Educational dysfunction commonly used in law school
It’s not merely that it’s common for a law professor to have never tried a case, or negotiated a deal, or drafted a real-life version of the sorts of documents he’s discussing in a Contracts, or Corporations, or Wills and Trusts class - it’s that legal academics almost never know anything about the business side of legal practice. The two most important practical skills that any lawyer working in private practice must possess are the ability to acquire clients, and to get them to pay their bills, which happen to be two things that most legal academics have never done in their lives.
So people who have never been trained to teach or to do academic research, and who know almost nothing about the practice of law, are expected to teach other people how to practice law, and to spend approximately half their time doing academic research. This by itself is a prescription for disaster, but the situation is made considerably worse by the traditional methods of classroom instruction and evaluation used in law school – methods that most legal academics continue to employ. Visit this website for more articles maritime lawyer.
The so-called “Socratic method,” which involves a professor cold-calling a randomly chosen student and quizzing the student about the facts of an appellate court case, is an absurdly inefficient way to teach people about law. It fills the first-year classroom with significant amounts of fear and anxiety, which anyone who knows anything about educational theory will tell you are exactly the things you want people not to experience when they’re trying to learn something. And it fills upper level classes with boredom and detachment, as everyone but the student on the spot zones out and surfs the internet on their laptops.
Of course not all professors use the Socratic method: some lecture, or mix lecture and general discussion with traditional Socratic cold-calling. But the institutional pressure to stick to traditional methods, especially in the crucial first year classes, is often intense. Professors who avoid the traditional methods are often considered less “rigorous,” and so many continue to employ these techniques year after year, even if they’ve come to suspect that they don’t actually work very well.
Besides, the great virtue, from the professor’s perspective, of the Socratic method is that it’s so easy: it takes up large stretches of class time without requiring the instructor to have anything original or interesting to say. (I have witnessed many law school classes, both as a student and a faculty evaluator, in which huge stretches of time were taken up merely reviewing the facts of cases. As one student put it to me, it’s as if a good way to study Macbeth would be to spend a lot of time asking students where the play took place and who the king of Scotland was).
Even law professors who mostly lecture often have little to say, beyond elaborating the ins and outs of the legal rules touched on in the assigned materials - something that any halfway competent student can learn from the materials themselves, or even more efficiently from the many available commercial outlines that break down law school material much more straightforwardly and coherently than the typical legal academic game of hide the ball, conducted in an increasingly soporific classroom.
A further source of educational dysfunction is that the evaluation method most commonly used in law school – a single end of the semester in-class “issue-spotting” exam – is perhaps the single most absurd aspect of this extravagantly absurd process. Issue-spotting exams, which require students to engage in the pseudo-intellectual equivalent of a game of Where’s Waldo, while frantically regurgitating gobbets of legal doctrine they’ve had stuffed down their throats over the course of the semester, bear no resemblance to anything a lawyer or an academic would ever be expected to do. And they leave students feeling as if their abilities are being evaluated arbitrarily, for the very good reason that they are being evaluated arbitrarily (The only thing issue-spotting exams really measure is the ability to take issue-spotting exams. And they do a fairly poor job of even that, as many students discover there’s almost no correlation between how hard they study in various classes and the grades they get in them).
Indeed, issue spotting exams persist in law school for the same two reasons so many nonsensical artifacts of legal education are still with us: because they create a relatively small amount of work for law professors, and because law professors did exceptionally well on such exams, so it goes without saying that they must be highly reliable measures of some important skill or ability.
