by Richard Prior
Staff Writer
Tadas Klimas has imported a new teaching style that may become all the rage of European law schools.
Or it may not. It’s tough to buck the sort of tradition that still favors powdered wigs over power ties.
American law schools rely on the Socratic method, understanding nuances of the law by dissecting them with verbal scalpels.
That’s not the way it is in Europe.
Law is taught at the undergraduate level, often to students who intend to become bureaucrats, said Klimas, dean of Vytautas Magnus University School of Law in Kaunas, Lithuania.
Professors lecture. Students take notes. There’s little interaction.
“To get that (bureaucrat) job, you need the law bachelor degree,” he said. “The lawyers go on to get a master’s, then they clerk up to 10 years before they become practicing attorneys.”
Klimas has been blazing a trail using American teaching methods since he became dean six years ago. And he’s been getting a lot of help from Florida Coastal School of Law.
“Florida Coastal has an extraordinary set of leaders,” he said. “They have great vision.
“If they did not have an international perspective, they would be a much lesser school — even with the same amount of students, the same amount of income and the same teachers.”
Dennis Stone, interim dean at FCSL, expects the blossoming relationship to bear even more fruit.
“Several years ago, we established an exchange with Dean Klimas’ university,” he said. “It has just blossomed this year with the addition of a student from there as part of the exchange program.
“We look forward to growth — our students going there, more of their students coming here.”
There are 8,500 students who attend Vytautas Magnus University, with 200 enrolled in Europe’s only American-based law school, founded in 1995. Half of the faculty are Americans.
“Knowledge of the outside world in legal education allows you to be a better lawyer in the United States,” Klimas said. “It gives you a better perspective.
“The trick is, in an American law school, to give you that education, that perspective, without shortchanging anything else.”
Klimas was in Jacksonville recently for confidential talks with FCSL about developing yet another program.
“We are in the beginning stages of a negotiation which, if fruitful, will be something truly amazing,” he said. The talks are going really, really well. But they’re just talks. On both sides.”
Klimas’ understanding of, and appreciation for, the American legal system comes naturally. He was born in Philadelphia; grew up in Rochester, N.Y.; graduated from the University of Rochester, where his father is a professor emeritus in linguistics; and received his law degree from DePaul University in Chicago.
He has been admitted to the bar in Illinois, Ohio and New York.
He also worked for the FBI for 12 years in foreign counterintelligence.
But, as Lithuania was struggling to gain its independence from the former Soviet Union, Klimas felt the need to go back to his roots.
“Well, a man has one life,” he said when asked why he left the United States. “Lithuania got free. I decided to take my act to Lithuania. I probably was right, but it’s a very tough course to make such a jump.”
He has no doubt about who sent the Russians packing.
“We — Lithuania — destroyed the Soviet Union. We were the guys,” he said with no attempt to conceal his pride. “There wasn’t any one dramatic point that would be easily televisable, like the destruction of the wall that divided Germany.
“But it was us that did it.”
Klimas found Lithuania’s geography to be “almost identical” to that in lower Michigan — rolling hills around the lowland, no mountains, many scattered, small lakes.
He found the greatest challenges inside himself.
“The biggest change was probably internal, psychological,” he said. “I had worked for probably the most powerful organization in the universe (the FBI), and there I was. All by myself.”
Klimas first worked for Professor Vytautas Landsbergis, the leader of Lithuania as the Soviet Union was crumbling. When Landsbergis ran unsuccessfully for president of the country, Klimas was in charge of the last two weeks of the campaign.
“Otherwise, he might have won,” Klimas chuckled.
He became chief legal counsel for Landsbergis when he was chairman of the parliament. He also wrote part of the criminal, civil and administrative procedure codes for the revived country.
“I was able to parlay my act into a little bit of something,” Klimas said.