Legal education should prepare students for the 21st century, not the 19th: Prof. Bernard Hibbitts

Professor Bernard Hibbitts is Publisher & Editor-in-Chief of JURIST , the legal news service he created in 1996 that has since won multiple awards and accolades. Professor Hibbitts attended law school at England's Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar after taking undergraduate and graduate degrees in Canada in political science and international relations.

. He later obtained additional law degrees at Dalhousie Law School, the University of Toronto (specializing in Canadian legal history), and finally Harvard Law School (specializing in American legal history). He is currently a Professor of Law the University of Pittsburgh.

In this interview, Prof. Hibbits talks about his reasons for starting JURIST, the lessons learnt along the way, the future of the legal profession, and a whole lot more.

(Edited excerpts)

. You started JURIST almost 25 years ago. How did you come up with the idea of such a forum?

. I was fascinated by the idea of making legal information freely available online. I loved the idea that the internet was a public place where people – law professors, law students and others – could share information and ideas and communicate directly and quickly with each other without always having to go through traditional and rather plodding publication processes.

. I was excited by the potential of using multimedia to present law online in engaging ways that were impossible in simple printed text.

So, JURIST was born from all of that.

. As a law professor in the mid-1990s I was favored by being somewhat more comfortable than most of my colleagues with technology. In school in the early 1970s I was taught how to run simple computer programs in FORTRAN and BASIC on IBM punch cards, and I enjoyed that.

In 1996, I thought that if I wanted to use the internet, the right thing to do was to learn HTML, the coding language that you needed to know to put material directly online. So I plunged into that, learned it quickly, and started experimenting.

. Since I knew HTML, I could create webpages and websites on my own without intermediaries, and that just made things faster and accelerated my learning curve.

. JURIST was actually hand-coded by me for well over a decade, and the last parts of my code were only retired in 2014, 18 years after JURIST started. So I think my code held up rather well!

. You developed JURIST at the University of Pittsburgh. Did your location influence JURIST’s development?

. To some extent I think it did. Pittsburgh was a good school, and I was happy to be teaching legal history there (that’s actually my academic specialty, not IP or any overtly tech-related subject), but compared to Oxford or Harvard it was a bit off the beaten track, and I felt an urge to connect to a broader range of people, nationally and internationally.

. JURIST certainly allowed me to do that. But Pittsburgh also inspired me by example. In the late 1950s and early 1960s it was the academic home of a young health law professor named John Horty, who had the crazy idea of putting Pennsylvania health law statutes on computer cards to make them searchable.

. He developed something called KWIC – Key Words in Combination – which eventually became the technology underlying the Lexis and Westlaw legal databases.

So, I knew that from Pittsburgh it was possible to use technology to change the legal world.

. How and when did law students get involved in JURIST?

. They were involved from the very beginning. I had a research assistant in 1996, a third-year law student at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law named Stephen Underwood, who had something of a technical background and helped me learn HTML.

I remember the day when I showed him the very first version of the website that would later become JURIST.

. He took one look and said “You’ve created a monster”! Of course he meant a good monster, but he could see at the time how what I had started could develop. And there were other wonderful law students with technical ability and background who helped and energized me along the way with their own enthusiasm for JURIST, and who helped me take the service places I could not have taken it by myself.

Some of them are still on JURIST’s Board of Directors, over 20 years later.

. Our biggest intake of students was in 2004, when we began to use blogging technology that allowed non-experts in HTML to publish easily on the Internet. So we used Blogger, and later other programs.

Today we use Word Press.

. JURIST is not a blog – it’s much, much larger than that – but the publishing technology that was first developed for blogs helps us function and has certainly allowed us to expand our student base, pulling in students who did not know code. Today those students power our service, providing objective international legal news and informed commentary to our worldwide audience 365 days a year.

. I’m very pleased that in addition to law students at Pittsburgh and several other law schools in the United States, JURIST now has law student staff at multiple schools in India.

. They have been terrific - so much so, in fact, that this fall we decided to radically expand our international law student base, and have just taken on new staffers in Australia, New Zealand, Kenya, and the United Kingdom. And we have added to our India-based cohort.

