSAC Research].Google Scholar

19 Thinking-Judging individuals react to experiences primarily by both (1) logical, rational analysis (Thinking) and (2) extrapolating both causes and consequences of the experience (Judging). Feeling-Perceiving individuals, in contrast, react to experiences primarily by (1) recognizing all aspects of the situation (Perceiving) and (2) determining the personal, subjective impact of the experience (Feeling). For a more detailed discussion of these psychological “functions” (to use Jung's terminology), see Carl G. Jung, Psychological Types 107ff. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1933).Google Scholar

20 Available data suggest that the percentage of law students drawn from these three general undergraduate curricular areas is between 80 and 90 percent. The percentage of all college and university undergraduates taking degrees with majors in these areas is about 50 percent. Fields of undergraduate concentration that are underrepresented among law students include education, the biological and physical sciences, engineering, and the fine and applied arts. For some relevant data collected in the recent past on law student undergraduate majors, see Seymour Warkov, Career Preferences for Law Among America's June 1961 College Graduates, Research memorandum (Chicago: National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago, 1962); Robert Stevens, Law Schools and Law Students, 59 Va. L. Rev. 551, 691 table A.7 (1973); and Thomas L. Hilton & John A. Winterbottom, The Impact of the Afternoon Tests: Prelaw Advisor Survey, inLSAC Research, supra note 18, at 267–89, esp. 275 table. For data on distribution of all undergraduate degrees by field of study, there are a variety of sources depending on how much detail the reader seeks. For general summary data, see the “Education” section in recent editions of U.S. Fact Book: The American Almanac: The Statistical Abstract of the United States, prepared annually by the Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce (currently published in paperback form by Grosset & Dunlap, New York).Google Scholar

21 See, e.g., Huntley, supra note 9; Pace, supra note 10; Carl Sternberg, Personality Trait Patterns of College Students Majoring in Different Fields, 69 Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, Whole No. 403 (1955); and A. E. Twomey, A Study of Values of a Select Group of Undergraduate Students (Ph.D. diss., Colorado State College, 1962). See also a discussion of these and other relevant studies in Feldman & Newcomb, supra note 4, vol. 1, ch. 6.Google Scholar

These studies employ the Allport-Vernon-Lindzey Study of Values questionnaire (Gordon W. Allport, Phillip E. Vernon, & Gardner Lindzey, A Study of Values (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1951)). In this questionnaire, a score indicating that a student has relatively strong economic values indicates nothing about whether the student is an economic “liberal” or an economic “conservative.” Rather, such a score indicates that he perceives a variety of events, each of which can be perceived (structured, if you will) from several perspectives, primarily from an economic perspective.Google Scholar

Behind this kind of questionnaire lies the basic notion that each person experiences events in a distinctive way and that basic values determine much of this distinctiveness. For an everyday example, suppose there is a newspaper article on a tidal wave in Bangladesh. The article may arouse, if one reader, thoughts primarily about the consequences to the precarious Bangladesh economy (a viewpoint in terms of economic values). Another may consider the government's reaction and the impact on the government's stability (a viewpoint in terms of political values). A third may think of the human suffering (a viewpoint in terms of social values). A fourth may consider what meteorological and/or geological conditions could have caused the tidal wave (a viewpoint in terms of theoretical values). A fifth may ponder what such disasters imply about the existence, potency, and purposiveness of the deity (a viewpoint in terms of religious values).Google Scholar

A reaction to a single event is a poorer indicator of a person's primary value orientation than would be a pattern of reactions to a variety of events. For example, a very humanitarian lawyer representing an airline might well react to news of a crash of one of the airline's planes by thinking immediately of the problem of protecting the airline against 217 lawsuits rather than the suffering of the victims or their survivors. The lawyer's humanitarianism (in the context of the research I am discussing, the relative importance of his/her social values) would be inferred better from reactions to many events in which the lawyer played varied roles as participant or observer.Google Scholar

In many of the research studies I am discussing, students were presented with a number of situations in a questionnaire and asked to indicate which of several proffered reactions was most like their own. The reactions were constructed to reflect the primacy of each of several value orientations (i.e., economic, political, religious, social, aesthetic, or theoretical). The relative frequency with which the student tended to select reactions reflecting each of the value orientations was used as an index of the relative importance of that value orientation (or framework) for that student.Google Scholar

For a summary of studies of both (1) shifts among undergraduates in positions on specific value-relevant issues and (2) shifts among undergraduates in the relative importance of various value frameworks for viewing events, see again Feldman & Newcomb, supra note 4.Google Scholar

22 See, e.g., Pace, supra note 10; Stern, Environments, supra note 10; id., People, supra note 10; J. Kirk, Cultural Diversity and Character Change at Carnegie Tech: A Report of the Carnegie Tech Campus Study (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1965).Google Scholar

23 The last two expectations derive from the undergraduate studies that compare students in various curricula but not from Miller's findings, supra note 18.Google Scholar

