A on leadership and the law school curriculum. Over the last week, there has been a lot of discussion about law schools and its role in training leaders. It's a timely topic--both because of last week's events and because of the recent passing of Deborah Rhode, a law professor

whose work challenged the absence of leadership training in law school curricula. As Rhode noted, since the Founding, the cohort of national leaders have often been drawn from those trained as lawyers, yet leadership is not a topic that typically has been taught at law schools.

To be sure, professional accreditation demands that law students learn about professional responsibility and ethics and such topics are integral to effective, ethical leadership. But they aren't courses that specifically identify and cultivate leadership skills. Indeed, there

are few courses in the traditional law school curriculum that take on the question of leadership squarely--although many of them could touch on such topics (imagine Con Law explicitly talking about executive power with an eye toward leadership? Or Products Liability with

an explicit focus on corporate leadership?). But maybe what's needed is a specific curriculum that thinks about the essential skills that effective leaders need and how these skills might, over time, be cultivated and honed? A course that considered how individual experiences

can inform leadership styles? This would be a huge undertaking, but it also seems to dovetail with other concerns that have dogged legal academia for a while. Eg focusing on individual leadership strengths/capacity could help better integrate those students from less traditional

backgrounds and those who experience imposter syndrome. Anyway, this is hardly a proposal for reform, but it is something that I have been thinking about in light of last week, Professor Rhode's work, and the work that we are doing this week @bwln_nyu

Spoiler alert: this week we are hosting our annual Sara Moss Leadership Training Intensive for our 1L BWLN Leadership Fellows. We'll be spending the whole week thinking about what makes an effective leader, what our own individual leadership styles are, and the skills we need

to expand leadership capacity. It's an amazing program, though one that, regrettably, is hard to scale to the broader student body. I wonder if others have been able to integrate leadership training into the law school curriculum, whether as a course or as some kind of

requirement? If there are folks who are also thinking about this in law schools, I would love to hear more about what you're doing and how it's working.

Adding to this . So many of you chimed in about courses you are offering at your schools--these look amazing, but it strikes me that many of them, like our leadership intensive, accommodate a small number of students. Is this a function of the subject matter? Is it possible to

scale leadership training to an entire class of students? Or would some aspect of what makes the training effective be lost? Could/should we think of leadership the same way we think about Contracts and Con Law--required courses in the curriculum?