. You received the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. Could you tell us about your experience at the University of Oxford? How was it different from your time at Harvard University?

. The first thing I have to say here is that I attended both a rather long time ago now – Oxford, almost 40 years back in the early 1980s, and Harvard a little more than 30 years back in the late 1980s.

Both institutions have changed significantly since that time.

. Looking back, indeed, I think the Oxford I knew in the ‘80s bears a closer resemblance to the Oxford of the early 1950s that my father knew (when he was studying for his D. Phil. in Divinity) than it does to the Oxford of today. So whatever I might say about my own experiences at Oxford and Harvard might not be the same as what a current student or future applicant would experience.

. Having said all that, however, I loved being at both universities. It was a privilege to attend them both on scholarship. Oxford was first and foremost a cultural experience.

I was an undergraduate student there, studying law, and so much of my life revolved around my law friends and our communal life together in college – in my case, University College, or “Univ” as we call it, on the High Street.

. My friends were very, very bright English men and women, and I learned so much by just being around them. If I recall correctly, the year I matriculated was only the second year women law students were allowed at Univ; the few that we had were excellent, and they certainly had a positive impact on the men.

. We went to musical productions, plays and pubs, talked for long hours, went for long walks in Oxford’s parks and gardens and even attended the occasional lecture! I also played ice hockey for the university in my spare time.

. As a Canadian, I tried very hard to fit in with my surroundings – I lived in college, or in college residences, all the years I was at Oxford, and consciously decided not to spend that much time with my international colleagues, as many other Rhodes Scholars did. My principle was “When in Rome!” And I am very glad I did that.

. Harvard was much more of a strictly academic experience. I was an LL.M. graduate student, and my friends were mostly other LL.M. students. We had a large class – there were well over 60 of us, from all over the world.

. I knew some of the US JD students in my classes, but only a few. They had already gotten to know each other in their 1L courses, and we generally did not take those courses. I actually knew more students at Harvard College, where I was a pre-law advisor at Dunster House and played ice hockey with the House team.

. As a graduate student I also got to spend more time with my professors, and that was fabulous. So overall the two experiences were different, but complementary.

. Could you tell us how law professors and law schools have incorporated technology in law?

. Law professors and law schools have frankly been very slow to incorporate actual technology into their thinking and practice. When I started JURIST in 1996 and was writing scholarship on what I anticipated would be the rapid demise of formal law reviews in the face of dynamic multimedia scholarship delivered directly by law professors to each other and the public over the internet, I thought we were on the brink of huge change in the legal academy.

. Well, we’re still on the brink.

JURIST is still there, and it’s developed and grown, but so are the law reviews, largely unchanged, although most of them have taken online form.

We put links in documents these days, but we really haven’t restructured memos or briefs or judgements in ways the technology (even the technology of the 1990s) would permit.

So that has been a disappointment.

. I think eventually more fundamental change will come. With the development of online scholarship repositories like SSRN, law professors and others are getting used to the idea of making their papers available online outside of the law reviews, but they still like law reviews because of their prestige value, so that traditional format continues to limit how they write and think and how they present ideas.

. As new generations come up that are more “digitally native” and more likely to be impatient with the old structures I think their hold on us will weaken and ultimately give way, but we’re not there yet.

Check back with me in 50 years!

. The digital space is taking over wide array of fields. What is the future of the legal industry and technology?

. Practising lawyers and law firms have been more successful in keeping up with technological change than law professors. That’s largely because their business clients – increasingly, technology companies - have forced them to keep up, and law firms have been more responsive to their demands than law schools and law professors are to whatever “demands” law students might make.

And then of course there is constant financial pressure on lawyers and law firms to lower costs for clients, and technology allows that.

. So , whether we’re talking about intricate project management software linking lawyers with their clients and each other across offices in real-time, artificial intelligence programs that can help lawyers predict case outcomes, or virtual law firms that operate only in the “cloud” with limited physical office presence.

