Initiated

Although school started over a month ago, yesterday marked my real initiation into the thrill of law school.

No, the thrill wasn't my introduction to Lexis, rather, it was CrimLaw, where I was cross-examined for the first time. As I mentioned before, PCrim is the most "socratic" of my professors, and some say he's the most socratic of the entire GW faculty. Not only does PCrim spend each class relentlessly questioning only one or two people but he does so in what I find to be a highly unusual way: Instead of looking at or speaking directly to the student he's questioning, he wanders around the room, looking out the window, at other students, and even at the blank wall or the corner of the room, all the while carrying on his socratic conversation with his chosen respondent. If the chosen student doesn't know the material well, PCrim's method can make the class painfully slow and frustrating; if the student is able to answer in a reasonably lively manner, the class can also be lively, and even somewhat exciting. So far, every student PCrim has called on has at least been able to muddle through, and PCrim is actually very nice and helpful in his questioning—if you stumble or ask for a bit of time, he gladly gives it; if you give the wrong answer or are on the wrong track, he bluntly says so, then kindly rephrases the question. And not only does he rephrase the question, but he will often start using language directly from the case your reading, and he'll review the case to the point where he wants you to be. That way, if you've read the case, the way he asks you the question will often trigger your memory of it and lead you to just the right point to find the answer he's looking for.

So far, PCrim's patience and all the help he offers has guided more than one student through cases that they clearly hadn't read very closely, so PCrim has never had to give up on a student—at least not until yesterday. No, it wasn't me (thank goodness!). I was actually the third person PCrim decided to call on yesterday, partly because the first person… well, let's just say he clearly hadn't read the case. It was a bit painful to watch him fumble through complex "I don't knows," and I have to admire the way he tried to redirect and qualify questions to buy time, but the bottom line was: He hadn't done the reading. The class slowed to a crawl as PCrim spent 10 minutes with this student, patiently giving the student plenty of time to find the answers, and even pointing him to the correct page and paragraph. No dice.*

So PCrim moved on to respondent 2, who did a much better job and the pace of class picked up. We were discussing proportionality of punishment, trying to follow the Supreme Court's decisions about whether the Eight Amendment (which forbids cruel and unusual punishment) contains any sort of guarantee that punishment will be somehow commensurate with the offense. So the material was Harmelin v. Michigan (1991) and Locker v. Andrade, which was just decided in March 2003. PCrim's relief was almost visible as Respondent 2 moved us quickly through Harmelin (which contains a good review of Solem and Rummel, the two other most recent SCOTUS cases in this thread), but he also seemed perhaps a bit more impatient than usual, more quick to cut off wrong answers and press more directly for what he wanted. It was clear to everyone that the time PCrim had spent with the first student meant that we'd have to move briskly to cover both of these complex cases in the time remaining. I was just relieved the class was moving again and—thinking how unusual it was for PCrim to call on more than two people per class—I was just beginning to gaze out the window and think about lunch when PCrim moved to Andrade and said, "Ambimb, please give us the facts of the case."

I'm glad (and relieved) to say that the next 15 minutes flew by, and from where I was sitting (in the hot seat), the time flew because I was able to respond quickly and correctly to 95% of PCrim's questions about Andrade. In addition to the facts of the case, PCrim always asks about what the defendant was charged with, what the issue of the case was, what the holding was, and what reasoning was most crucial to that holding. Andrade, which said two consecutive 25-year sentences were Constitutionally acceptable punishment for the offense of stealing 9 videotapes worth about $150,** also contains a dissenting opinion. Last night, by the time I'd finished all the other reading, I'd only read that dissent once and I hadn't taken the time to absorb the details about it, so I began to stumble a little when PCrim asked about it. Aside from that, my time in the hot seat was actually fairly cool.

The experience taught me at least a couple of things. The first lesson was that law school would be orders of magnitude better if classes were small enough to allow much more of this kind of one-on-one interaction between faculty and students. We spend so much time reading and preparing to discuss cases, and for the most part we never get to discuss them. This makes all that preparation start to seem like a waste, and that encourages law students to slack, skim, and just cram for exams. That makes huge law school classes pedagogically poor.

I also learned that I'm not as cool under pressure as I'd hoped. For the most part, I fielded PCrim's questions w/aplomb because I knew the material; however, a couple of times when he strayed into more difficult questions or questions for which I didn't have a ready answer, I was too impatient with myself and instead of giving the question enough thought to answer intelligently, I just blurted an "I'm not sure" or I just guessed at an answer. From a distance I can see it would always be better to take your time and come up with the best answer you can, rather than just giving up or guessing, but what surprised me is how much pressure I felt when I was on the spot. It's not just that a stern professor is expecting an answer, it's that the whole class is expecting an answer. In the second or two you may pause to consider an answer, the silence of the room can be deafening as the staccato whoosh of fingers tapping on keyboards hangs literally on your words. The takeaway is that you just have to shut that pressure out and have confidence that if you give yourself the chance, you will come up with a better answer than if you just blurt the first thing that comes to your head.

Finally, I learned that it's great to know the material. It's thrilling to have the answers, and to be able to engage the issues of a case with the confidence that comes from knowing you've got a good grip on its facts and those issues. Conversely, not knowing the material can be damned painful and probably comes close to negating the value of attending class at all. That lesson's obvious, but it's good to be reminded of it.

* To be fair, this first student might have read, but might simply have seized up under the pressure of questioning. The fact that he responded w/redirections and evasions makes me think he just hadn't read, but it's hard to tell.

** The defendant, Andrade, was an admitted heroin addict who admitted he stole to support his habit. He had a fairly long history of nonviolent crime—mostly burglary and petty theft—however some of his thefts had been categorized as "violent or serious" at the discretion of the judge and prosecutor. His harsh sentence was the result of California's "three-strikes" law, which says that after you've been convicted of two violent felonies, any other conviction (violent or no) can trigger a 25-year sentence.

Posted September 25, 2003 07:28 AM | law school