And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,
And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.

Because the range of intellectual capacities and activities generally valued and developed in law schools is narrower than the range needed to do the work of lawyers, students do not learn the full spectrum of intellectual activities necessary to professional excellence. The relatively narrow range of intellectual capacities and activities valued and developed in law schools also does not engage students as fully as possible. We hypothesize that if law schools are to produce graduates capable of professional excellence, they must be systematic and self-conscious about the development of a broad spectrum of relevant cognitive processes. Furthermore, if law schools presented lawyering as something that implicates a variety of relevant intellectual capacities, students would engage more fully in the development of their capacities. In particular, students whose concerns, interests and/or practiced ways of working have been heretofore neglected will feel less alienated, perform better across the range of cognitive activities, and develop a more positive sense of professional role. As we . . . have begun to articulate, analyze, and teach the neglected capacities, we have found it useful to draw upon the work of psychologists whose efforts to explore a broader spectrum of human capacity precede and parallel our own.

Professor Peggy Cooper Davis of the New York University School of Law has identified a problem of exclusivity at the fine law school at which she teaches, and, together with her colleagues, has established the Workways program there to begin to remedy the problem. However, such an approach has not taken hold in legal education generally where we law professors continue, on the whole, to admit, educate, evaluate, and mentor our students pursuant to very traditional notions of what it means to be bright.

The majority of law schools emphasize and measure [sic] only the logical-mathematical type because the usual method of evaluating student performance is a single exam that asks students to analyze a complex set of facts, in a limited time period, in writing. Arguably, this is a limited view of intelligence that does not adequately reflect all the types of intelligence that the successful lawyer needs. Effective teachers find ways to teach and evaluate a broader range of intelligences, and they encourage their students to master more than one type.

This article explores Harvard education professor Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI) and endorses the proposition that taking a new, more expansive approach to recognizing and evaluating student capabilities could help us to provide a better legal education in several arenas.
Part I of this article will explore the history and criteria of traditional intelligence theory and how Howard Gardner sought to redefine these with the 1983 inauguration of his MI theory. Part II explores the nature of each of his identified intelligences and how they could apply to the tasks of lawyering. Part III of the article commences the application of MI theory to legal education, beginning, as they say, at the beginning with law school admissions. Part IV explores Professor Davis’ hypothesis by applying MI theory to legal pedagogy and testing and proposes one alternate paradigm in advocating the use of simulations in the law school classroom. Part V of the article raises my own hypothesis that MI theory could play an invaluable role in the mentoring of law students regarding their career choices. Finally, the Article concludes with a discussion of possible critiques to the application of MI theory to legal education and ultimately finds that, although fraught with challenge, the use of MI theory in our pedagogy provides great hope for the constructive evolution of law teaching. “There is a search to reclaim the public image and the soul of the profession. There is a search to reclaim the joy, pride, and integrity of the profession.” Multiple Intelligence theory could be where X marks the spot.

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