At Salon, Richard Posner has thoughts on law school, and how to fix it:

If the professor teaches the canons, even while telling the students that the canons (with the exception of the handful of substantive ones) are window dressing, the lesson the students will take from the course and seek to apply as law clerks or litigators is to dress statutory opinions in canons, much as the sharpies in The Emperor’s New Clothes dressed the emperor in luxurious nonexistent clothing.

Another curricular error is the continued emphasis in legal-writing courses on the Bluebook, which has swollen from obese to grotesque size and by reason of its length and complexity has spawned auxiliary book-length treatments of citation form, such as Harvard’s Blackbook, which annotates and extends the Bluebook in an effort to cope with its gaps and contradictions, the result of its great length and its authors’ outsized ambitions.There are alternatives to the Bluebook, some simpler, but they have not caught on. In part this reflects the intellectual conservatism of the legal profession, which students find comforting. But in part the Bluebook’s very complexity is an attraction. Modern students want the same things their predecessors wanted—a good job upon graduation, of course, but also to be the members of a real profession (a guild, even a mystery), “profession” implying esoteric knowledge, a specialized vocabulary, and a technique for generating objectively correct answers to even the most difficult questions that arise in one’s professional field.