24 Howard S. Erlanger & Douglas A. Klegon, Socialization Effects of Professional School: The Law Student Experience and Student Orientations to Public Interest Concerns, 13 Law & Soc'y Rev. 11 (1978); Craig Kubey, Three Years of Adjustment: Where Your Ideals Go, Juris Doctor, Dec. 1976, at 34; Wagner P. Thielens, Jr., The Socialization of Law Students: A Case Study in Three Parts (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1965); Warkov & Zelan, supra note 3.Google Scholar

25 Erlanger & Klegon, supra note 24; Leonard D. Eron & Robert S. Redmount, The Effect of Legal Education on Attitudes, 9 J. Legal Educ. 431 (1957); Walter W. Steele, Jr., A Comparison of Attitudes of Freshmen and Senior Law Students, 23 J. Legal Educ. 318 (1970); Thielens, supra note 24.Google Scholar

26 See, e.g., Erlanger & Klegon, supra note 24, on pro bono work plans; Kubey, supra note 24, on the importance of social “betterment” motivations; and Thielens, supra note 24, on shifts in preferences for various kinds of clients.Google Scholar

27 Michael J. Patton, The Student, the Situation, and Performance During the First Year of Law School, 21 J. Legal Educ. 10 (1968).Google Scholar

28 Thielens, supra note 24.Google Scholar

29 Patton, supra note 27.Google Scholar

30 E.g., Thielens, supra note 24; Stuart C. Goldberg, How Lawful Is the Practice of Law, 2 Learning & L. 43 (1975). Thielens, in fact, reports that various questions about the same ethical issue yield somewhat different change patterns, depending on whether the issue involves actual or ideal practice.Google Scholar

31 Thielens, supra note 24; Kubey, supra note 24; Dan Lortie, Laymen to Lawmen: Law School, Careers, and Professional Socialization, 29 Harv. Educ. Rev. 352 (1959).Google Scholar

32 See, e.g., David Riesman, Law and Sociology: Recruitment, Training, and Colleagueship, 9 Stan. L. Rev. 643 (1957); and Charles D. Kelso, The nnrs Study of Part-time Legal Education: Final Report (Washington, D.C.: Association of American Law Schools, 1972).Google Scholar

33 For research data on and discussion of the congruence between a variety of student characteristics and the student characteristics that are supported and reinforced by various undergraduate schools, see the following: Alexander W. Astin, Distribution of Students Among Higher Educational Institutions, 55 J. Educ. Psych. 276 (1964); Lawrence A. Pervin, Performance and Satisfaction as a Function of Individual-Environmental Fit, 69 Psych. Bull. 56 (1968); Stern, Environments, supra note 10; and id., People, supra note 10.Google Scholar

34 Erlanger & Klegon, supra note 24; Kubey, supra note 24; Thielens, supra note 24; and Warkov & Zelan, supra note 3.Google Scholar

35 Thielens, supra note 24. For a relatively recent study containing data on undergraduates' choices of law versus other career fields, see James A. Davis, Undergraduate Career Decisions: Correlates of Occupational Choice (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1965); see also Warkov & Zelan, supra note 3.Google Scholar

36 id.Google Scholar

37 Lortie, supra note 31.Google Scholar

38 Thielens presents data on a variety of aspects of what he broadly terms student “values” indicating that student shifts away from initial positions during the first year of law school may be followed by movement back toward original positions in the ensuing two years. These data are aggregated over large student groups, however, and individual student change patterns may present a somewhat different, more complex picture. supra note 24, ch. 7.Google Scholar

39 Many observers and college counselors have discussed an undergraduate “sophomore slump.” The available research data, mostly studies of changes in student perceptions of college qualities over the four undergraduate years, do indicate in several schools a low point in student enthusiam occurring sometime after the first semester of college work. Feldman and Newcomb discuss these studies and present data summaries (supra note 4, vol. 1, pp. 92–95). However, studies of student perceptions of various college qualities (such as the extent to which colleges reinforce such qualities as achievement, affiliation, adaptability, emotionality, or expressiveness) strongly suggest that although freshman undergraduates generally come to perceive their schools as less demanding and purposive than they had expected prior to entrance, sophomore perceptions generally did not represent a nadir in perceptions of instutional potency and directionality. In general, juniors and seniors saw their schools as least potent and purposive. For data summaries of several such studies, see id., vol. 2, pp. 95–98. These two sets of findings suggest several possibilities, among them, (1) students who find their college different than they had anticipated (and hoped) may readjust their expectations of what the college will do for them; and (2) as students come to specialize more and more in particular areas of study and develop sets of distinctive student friends, they may find themselves in college settings having distinctive demands and purposes.Google Scholar

40 Thielens, supra note 24, ch. 7.Google Scholar

41 Goldberg, supra note 30.Google Scholar

42 Arthur Rothman & Herbert Marx, Expectations versus Perceptions of a First Year Law Class, 26 J. Legal Educ. 349 (1974).Google Scholar

