Walter Hutchens’ Blog

Harvard Law School has revised its first year curriculum, supplementing and modifying the standard set of courses on contracts, torts, civil procedure, criminal law and property. They’ve added a course on statutory law (legislation and regulation), a new January-term course called “Problems and Theories” that will apparently be application-oriented, and new electives on international law.

A few quick reactions:

1. It’s Harvard, so HLS’s “innovations” will likely influence many other schools. The sacrosanct 1L curriculum, a rite of passage for generations of lawyers (like boot camp or a hazing ritual?) will now be reexamined by lots of schools, many of which will probably make modifications very similar to Harvard’s.

2. One of the ironies of US legal education is that, despite the ranking-obsessed nature of the law school admission process, every student takes essentially the same classes, taught by graduates of basically the same few schools, using basically the same teaching methods, often reading identical cases regardless of which school is attended.

I don’t mean HLS doesn’t have greater resources, more illustrious faculty and on average smarter students than a lesser ranked law school. What I mean is that the credentialism of the profession seems wildly disproportionate to actual differences in education among law schools.

3. As a lawyer who teaches in a business school, I’ve long been struck by how business school faculties seem radically more innovative than law school faculties in terms of course requirements and offerings. Business schools are eager to distinguish themselves with e-commerce majors and other novelties, whereas this Chronicle of Higher Ed story (sub. req’d) notes these HLS curriculum changes are Harvard Law’s fist curriculum overhaul “in more than 100 years.” A hundred years!

There has of course been curriculum change at HLS over the last 100 years. The number of electives has grown enormously. They now publish rafts of specialized journals. They have clinical courses. Ideological fads have come and gone (or, in some cases, stayed). Shortly before announcing these changes to the first year curriculum they announced the creation of concentrations for upper-level students.

Nonetheless, I think it’s accurate to perceive that law school course requirements have been 1) remarkably stable and 2) remarkably uniform across schools.

There are some simple reasons for this, I think. Law is an inherently conservative profession. Like the law, law school curricula evolve incrementally.

But more importantly I think, law schools move slow because they are monopolies. Basically you don’t become a lawyer except through a law school. Ensconced as gatekeepers to the profession, they are like state-owned enterprises protected from completion. Consumers don’t have much meaningful choice; to become lawyers they have to go to a law school, and schools teach pretty much the same things, particularly in the first year.

Of course people choose among law schools. But inertia, accreditation standards and perhaps bar exam content assure competition among law schools stays within well-worn channels.

In radical contrast, nobody needs a license to practice business. Business schools are not gatekeepers to the business profession. An entrepreneur needs approval from paying customers, not a panel of older entrepreneurs. And the business environment changes faster than the legal environment.

Thus business schools must continually examine their value propositions and recalibrate. Law schools, comparatively, don’t have to and don’t.

4. HLS will apparently spend less of the first year teaching property. To the extent this means less time teaching estates in land, it makes sense, but I imagine lawyers need more basic training in intellectual property law even though they now need much less training in feudal conveyances. For instance, my 1L property course didn’t even touch on IPR, but dwelt endlessly on future interests.

My own property teacher was wonderful—a brilliant scholar of the infamous Rule Against Perpetuities. His course was like the grandest LSAT logic game ever conceived. I enjoyed it, oddly, but it was far from the best imaginable use of my time in terms of the substantive content (the retort would be that it was a skills course not a black letter law course, but 1) I’d like to think I had decent critical thinking skills before the course and 2) in any event I could have sharpened my analytical tools on more relevant doctrines).

5. More attention to statutory law makes sense. I took courses on legislation and administrative law and found them extremely helpful. Parsing cases is a good exercise and important legal skill in a common law jurisdiction, but since Langdell’s method was instituted there has been an explosion in statutory law. It’s about time the 1L curriculum reflected that.

6. Shifting some 1L emphasis from private law to public law makes sense (it always amuses me how all those students fresh from writing admissions essays about how they want to save the world are thrown into learning about how to sort out who owes what to whom, a much more conservative project). But I do hope these HLS students are exposed to “theories” of how the protection of property rights and economic liberty are basic human rights, critical for liberty and freedom.

