Law School and the Criminal Justice System: A Disconnect?
By Roger Baron
I graduated from law school 50 years ago. When I entered the practice of law as a naïve young lawyer, I found things weren’t as I expected. The single most dramatic shortcoming I found in my legal education was availability and emphasis on criminal law in the curriculum. Although I needed 90 hours course credits to graduate law school, I was only required to take two courses involving Criminal Law – a 3 credit course in Criminal Law and a 3 credit course in Criminal Procedure.
As a practicing lawyer, I discovered that the vast majority of cases in the state courts were criminal cases. In the county where I had a general practice in rural Missouri, the courthouse clerk kept active criminal files in a separate set of file cabinets than active civil files. There were about twice as many criminal file cabinets than civil file cabinets. Of course, in those days, all records and files were maintained in hard copy as paper products. There were no electronic filing systems.
This imbalance between criminal and civil cases was not unique to Missouri, and is not unique to South Dakota. It is a national phenomenon. I saw it in the file cabinets. We now see it in the statistics.
According to South Dakota’s Unified Judicial System (UJS), for the fiscal year 2025, 68.9% of the cases filed in South Dakota State Court were criminal (139,510 of the total of 202,589). In federal court in South Dakota for the same time period, 58% of all the cases filed were criminal (516 of the total of 890 cases).
In federal court in South Dakota in 2024, there were 42 jury trials held – and 38 of those were criminal. This means slightly more than 90% of all jury trials in the District of South Dakota were criminal cases. (Comparable statistics for jury trials in FY 2025 are not available; the January 2026 federal newsletter reports 40 jury trials in FY 2025, but does not identify how many of those were criminal.)
At the University of South Dakota School of Law, only 6 of 90 required credit hours are devoted to Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure – identical to my experience in Missouri more than 50 years ago. When viewed in comparison with the statistic described above, this disparity is striking. There are some criminal law-related elective courses, but many students do not take these courses.
I am not the first person to question role of criminal law in legal education. More than 60 years ago Professor Harry Glassman asked, Why Don’t We Teach Criminal Law? Glassman observed “The strangest shortcoming in the average law school curriculum is the comparative neglect of criminal law,” which he described as an “orphan” in legal education. Paul Kurtz later conducted a nationwide empirical study of criminal-justice curricula, resulting in the suggestion that there should be an effort to explore how more of the curricula should be devoted to criminal law.
More recently, Professor Alice Ristroph questioned whether traditional criminal-law teaching adequately reflects the realities of the modern criminal justice system. She states that her mission consists of “dual aims to destabilize the current curricular model and to move toward something better.” She posits that this failure of the legal education system has contributed to the mass incarceration phenomenon that society faces today.
Even more recently and closer to home, USD Knudson School of Law Professor Gregory Brazeal published a law review article in which he examines the gap between the traditional law-school curriculum and the actual operation of the American criminal justice system. Professor Brazeal argues that the current system tends to focus on appellate opinions and doctrinal problems, without paying adequate attention to the day-to-day realities of prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges, plea bargaining, and the criminal process.
Of course, counting cases is not the same as counting hours of judicial or attorney time. A single complicated civil lawsuit may require more work than a minor criminal matter. I do not suggest that criminal law should constitute 68.9% of the law-school curriculum at South Dakota’s only law school just because criminal cases constitute 68.9% of the case load in South Dakota. Rather, this disparity raises a legitimate question about whether present allocation of required legal education bears a reasonable relationship to the work lawyers and courts perform.
If criminal cases constitute nearly 70% of South Dakota’s state-court filings, more than half of its federal district-court filings, and more than 90% of its federal jury trials, is it reasonable that a law student graduate with only six required credit hours of criminal-law education? Perhaps the answer is yes. But I believe the question deserves to be asked—and answered—not by tradition, but by looking honestly at the legal system which those students are preparing to enter.
The ultimate question is not whether criminal law should constitute 70% of a law-school curriculum. The question is whether 6.67% is enough.
Authorities: Harry P. Glassman, Why Don’t We Teach Criminal Law?, 14 J. Legal Educ. 170 (1961); Paul M. Kurtz, An Inventory of the Criminal Justice Curriculum of American Law Schools, 31 J. Legal Educ. 164 (1981); Alice Ristroph, The Curriculum of the Carceral State, 120 Colum. L. Rev. 1631 (2020); Gregory Brazeal, Justice Theater in the Criminal Law Curriculum, 45 Cardozo L. Rev. 2421 (2024).
Note: In regard to the preparation of this week’s column, the author would like to thank Professor Gregory Brazeal, Attorney Sarah Baron Houy and Claudia Baron for their assistance and input.
Anyone desiring to communicate with the Author, may do so by sending an e-mail to the author at rogermbaron@gmail.com .