43 Nor do undergraduate experiences, by and large. (For a general discussion of the undergraduate research, see Feldman & Newcomb, supra note 4, vol. I, ch. 4.) Despite this not atypical phenomenon of law school experiences falling short of expectations, there are suggestions that the law school provides a value environment similar not only to the environments provided by law practice settings but also to the environments in which many law students had placed themselves as undergraduates. For example, Becker and Meyers report that in the first five to ten years of law practice there is an aggregate drop in interest in legal aid and public defender work, shifts that may be even stronger than those in law school. Thus, it may be that law schools, despite not “living up” to student expectations, may provide an environment of values, interests, and tasks that is on line between undergraduate environments and work-setting environments. Comment, A Survey of Chicago Law Student Opinions and Career Expectations, 67 Nw. U.L. Rev. 628 (1972).Google Scholar

44 Stevens, supra note 20, at 646.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45 Hereafter, for the sake of brevity, I will refer to Brigham Young University as BYU, and to the student group we are studying as “the BYU students” or “the students.”Google Scholar

46 I would like to thank both the students and the faculty of the J. Reuben Clark Law School for their tremendous cooperation in carrying out the study of which this paper reports only a segment. In the course of the study we administered questionnaires to and interviewed both students and faculty. In addition we frequently observed each of the first-year classes and discussed informally with both students and faculty innumerable matters about legal education, careers, and so forth. All in all, their cooperation was all that we could ask, more than we had hoped for.Google Scholar

47 We used the random student numbers to provide anonymity for each student and confidentiality of the student's responses. All student data were received and processed by us accompanied only by the code numbers. Students affixed their own code numbers to response sheets. The only links between the code numbers and student names were (1) a list kept in the dean's office at BYU and (2) students' personal records of their own code numbers. The American Bar Foundation has no copy of the list. Thus we could link student responses to code numbers, and the BYU dean's office personnel could link code numbers to student names, but neither could link student names to their responses. The name-code number list was maintained so that students completing questionnaires could obtain their code numbers if they had forgotten them and dean's office personnel could send information, such as grades, identified to us only by code numbers.Google Scholar

48 Students indicated their degree of interest by selecting one of four response alternatives. The alternatives (and the numerical value we gave to each) were: “strong interest,” given a score of 4; “some interest,” 3; “slight interest,” 2; “no interest,” 1.Google Scholar

49 Students indicated the acceptability of each work setting by selecting one of the following response alternatives: “highly acceptable,” given a score of 4; “moderately acceptable,” 3; “minimally acceptable,” 2; “not acceptable,” I. I will refer in what follows to “interests” in both law content areas and work settings. The “acceptability” of a work setting to a student and the student's “interest” in working in that setting are probably virtually equivalent. And to speak of a student's “interests” in various work settings is less clumsy than speaking of the “acceptabilities” of various work settings to a student.Google Scholar

50 Again we asked students to select, from six response alternatives, the one that best represented their agreement or disagreement with the statement: “strongly agree,” given a score of 4; “agree slightly,” 3; “disagree slightly,” 2; “strongly disagree,” 1. Two additional response alternatives, “don't know” and “can't decide” were coded and generally treated as missing data. In a few analyses, these responses were treated as meaning “neither agree nor disagree,” forming a category between “agree slightly” and “disagree slightly.”Google Scholar

51 These are not items on the OPI. However, they are quite similar in form (and content) to items on the OPI.Google Scholar

52 The person taking the OPI is asked to circle, on a separate answer sheet, the letter T corresponding to the item if the item is true or mostly true of him/her; the letter F, if the item is false or mostly false of him/her.Google Scholar

53 I administered the OPI rather than another personality-measuring device (of which there are many) because the OPI was designated specifically to be sensitive to personality characteristics considered by some personality theorists as both especially relevant to what and how postsecondary school students learn and susceptible to the kinds of changes which educators claim to be seeking in their students. The OPI has been widely used in research on higher education, and data are available on a number of college and university student samples.Google Scholar

For a detailed description of the OPI see Paul Heist & George Yonge, Omnibus Personality Inventory-Form F: Manual (New York: Psychological Corp., 1968).Google Scholar

54 For example, the OPI taps several aspects of intellectuality. Over a large varied population these aspects have substantial positive correlations. However, they are distinct, and many people obtain high scores on one or two of these scales but not on the others.Google Scholar

55 I could find no recent data on average age of all entering full-time day law students. There are a few relevant earlier data. For example, Warkov and Zelan report that, within their large sample of college seniors graduating in the spring and summer of 1961 (34,000 seniors at 135 schools), 69 percent of those intending to study law had enrolled in law school in the fall of 1961. supra note 3, at v, 27.Google Scholar

56 These figures also suggest the continuation of the shift between 1965 and 1972, noted by Stevens, of law students' undergraduate study programs away from the fine arts and humanities toward the social sciences. supra note 20, at 574.Google Scholar

57 The mean score of 622 is above the median of average LSAT scores reported by schools in the Pre-Law Handbook for 1973. My guess would be that schools that do indicate the average scores of the students they admit are generally among the more selective of all law schools. 1973–74 Pre-Law Handbook: Official Law School Guide ([Washington, D.C.]: Association of American Law Schools; [Princeton, N.J.]: Law School Admission Council, 1973).Google Scholar

