Abstract
The 21 st century has witnessed a seismic shift in legal education. The decades-old call for law schools to teach students not only how to think like a lawyer but how to be one, seems to have finally been answered. In response to pressures from students, practitioners, education experts, and education regulators, 2 law schools across the country have added a wide-range of " experiential " courses to their curricular offerings. A large number have also added a position at the decanal level dedicated to experiential education. This sudden shift in favor of experiential education gave rise, in 2011, to the Alliance for Experiential Education in Law. 3 Members – all leaders in legal education-began meeting to discuss the implications and meaning of the shift. Conversations repeatedly returned to the same questions: what is experiential education in the law school context, and which courses count as experiential? There was no consensus. Without a consensus on nomenclature, comparisons and even conversations have been difficult. Institutions use different terms when referring to the same types of learning experiences, and use the same terms-such as " practicum " or even " clinic " – inconsistently. The ABA recently adopted Standard 303(a)(3) requiring that each student complete six semester credits of experiential courses.