Harvard has posted a statement about the curriculum changes here. According to the statement the faculty approved the curriculum overhaul unanimously. It’s hard to imagine such a large, contentious law faculty agreeing unanimously on anything!

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On the DEMO website I saw a video about ThinkFree, an online office suite. I test drove it and like it very much.

They currently give you a free gigabyte of storage. With today’s high-megapixel cameras a gig might only store a few hundred photos, but for the text documents, spreadsheets and PowerPoint-type files that ThinkFree wants to handle, a gig is a lot of storage.

Within a few years using a non web-based (or non-web-enabled) word processor will seem as retrograde as using an old typewriter. Web access and the easy collaboration it provides will probably be as compelling as not having to re-type something to change it.

ThinkFree is the slickest of the web-based office suites that I’ve tried, though with Google and Microsoft bearing down, they will have to move fast, even with a great product, if they want to have the luck of YouTube whose investors and 60-odd employees are now divvying up $1.6 billion in Google stock.

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The New York Times reports that that old-line v.c. firm Sevin Rosen has “returned commitments” (meaning they’ve either returned cash or canceled rights to call down cash) for one of its funds. They’ve purportedly done so because they believe right now exit opportunities just aren’t good enough to justify taking more money from investors.

Hmpf.

I am used to inveighing (along with many others) that China’s lack of stock market exit mechanisms contributes to China’s under-achievement in many high tech areas (we certainly can’t blame a lack of human talent!); however, the notion that a lack of appealing exits will thwart U.S. v.c. funds is, um, novel.

A few differences should be noted. First, the U.S. is awash in v.c. money. This Times story notes, “At the end of 2005, venture capitalists had a combined $261 billion under management, more than at any time in the industry’s history[.]” So this can be seen simply as one well-funded firm crying uncle about a glut of supply compared to its perception of available investment opportunities and the likely returns on those investments. Although China has lots of cash (including staggering FOREX reserves and bank deposits), I don’t think it has a similar glut of v.c. funding.

Second, China lacks exit mechanisms for v.c. funds because of the way the PRC government has structured China’s stock markets (and to a lesser extent M&A markets). Sevin Rosen, in contrast, is making a judgment about market conditions, not regulatory blocks.

It’s bold for Sevin Rosen to return cash. If they don’t think they can earn desirable returns it is the right thing to do—much better than taking the cash and succoring themselves on the management fees while secretly hoping their analysis is wrong.

Still, whether or not they have correctly judged the market is unclear. Will there still be a lack of good exits down the road? Personally, I’d want to hedge that bet (and v.c. money is not after all supposed to be the core portfolio of a retirement fund!). Plus, if returns look lower for v.c. investors compared to historic highs, that may not mean v.c. funds won’t outperform other investments. What are portfolio managers supposed to do with their risk capital, put it in U.S. real estate? (I’ve got a house for sale in the DC area that’s been languishing for months now, and my anticipated return has been dropping lock a rock!).

Besides general economic uncertainty, it seems to me there is a there there in all the Web 2.0 buzz. Check out the videos and links from DEMOfall 2006 to get a sense. Not every scheme will be a YouTube or MySpace, but some will.

The Times story is titled A Kink in Venture Capital’s Gold Chain and is by Miguel Helft. With registration it is available here.

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For years I’ve used a program called Wenlin to assist with reading and inputting Chinese on computers.

I first bought Wenlin while in law school. It immediately helped with my struggles to read Chinese legal texts (or, in those days, read anything in Chinese). I’d paste text (from say a web page) into Wenlin and take advantage of its excellent dictionary (developed by John DeFrancis, a linguist and China scholar who is now in his 90s—my first Chinese textbook was by DeFrancis, and he makes an appearance in Peter Hessler’s recent book Oracle Bones).

Once the text was in Wenlin, moving the pointer across it caused definitions of the characters to flash across the bottom of the screen.

It was like training wheels for reading.

If instead of using Wenlin I’d counted strokes and looked up unfamiliar characters according to their radicals in a paper dictionary, it would have taken me exponentially longer to get through anything. Wenlin allowed me to move forward (however haltingly) until eventually I’d seen the most common (legal) characters often enough so that I was able to read without the training wheels.

