Are law schools to blame for poor defense lawyering?

Neal Katyal’s terrifically interesting new Harvard Law Review comment about his work in the Hamdan case suggests that law schools are largely to blame for the poor quality of criminal defense lawyering.  Here is one of many notable passages from Neal’s piece:

The truth is that very few law schools today prepare students to be lawyers: this responsibility is shunted off to law firms, the judges for whom students clerk, prosecutors’ offices, and others.  The obvious exception is law clinics, which do offer crucial lessons in the art of good lawyering.  But clinics, despite their many virtues, still do not reach most law students, and their connection to the theoretical law taught elsewhere in the school is often left murky.

The cost of this educational failure is massive, forcing employers to spend their limited resources on training new lawyers in the basics of their jobs. The harm to indigent criminal defendants, whose very freedom may depend upon recently graduated attorneys lacking lawyering skills, is particularly acute.  Litigating Hamdan gave me a sense of just how much law schools are failing.

Because Neal’s article spotlights the insights a law professor can gain from working on real cases, it has led me at Law School Innovation to ask this question: Should law professors be required to practice?