58 id.Google Scholar

59 For examples: (1) 37 percent of the BYU students reported their fathers had completed some graduate study vs. 26 percent in the Stevens sample; (2) a total of 59 percent of the BYU students reported their fathers had earned at least a four-year undergraduate degree vs. 49 percent of the Stevens samples; and (3) only 26 percent of the BYU students reported their fathers had not attended college vs. 36 percent of the Stevens sample. Stevens, supra note 20, at 601 table 30.Google Scholar

60 Several commentators on earlier presentations of data from this study have suggested that because the LDS church and the surrounding Mormon culture are quite distinctive, changes among BYU law students are likely also to be quite distinctive, atypical of law students generally. Religious and other aspects of culture affect changes in their members via the instillation of beliefs and qualities of temperament in these members. I will discuss below more direct measures of some of these qualities of the BYU students at entrance into law school; consideration of the possible “atypicality” of our findings will be deferred until that discussion. See pp. 817–19 infra.Google Scholar

61 Supra note 20, at 576–81 tables 8–18.Google Scholar

62 Stevens, supra note 20, at 631 table 41.Google Scholar

63 The Wisconsin data are taken from table 7 of the Erlanger and Klegon paper, supra note 24. Both the BYU and Wisconsin students were presented a list of law-relevant work settings and asked to indicate how acceptable each would be. In the BYU study, the students were asked to evaluate acceptability as “work settings for you during most of your career.” They indicated their responses on a four-point scale: “highly acceptable,” coded 4; “moderately acceptable,” 3; “minimally acceptable,” 2; or “not acceptable,” I. In the Wisconsin study, the students were asked to evaluate acceptability as “work settings for you five years after graduation from law school.” They indicated their responses on a three-point scale: “desirable,” 2; “acceptable,” 1; or “unacceptable,” 0.Google Scholar

The 14 work settings rated by the BYU students are presented (along with relevant BYU data) in table 4 of this article. The Wisconsin students were asked to rate 12 of the 14. “Poverty law office” and “public interest law office” were not included on the Wisconsin list.Google Scholar

64 The rank order correlation coefficient between the two schools was + 0.60. For a description of rank order correlation coefficients, see almost any elementary statistics text (e.g., Helen M. Walker & Joseph Lev, Statistical Inference 278–86 (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1953)).Google Scholar

65 The greatest differences between the BYU and Wisconsin group ratings of the work settings were in three settings: (1) working in the “public defender's office” was seen as more acceptable by Wisconsin students than by BYU students; (2) working for a “state agency” was, similarly, seen as more desirable by Wisconsin students; whereas (3) working in a “district attorney's office” was seen as more desirable by BYU students.Google Scholar

66 The BYU work-setting change data are presented in table 4. The rank order correlation between BYU and Wisconsin for work-setting change scores is +0.87.Google Scholar

67 Although both studies presented the same opinion statements, we asked students to indicate their responses on a four-point agreement-disagreement scale, whereas Erlanger and Klegon used a five-point scale, adding a middle “neither agree nor disagree” category. Thus, BYU student responses are not precisely comparable to Wisconsin student responses. In cases where most students tend to agree with the given statement, the presence of the middle category in the Wisconsin study will draw off students who would have indicated “slight” agreement if presented with the scale used at BYU: thus the same average agreement will produce a more equivocal average agreement score in the Wisconsin group. Conversely, in cases where most students disagree with a statement, the Wisconsin group will yield a more equivocal, less negative average agreement score. Erlanger & Klegon, supra note 24.Google Scholar

68 (1) Large majorities of both groups tended to agree that “lawyers should be trend setters in working toward social change”; (2) large majorities of both groups tended to agree that pro bono work “is part of a lawyer's professional obligation”; (3) less sizable but similar majorities of both groups tended not to believe that “the complexities of corporate structure create the most important work of lawyers.”Google Scholar

69 (4) Whereas a slight majority of Wisconsin students tended to agree that “in noncriminal cases lawyers have wrongly neglected to make law more readily available as an instrument of justice to common people,” the BYU students were virtually evenly divided; (5) whereas a slight majority of the Wisconsin students disagreed with the statement that “one of the most important functions a lawyer can have is to contribute to the development and refinement of the techniques of business organization and commercial enterprise,” the BYU students were, once again, evenly divided.Google Scholar

70 Intellectuality and aestheticism scores (TI, TO, Es, Co, and PO), emotionality scores (PI, AL), and sociability scores (SE and Am) are quite similar to the mean scores of the other samples. The mean score for the avu group on the Impulse Expression scale is low, but not dramatically low, compared to the other groups.Google Scholar