All these things are here already, and they will simply become more prominent over time. And as they do the practice of law will change.

. JURIST in some ways mirrors larger changes taking in the law practice environment. JURIST was founded in 1996, the same year as the first virtual law firm was set up in London.

Now there are many virtual law firms in the UK and US, and others are popping up elsewhere.

. JURIST actually operates very much like a virtual law firm, except that instead of linking up lawyers online to serve clients, it links law students around the world in the common enterprise of delivering legal news and commentary to a mass audience of readers.

Formally, we’re based at the University of Pittsburgh in the US, but our law student staff operate from wherever they are in the world.

. So we, like the virtual law firms, exist pretty much in the cloud. It’s not a problem for us as we were originally intended to operate in an internet environment. And of course neither is any of this a problem for virtual law firms. COVID may actually be a huge boost to that business model, just as it has been for us; virtual law firms may soon find themselves more successful than traditional physicalized law firms burdened by the obligation of maintaining large groups of lawyers working out of offices in major centers.

. You have expanded your outreach to a Digital Scholars’ Program at JURIST. What is your vision for such programs and what is their significance?

. This past summer JURIST began our Digital Scholars Program as an incubator for young scholars – some still at the undergraduate level – interested in the interplay of law, technology and public policy.

. We encouraged them to develop legally-oriented projects using technology and to write papers about the role of technology in such things as environment regulation, policing and data governance.

The program was a great success – we drew applicants from some 15 US undergraduate institutions, most prominently Yale College.

. Right now, the projects are in the process of being published on JURIST. Three of our Digital Scholars are in the 1L class starting at Harvard Law School this fall. Next year we’re hoping to expand the JURIST Digital Scholars Program to include international students – hopefully, Indian students interested in law and technology will apply.

. Down the road I think there are other incubator programs that JURIST can undertake along the lines of our Digital Scholars Program.

In all of them we are trying to identify promising young scholars early in their academic careers and give them a bit of a visibility boost to encourage their work and help them to help others.

. We can also help them connect to interesting and ambitious colleagues across institutions, and of course in the process they will become familiar with JURIST. I know that some of them will continue to write and even work for us through law school and even beyond.

. As an academic, you have witnessed the shift from thick books to thin screens. What changes are required in the current legal educational regime to prepare law students for future courts?

. This goes back to something I talked a bit about before. I think legal education needs to change. Law professors need to be more aware of how technology drives or can drive law practice.

They need to prepare their students to practice law in the 21 st century, not the 19 th .

. They need to rethink their own traditions and procedures to keep up with the times and take advantage of the options that technology makes available to them. In doing that, they will help open the eyes of some of their own students.

Do I think everyone in the legal profession these days should learn HMTL code or become data engineers? No, I don’t, but I think we need to have a far greater degree of technological awareness than we have now.

. At the end of the day, however, I don’t want us to take things too far. Legal education needs to be driven by more than just technology.

Technology can give law students and lawyers more skills, and it can extend existing skills, but lawyering based on skills alone is hollow and even dangerous.

Law students also need to develop an appreciation of values.

. While we expose them to technology and encourage its use, we also need to expose law students to legal history and jurisprudence and other subjects that help students understand why law exists and how it can and should be used to improve the lives of other human beings. In a technological age this is more necessary than ever.

Technology is not an end it itself. At best, it is a means.

. On JURIST my law students use technology, but I hope they also learn values. They learn to serve the public by informing and educating them. They share their own research and their own learning on current legal developments with everyone, generously and for free.

And they learn teamwork and the value of collaborating with each other in real-time every day across schools, across borders and even across continents.

. They get to make new friends and new contacts in ways that could not have been anticipated 30 years ago. I hope JURIST helps to make them better lawyers, but in the long run I hope more fundamentally that JURIST enriches their lives and helps make them better and more broad-minded people who support and care for others.

That would make me happy.

. (Vishwajeet Deshmukh is a student at the Government Law College in Mumbai)

Legal education should prepare students for the 21st century, not the 19th: Prof. Bernard Hibbitts

Vishwajeet Deshmukh

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