Law Forum Fails to Resolve Issues

A forum on legal education at the Law School Thursday night pointed up, if nothing else, that the school's Governance Committee is going to have a hard time correlating a report to President Pusey on student sentiment about the selection of a new Law dean.

NEWS ANALYSIS

About 300 students and 15 professors spent two and a half hours at the forum-entitled "The Future of Legal Education at Harvard"-haggling over curriculum and wondering why so few faculty members were present.

The forum was organized by the Governance Committee as the final phase of its effort to determine law students' views on the dean issue. The committee's report to Pusey is due next week, and will probably be completed by its meeting next Tuesday.

Following brief speeches by Law professors Clark Byes and Charles Fried and three students on the forum panel, students did most of the talking. The forum broke up without reaching any conclusion other than that mass meetings are generally futile.

"The forum was the result of an error of judgment on the part of those who organized it," Fried said yesterday afternoon. Since none of the apparent candidates for dean attended the forum, he said, it lost its purpose.

Candidate's Night

The forum derived from a movement among Law students for a "candidate's night" where candidates for dean would answer students' questions and give their views on specific issues now being debated at the Law School.

"Of course none of the obvious candidates came and rightly so," Fried said. "No one wanted to seem in the position of running for dean."

The men mentioned most frequently as likely candidates for dean are Acting Dean Albert M. Sacks and Law professors James Vorenberg and Paul M. Bator.

Abram J. Chayes '43, chairman of the Governance Committee, was not as pessimistic after the forum Thursday night. "It went about as I expected it would, but I came away with many of my conceptions about the views of the student body confirmed," he said.

Both Chayes and Fried emphasized the need for Law students to respond to Pusey's request for written recommendations. "If every Law studentwould write two pages about [candidates] they know, then their views would of course weight heavily on Mr. Pusey and Mr. Bok's final decision," Chayes said.

Dissatisfaction

Nearly all of the students who spoke at the forum expressed some dissatisfaction with curriculum at the Law School.

The sore point, though, was the conspicuous absence of the large majority of the Law School Faculty-who were invited to the forum in a letter from Chayes on behalf of the Governance Committee-and of every Law professor mentioned so far as a candidate for dean.

Neither President-elect Bok nor Pusey attended the forum.

Third-year student Sol Shapiro charged that "through bad faith and manipulation, those who have been played up in the press as candidates for dean had [this forum] changed to a general and meaningless topic."

Chayes responded by saying, "The charges of bad faith are untenable, and if students continue to express views in good faith they will have an impact on the selection of a dean and on the direction of this school."

One Law professor said after Thursday night's meeting, "Yes, I think it's unfortunate that more Faculty members didn't come, but I certainly don't think they stayed away in bad faith. As far as professors finding out what the students said tonight, what do you think we'll be talking about at lunch tomorrow."

Another view frequently aired was that Pusey and Bok should look outside the Law School for the next dean. "We need a fresh perspective," Doug Castle, a second-year student, said. "And we don't want a carbon copy from the outside either. Someone with fresh ideas is not going to sink the Harvard Law School, but he may give it a few bumps and that could be all it needs."

The prospect of the new dean coming from the outside is minimal, however. "I would say the chances of the new dean coming from outside the present Faculty are very slim if not non-existent," one Law professor said this week. "This seems to be the accepted view among the Faculty."

If one thing was certain at Thursday night's meeting, it was that there is a huge gulf of opinion at the Law School not only about curriculum but about the selection of the new dean as well. Tying together the views of which constitute this gulf is the task which now faces the Governance Committee.

Considering the rapidly approaching deadline, the task is not an enviable one.