71 The low scores on the RO scale reflect strong traditonal Christian religious beliefs and adherence to such practices as attending church services and prayer. The low mean score on the Autonomy (Au) scale reflects tendencies to accept guidance and direction from others. Students low on the Autonomy scale report that they frequently seek and respond to advice and judgment of others (friends, parents, “authorities” in the church and community, etc.). It is possible that BYU students, given the great stress in the culture of both children's accepting the authority of parents and all accepting the guidance of church authorities in religious matters (including the large gray area where religious, ethical, and societal values overlap), are unusually acquiescent to faculty opinions on proper lawyer and legal system behaviors and goals. However, the data on interest and opinion changes I have presented so far suggest the BYU students entered law school no more homogenous than groups entering other law schools. Nor do our data suggest that either interests or attitudes are homogenized over the first year of law school. It may be that the unusually strong tendencies to accept direction from others reflected in the low Autonomy scale scores are generally restricted to religious and familial matters. It may be that the authoritarian structure of the Mormon culture has had the effect not so much of creating a homogeneous and ever homogenizing group of young people but of creating a group with religious and social beliefs that lie to the onservative side of our political spectrum-varied but conservative.Google Scholar

72 I should indicate here that avu has attracted its faculty from a variety of professional careers: private practice in small and large law firms, federal and local government agencies, teaching at various regional and national law schools, and so forth. Also, casebooks and other reading materials used in first-year courses at evu are standard, widely used materials. Direct classroom observations plus student descriptions of their classroom experiences indicate that the avu faculty are quite varied in their own content-area and work-setting interests (e.g., some were quite comfortable as legal academics, others clearly were not–one or two have, since this study, returned to private practice) as well as in their attitudes toward lawyering and legal institutions (e.g., some faculty were advocate of strong protections for the accused in criminal cases, whereas others were convinced that movements to strengthen such protections have gone much too far).Google Scholar

73 Whether wives and other family members and responsibilities pressed BYU law students toward distinctive career paths, views of appropriate professional activities and attitudes, and so forth is impossible to assess without knowing details of family dynamics and law-relevant views. Discussions with BYU student wives shed a bit of light on family pressures. For example, wives generally appeared strongly supportive of their husbands' career plans and investments of energy in their law studies, and wives had a variety of preferences regarding the kinds of communities they hoped to be living in after law school and a variety of pictures of their husbands' future law careers.Google Scholar

74 The grouping was done on the basis of the interest response patterns of individual students. Content areas for which student responses were strongly related to one another were joined into groups. For example, students who indicated “strong” interests in corporate law also tended to indicate “strong” or “some” interest in both antitrust and bankruptcy law. Conversely, students who indicated “no interest” in corporate law tended to indicate “no” or “little” interest in these other two areas. Because of these relationships among the three content areas, I grouped them together into a “business law” category. Other areas, such as administrative, maritime, and patent law, either did not show such relationships with other content areas or showed modest relationships with content areas in two or more of the larger categories. These were not combined into categories.Google Scholar

For the statistically minded reader, the groupings shown in table 3 reflect quite well the relationships among content areas revealed by factor analyses of responses.Google Scholar

75 These larger interest categories were used, as described later in this section, to define clusters of students with distinct interest patterns.Google Scholar

76 Our measure of average scores in this and succeeding tables is the arithmetic mean of student scores. The larger the mean, the higher the average interest. To obtain the arithmetic mean of the interest scores for a single content area, the scores for all students on that item are first added together; the total is then divided by the number of students responding to the item. Given our scoring scheme, mean interest scores can range from 1.00 (which would occur if all students indicated “no interest” in the content area) to 4.00 (which would occur if all students indicated “strong interest”).Google Scholar

Our measure of variation in interest scores among students in a particular content area is the standard deviation. The larger the standard deviation, the greater the dispersion of student scores on that item. The standard deviation of scores on a particular interest item is computed in the following way: (1) the difference between each student's scores on that item and the mean of all student scores on that item is computed; (2) this difference is squared, producing a positive number which could be called “the squared difference” between each student's score and the average score for all students; (3) the squared difference scores for all students on that item are added together; (4) the resulting total of the squared difference scores is divided by the number of students responding to the item (the resulting “mean of the squared differences” is called the “variance”); and (5) the square root of the resulting “mean of the squared difference scores” is obtained. This square root is called the standard deviation. Given our scoring scheme, standard deviations on interest items can range from 0.00 (indicating that all students gave the same response) to 1.50 (indicating that half of the students marked “no interest”; half, “strong interest”).Google Scholar

77 A statistically significant difference between two means is a difference so large that it is unlikely to have been produced by random fluctuations in responses. In the case where we are working with two means, our indices of the amount of fluctuation to be expected via random factors are the standard deviations of the sets of measurements that produced the two means. In general, the larger the standard deviations, the larger the mean difference must be to deem it statistically significant.Google Scholar

What does it mean to say that a particular mean difference is statistically significant at the .05 level? It means that a mean difference as large or larger than the one we obtained will occur no more often than 5 percent of the time if (1) there were really only random fluctuations operating in our data and (2) the standard deviations of two sets of measurements were accurate reflections of the magnitude of these random fluctuations in a larger population from which our group is a random sample. Social science researchers have generally adopted the convention that a difference, to be labeled statistically “significant,” must be likely to occur no more than 5 percent of the time if only random data fluctuations are present. In pilot research projects and in studies in which large samples are prohibitively costly, differences at the .10 or even .20 level of statistical significance are labeled “significant,” indicating that the researcher believes these differences worthy of continued research attention.Google Scholar

