Stepping away from my steady diet of frivolous food topics just for a second, I thought I'd say something about the Harvard curriculum reform Will talked about just below. After all, I'm now valued alumni, or something (that is, I have a job which pays enough to make donations).

I guess people won't be surprised to hear that I think the proposed changes are stupid. Why? Not for any kind of solid pedagogical reasons, like the other commenters. For me, it's just a matter of conservatism. I think old things are usually better than new ones. I like old furniture. Old rugs. Old recipes. I value continuity through time. I like looking back at Learned's Hand's report card and seeing the same courses.

Moreoever, I don't think the proposed courses have any real value. 1L is mostly about taking a bunch of smart people and hitting them over the head with a lot of really new stuff. You're not meant to actually retain anything - at least not in terms of practice. And thinking you are going to retain something of use to a high end corporate law practice from some goofy statutes course is not very convincing. In fact, I think that Property, as maligned as it is, is one of the better 1L courses, precisely because it's so incredibly useless. It's formative of lawyers recognizable by other generations of lawyers in a way that whatever the heck these new courses are called won't be.

In the end, my reaction is completely ruled by something one of my favorite college professors said to me when I asked why we weren't (at that point) teaching anything past 1860 in the modern history department. "Ach," he said. "That's all just journalism."