The development of the modern Yale Law School is deeply intertwined
with the story of a group of students in the 1960s who worked to
unlock democratic visions of law and social change that they
associated with Yale's past and with the social climate in which
they lived. During a charged moment in the history of the United
States, activists challenged senior professors, and the resulting
clash pitted young against old in a very human story. By demanding
changes in admissions, curriculum, grading, and law practice, Laura
Kalman argues, these students transformed Yale Law School and the
future of American legal education.
Inspired by Yale's legal realists of the 1930s, Yale law students
between 1967 and 1970 spawned a movement that celebrated
participatory democracy, black power, feminism, and the
counterculture. After these students left, the repercussions
hobbled the school for years. Senior law professors decided against
retaining six junior scholars who had witnessed their conflict with
the students in the early 1970s, shifted the school's academic
focus from sociology to economics, and steered clear of critical
legal studies. Ironically, explains Kalman, students of the 1960s
helped to create a culture of timidity until an imaginative dean in
the 1980s tapped into and domesticated the spirit of the sixties,
helping to make Yale's current celebrity possible.