78 There are some marked exceptions to this tendency in the table. Three content areas (international, tort, and trusts and estates law) in which students initially showed relatively strong interests buck the general change trend and do not show mean drops over the year. Also, three content areas (maritime, military, and patent and copyright law) with initial low mean interest scores dropped still further over the year.Google Scholar

79 The first method involved calculating the mean change score in each content area using only those students who initially indicated either “some” or “little” interest in that content area (i.e., those students who initially responded in one of the middle categories on the response scale and could thus show increased or decreased interest over the year on the scale). The second method involved two assumptions: (1) at any point in time a student has a “true” level of interest, but due to random factors like the ones I have described, the student's response at that time may indicate either more or less, or the same level of, interest as his/her “true” interest; and (2) in the absence of any real changes in interest in a content area over the year, the number of students who show a drop in interest will be roughly equal to the number who show a rise in interest (this, in effect, implies that there is at the end of the year an implicit “stronger than strong” interest category as well as a “less than no interest” category). Armed with these assumptions, I then attempted to construct tables cross-tabulating “hypothetical” initial and end-of-year responses for each content area that would closely match the actual tables obtained from the BYU students. I was able to construct closely matching “hypothetical” tables for nearly all the content areas.Google Scholar

For an early, yet rich and penetrating, discussion of measuring “true” interests, attitudes, etc., see L. L. Thurstone & E. J. Chave, The Measurement of Attitude: A Psychological Method and Some Experiments with a Scale for Measuring Attitudes Toward the Church (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929).Google Scholar

80 Standard deviations in the range we obtained (from 0.69 to 1.00) indicate substantial diversity of interests among students in each of the content areas. For each of the content areas, at least three of the four response categories attracted a substantial number of students.Google Scholar

In many of the content areas, especially those with initial mean response scores between 2.00 and 3.00, student responses were plentiful in three of the four available response categories.Google Scholar

81 I will return to this point below when I discuss a cluster of students whose strongest interests were in the international law area. See p. 852 infra.Google Scholar

82 Some readers may question my placing of antitrust law in the “business” category since interests here could be either interests in protecting businesses facing antitrust prosecution or interests in prosecuting businesses for antitrust violations. Relationships between interests in antitrust law and interests in other content areas suggested that, in this student group, students with strong interests in antitrust law were usually those with strong interests in representing business clients. In later forms of the LSI being used at other schools, we have included both antitrust defense and antitrust prosecution as separate areas.Google Scholar

83 Cf. discussion of commentary and other research data on legal education, pp. 798–806 supra.Google Scholar

84 Although the last work setting specified on our list was labeled “teaching,” it was quite clear from student responses that most students reacted to it as though it read “law teaching” (so strong was their determination to go into law?). A few did indicate it meant law plus business and/or political science. One or a very few had interests in other kinds of teaching. I will treat responses to this item as though they meant interests in “law teaching.”Google Scholar

85 Despite the very high initial interests in certain of the work settings, changes in mean interest scores over the year are not distorted to any significant degree by initial “ceiling” and “floor” constraints on possibilities for indicating changes.Google Scholar

86 1 have placed “public defender's office” in the “public service” category in table 3 rather than in a separate public criminal law category along with “district attorney's office” because student interests in public defender work paralleled their interests in the other “public service” work settings a bit more closely than they did interests in work in public criminal prosecution. It appears that in students' minds, public defender work is primarily an avenue for helping the underdog: the fact that it is a way to immerse oneself in and practice criminal law seems to be somewhat less important to many students. Looking at the student responses to these work settings, we regretted omitting a “private criminal defense practice” item, which would have helped us better distinguish among student interests in (1) practicing in the area of criminal law, (2) stamping out crime, and (3) helping the underdog. Later versions of the Ls' include a private criminal defense item.Google Scholar

87 By “secondary interests” in a work setting I mean interests less strong than the student's strongest interests but stronger than interests in other work settings. For example, if a student gave responses to the 14 work settings that were scattered across all four response categories, the “secondary interests” would be those that the student found “moderately acceptable.”Google Scholar

88 Recall here Lortie's suggestion that law student conceptions of what lawyers actually do in professional practice appear to grow fuzzier as the students pass through law school. Lortie, supra note 31. It is possible that although students develop sharper images of predominant problem types and clienteles of different professional settings, they simultaneously become less clear about (perhaps because they become more concerned about) the day-to-day, hour-by-hour activities of lawyers (e.g., “I know what 'corporate clients' are and what some 'corporate tax problems' are, but exactly what are the activities of a lawyer engaged in helping such a client to solve such a problem?”).Google Scholar

