gregh  2007-02-20 12:17  Law_School   

In what seems a plethora of mentions of USF law professors in the New York Times lately (see this post), Ann Althouse comments in the New York Times about legal teaching. In so doing, she gives a limited constrast of One L and "The Paper Chase" (the movie, not the book.) This is fitting for me, because I've read One L and seen "The Paper Chase," but I haven't read the book for the latter. Her principal conclusion appears to be:

"A Skull Full of Mush' - New York Times:

The students who come into our law schools are adults who have decided that they are ready to spend a tremendous amount of time and money preparing to enter a profession. We show the greatest respect for their individual autonomy if we deny ourselves the comfort of trying to make them happy and teach them what they came to learn: how to think like lawyers.

But that's not the entirety of it. She was at conference last week that had as one of its speakers Prof. John Jay Osborn. Prof. Osborn feels that law students hate law school. Prof. Althouse summarizes:

Osborn says they hate law school, and they hate it because the law professors don’t care about what the students think. "You come in here with a skull full of mush, and you leave thinking like a lawyer," said Osborn’s sadistically Socratic professor, Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. This legal discipline deprives students of "their own narrative," as Osborn put it, and they need to learn how to struggle, as Osborn’s protagonist Hart did, to "reclaim" it. They need to resist what law school tries to impose, like the domineering grading system that Hart pitched off in the form of a paper airplane.
...
Though none of the law professors I know are much at all like Kingsfield, Osborn chided us law professors for making our students so unhappy: stop calling on them; listen only to volunteers; don’t dictate how they should think; let them tell their own stories.

Now, in fairness to Prof. Osborn and in contrast to what Prof. Althouse suggests, in Contracts Prof. Osborn doesn't ditch the case method at all. In fact, we covered more cases in Contracts than in any other class I've been in. Sometimes, we had so many cases to cover, class would end with Prof. Osborn running through the remaining cases, spitting out the key facts, holding, and reasoning; on the final, we were expected to analogize each of those key bits to the facts in the fact patterns. Mind you, we didn't cover much black letter; UCC § 2-207 was the only UCC we were responsible for. We weren't generally concerned about whether a case was still good law. But more importantly, we blasted through cases without recognizing what makes the case method useful.

Because Prof. Osborn didn't cold-call, didn't even assign people to be "up" for a particular class, it was the narrative of a few that we heard most from. We didn't get to flesh out the case details, analytical warts and all, like we might when the responsibilities -- and analyses -- are spread around. What we got was more of a lecture on major cases in Contract Law. While that might be useful, it was not, in my opinion, all that useful for helping students to discover their analytical problems with the content. Being told the reasoning of a case doesn't go very far to understanding the reasoning, to getting closer to "thinking like a lawyer."

Don't get me wrong. I like Prof. Osborn; he's a very nice man, and it may well be that many love his methods. I know that he's very popular at the school, and many consider him a favorite professor. But I'd much rather go through the rigorous analysis required when cold-called by Prof. Shatz (see here or here), knowing why the case in question did not involve burglary, than not having that flawed analysis come out. The "warm fuzzy" approach leaves that far too possible.