Beyond making it possible to decipher a text in less than a week, Wenlin helped me because clicking on a character brought up a wealth of other information about it. I’d see an animation drawing the character stroke by stroke. I could hear the character pronounced in a comically slow voice. Best of all, I’d see the compound expressions that a character would typically be part of (in order of frequency of occurrence in common usage). In fact, the list of frequent combinations for a character that Wenlin gives includes combinations where the character in question comes first and those in which it comes later. So you’d get, for example, both 法律 falu law and 办法 banfa (method) when looking at the list for 法 fa. Without Wenlin you’d need both a normal and a “reverse” dictionary to get such a list. Also, Wenlin can give you a list of characters in which a character in question comprises a component (even if it isn’t the official radical for the character in which it appears as a component). All this helped my brain make the associations and get the repeated exposures that allowed me to learn to read.

Over the years my Chinese has improved a great deal, but I’ve continued to find Wenlin useful as a dictionary and sometimes for inputting characters.

I’ve dutifully bought its upgrades and installed it on every computer I’ve owned. Actually, I’ve even been an unpaid Wenlin evangelist, enthusiastically recommending it to literally scores of people over the years.

Now that I’m moving back to a Mac after using PCs running Windows for several years, I inevitably wanted to install Wenlin on my new Mac. That turned out to be quite a challenge.

If you own Wenlin you can install it on a Mac or PC from the same CD, but alas I’m in China and apparently left my Wenlin installation CD in America.

No problem I thought; I’ll just buy the Mac version online.

Uh, no. Wenlin can be ordered online but not downloaded. You have to wait for the CD to come in the mail. I wrote the company to confirm this. They generously offered to mail me a CD. If I was patient that would have been a good solution. But I’m not. So I tried to find another way.

I know peer-to-peer file sharing tools are notorious for enabling people to share software, aka illegally download files (as well as share material not subject to restrictive copyrights). I’d honestly never used one before, but I was intent on finding some way to get my hands on Wenlin (an email from a Wenlin rep explicitly confirmed I could use my existing license to install it on my Mac, so I wouldn’t be breaking any copyright rules, just getting a soft copy instead of waiting on the CD).

Well, it turns out Wenlin for the Mac is not a very hot download. I searched Google, Yahoo, Baidu and several torrent-indexing sites but found no functioning Wenlin-for-Mac downloads. I did find a few torrents of Wenlin for Windows, but those included only .exe versions of the program that won’t run on my Mac.

Finally I figured out a workaround. After getting a bit torrent client and downloading the Windows version of Wenlin (which included the dictionary, sound files and fonts in formats my Mac could use), I then downloaded from the Wenlin site a package that updates Wenlin to the most current version.

The updater package doesn’t include the large sound files and dictionary that are in the full install, but as I said I had just gotten those from a Wenlin-for-Windows torrent.

I simply drug the files in the updater package to where they needed to be in the folder I downloaded as a torrent (using Wenlin’s instructions here).

Voila, Wenlin works on my Mac! (Note this 2-step install won’t work with the demo—you have to use the updater).

I share this info not to encourage piracy but to help someone like me who has a duly licensed copy of Wenlin but needs to reinstall it (particularly on a Mac) when lacking the CD.

Seriously, people should buy Wenlin to support it. Of all the books and courses I’ve paid for in my effort to learn Chinese, the money I’ve spent on Wenlin provided the greatest return.

Hats off to Wenlin’s developers and to DeFrancis, editor of its built-in dictionary, for making a great product (despite the cheesy audio hiss in the startup and closure sounds!).

Now if they’ll just create a way to download it immediately after purchase!

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Yesterday when Skype notified me a new version is available I dutifully downloaded and installed it. I was then surprised to find out my video capability had disappeared.

The new version of Skype for the Mac is 1.5.0.80; however, the “Preview” version of Skype with video for Macs is denominated 1.5.0.77. The newer, non-preview version lacks video support. Arghhh.

I re-dowonladed the preview version and re-installed it over the “update.” Now I can Skype with video again from my Mac.

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