89 I have composed these descriptions of student attitude responses to be read in conjunction with examination of the data in table 5. The descriptions convey in a shorthand way certain general characteristics of student response shifts. Keep in mind that mean scores in table 5 (as in tables 3 and 4) are averages of student responses. On most items, student responses were scattered across all four response categories. For example, in response to the first item on table 5 (“Lawyers can be trusted to keep their clients' secrets”), 31 students (35 percent of the students responding to that item) indicated strong agreement at the beginning of the year; 48 students (55 percent), slight agreement; 8 (9 percent), slight disagreement; and 1 (1 percent), strong disagreement. On some items there was more dispersion of student opinions; on others, less.Google Scholar

90 For comparative data on the U.S. adult population (and subgroup) responses to these opinion items see chapter 6, Opinions and Perceptions, of Barbara A. Curran, The Legal Needs of the Public: The Final Report of a National Survey (Chicago: American Bar Foundation, 1977).Google Scholar

91 As in discussing the career interest items, I use standard deviations as indicators of agreement among students. These items tapping opinions about the law, legal professionals, and legal institutions make vivid another aspect of consensus and its measurement. Suppose, for example, that all students at the end of the year had indicated that they agreed somewhat with one of our opinion items. The standard deviation of their responses to the item would have been 0.00. Yet, each student could have “qualified” agreement for different reasons. In this case, although there would be consensus in the choice of item response, there would not be consensus on the actual state of affairs.Google Scholar

92 I observed in classes that BYU students were attentive to derogatory comments about clients made by judges in casebook opinions. In class students frequently questioned client motives in bringing various legal actions against others.Google Scholar

93 There was some discussion in classes about the morality of using the courtroom as a forum for debate about political and social values. Conversations with students indicated that many held the view that legal practice had to be conducted within the law; legal, political, and social change were best sought through legislation and other extrapractice mechanisms. This view could account for some qualification of opinions on this item.Google Scholar

94 There is a strong belief in the Mormon culture that the members of the community have obligations to help one another in times of need. Various of the BYU students, for example, gave time, labor, money, food, and household goods to needy families in the Provo community. Several BYU faculty emphasized service to the poor as a lawyer's obligation. This rise in student support for lawyer service activities, in spite of initial opinions clustered near the ceiling of the response scale, may indicate that faculty efforts in this regard were quite successful.Google Scholar

95 Supra note 24.Google Scholar

96 Note on these two scales that contrary to the scale names, high scores indicate the absence of psychological distress, anxiety, etc.Google Scholar

97 Notice, too, the slight drop in the Response Bias (RB) mean score. Since a few items on the RB scale also appear on the TI, TO, PO, PI, and AL scales, this drop may reflect merely the drops in intellectuality and psychological well-being just noted.Google Scholar

98 To illustrate, suppose a student entered law school with strong or moderate interests in most of the content areas listed on the LSI. Suppose further that during the first year (as a result of a variety of experiences in and around law school), the student found that several areas were as interesting (or even more interesting) as he thought at entrance. Suppose still further that interests in other areas waned by comparison. Comparing this student's content-area interest responses at the end of the first year with those given at the beginning of the year might yield the following response change pattern: (1) in those content areas in which the student's interests were maintained or strengthened (a minority of content areas), response changes would be zero or positive; (2) in those content areas in which interests waned relative to other areas (a majority of content areas), response changes would generally be negative. This pattern of change would appear, via the two methods of analysis described above, to be an “overall drop” in content-area interest.Google Scholar

99 This means that two content areas were regarded as “similar” in student eyes if individual students indicated similar degrees of interest in the two areas.Google Scholar

100 Constitutional law related more closely to both poverty law and civil rights/civil liberties law than to other content areas. Because constitutional law, encompassing abstract elements of law underlying a number of content areas, related less directly to specific kinds of practice than did most of the other content areas, I singled it out in table 3. Here, and in the development of student clusters to be discussed below, I added it to the helping the underdog interest category to add greater stability to the measure of such general interests.Google Scholar

101 Students who indicated relatively strong interest in one of the content areas within a category tended to report relatively strong interest in the other content areas within the category. For example, if a student reported widely varying degrees of interest in the 18 content areas (“strong interest” in a few areas, “some interest” in a few others, etc.), then “strong interest” in corporate law was likely to be accompanied by “strong interest” or at least “some interest” in antitrust law and bankruptcy law (the other two content areas in the business law category).Google Scholar

102 I chose to form clusters on the basis of end-of-year interests rather than interests at entrance primarily because the end-of-year interests would be based on more information about the law and lawyering.Google Scholar

103 For a student to be described as “preferring” one content-area category over another, the student had to indicate that interests in at least two of the content areas in the first category (the “preferred”category) were greater than interests in any of the content areas in the second category (the “nonpreferred” category). I decided not to use a more stringent criterion, such as requiring all content areas in one category to be of more interest than all content areas in the other category, because (1) a more stringent criterion was met by few students (e.g., as again you might imagine from the data in table 3, some students indicated strong interests in corporate and antitrust law within the business law category but little or no interest in bankruptcy law), and (2) in a number of cases where the two-content-area criterion was barely met there was additional evidence supporting the apparent “preference.” For example, several students who indicated greater interest in corporate and antitrust law than in any of the individual law areas also indicated little or no interest in insurance and tort law as well as relatively strong interests in work as a house counsel for a corporation or a bank. Thus it appeared that few students were likely to be placed into clusters via accidental, random factors using our two-content-area criterion.Google Scholar

104 Perhaps surprisingly, none of these students indicated “strong” interests in two or more content areas within three or more categories. E.g., no student indicated “strong” interests in corporate and antitrust law within the business law category, and in tort and criminal law within the individual law category, and in tax and trusts and estates law within the money law category. They tended, rather, to show markedly disparate levels of interests within each of three or more categories. E.g., a student might show “strong” interest in corporate law but not in antitrust and bankruptcy law, and in criminal law but not in family and tort law, and in tax but not in trusts and estates law. These patterns could represent interests focused according to some logic not shared with other students, or they could represent scattered, unrelated interests.Google Scholar

105 These descriptions are presented to illustrate the heterogeniety of the BYU law student group. Also they suggest the ways that career interests, attitudes, personality characteristics, etc., may relate to and support one another. In the hope that other researchers will seek answers to questions examined in this study, these data are offered as possibly being useful for comparative purposes.Google Scholar

106 This suggests that students in cluster A saw less conflict between individual law and business law than between helping the underdog and business law.Google Scholar

107 Conversation with students suggested a possible explanation for these attitudes among the business-oriented students. Some students (and some faculty as well) felt that business in this country is under unreasonable and damaging attack by both consumer groups and legislators and that such attacks are, in net, socially damaging.Google Scholar

108 At least the balance of priorities appears to lie more strongly in the problem-solving, specialist role among these students than among the BYU students generally.Google Scholar

109 Since there was much discussion at BYU about government usurpation of the rights of business, I anticipated finding a cluster paralleling cluster A (individual law plus helping the underdog) with primary interest in protecting the rights of business. This cluster would have manifested strong interests in business law areas, constitutional law, and perhaps civil rights/civil liberties law. Although I found one or two students with such a pattern, cluster E emerged as a much larger grouping.Google Scholar

110 Meile discusses such “uncommitted” students. His data suggest that such students tend to experience less anxiety and concern about law school success than other students. In addition, they may earn relatively low grades compared with other students. Richard Lawrence Meile, Performance and Adjustment of First Year Law Students 73 (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1961).Google Scholar

111 Thielens, supra note 24.Google Scholar

112 Some psychological research suggests that students, in quests for admission to selective institutions of higher education, may “overtune” themselves to the point where they perform on en-trance examinations, in interviews, and on application forms at a level higher than their most characteristic performances. Part of the “overtuning” process may involve pumping up expectations to an unrealistically high level.Google Scholar

113 This lack of cluster opinion accentuation may result largely from the variable meanings of items to individuals. It is also consistent with the hypothesis that the bulk of changes in response to the “ought” items were essentially random fluctuations indicating no real shift in attitudes.Google Scholar

114 I have wondered, as I reviewed the data we have collected, the extent to which attitude and value changes reported by observers and researchers of legal education have not been changes in student attitudes and values concerning what “ought” to be the case but rather (1) changes in opinions about actual states of affairs and/or (2) not changes at all but rather apparent pressures toward change exerted by law school experiences.Google Scholar

115 This was indeed the explicit message in one of the first-year courses–the focal concept of the course, in fact.Google Scholar

116 I should note in passing that BYU faculty appeared to observers to vary markedly from one another in both (1) their accessibility, informality, and ostensible empathy with students and (2) the importance they attached to improving the lot of clients and various specific social groups.Google Scholar

117 I do not want to imply that “getting oneself up” for selection into law school involves putting on an act. All of us feel differently about ourselves at different times. Most law school aspirants, when primed for selection, probably feel, as they should, that they are being themselves.Google Scholar

118 For example, varied groups of critics complain that students are diverted from social justice and law reform concerns toward aspirations to make lots of money and gain the respect and friend-ship of the rich and already powerful, led by a faculty to an overly negative opinion of legal institutions and the ethics and social responsibility of the practicing bar, trained to be contentious even when conciliation is called for.Google Scholar

119 It is interesting that although students report and our classroom observations indicate pressures toward autonomy and tolerance for complexity in the classrooms, the better examination grades go to students who tend to be low on these qualities. Thus, student responses in the direction of greater independence of judgment and greater tolerance of complexity and ambiguity appear especially strong in that they fly in the face of examination pressures. We have picked up a sense that these qualities, although sought and encouraged in the classroom, may be sought and encouraged within limits. I have mentioned earlier my impression that latitude of student interpretation and judgment is encouraged within the bounds of the legal system as it exists; discussion of considerations from outside these bounds is apt to be truncated and discouraged (“Let's get on with the next point” or “That is interesting, but …”). Students high in Autonomy and Complexity may come at legal problems from outside the bounds–hence their reports of feeling somewhat deviant and isolated.Google Scholar