Baby-stepping through law school

Early morning and I should be working on CrimLaw. And CivPro. And Torts—there's always more Torts ... so many little cases, each one refining the rule just a bit, giving you a twist on what seemed like a straightforward rule or area of law. The work in law school never ends, and it seems, in terms of quantity, to be getting harder. Yet, despite that, it's also getting a little better.

First, I'm starting to understand why I find it so hard to get stressed or really enthused about class. Classes are just too big and impersonal. After having spent three years in grad school for English, I'm used to doing lots of fairly complex reading, but I'm also used to being in small classes of 6-12 students which allow you to actually talk about and engage with the material you read. In grad school, I always knew that if I read closely and took good notes and grappled with the ideas the reading addressed, all that effort would be rewarded in class because I would be able to follow whatever discussion took place, and I would be able to contribute where it was appropriate. In law school, where most classes have 100 students, things are very different. Yes, if you read closely you can follow the discussion better and you'll get much more out of it, but you rarely (like a handful of times per semester) get the satisfaction of actually entering that discussion to test your ideas, put forward your own theories, make the material your own.

My takeaway lesson: Law school classes can be a very passive exercise; however, since you'll get more out of them when you actually participate, you have to actively and consciously fight that passivity. Since it's unlikely you'll be called on to speak, you might get more out of class if you participate in your notes by writing down the hypotheticals, then trying out your own solutions to the problems before your classmates arrive at the "right" answer, which the professor will then confirm he wanted. You have to read closely in advance to be able to do this effectively, so there's some incentive to stay on top of things.

I've also begun to see that there really are a lot of parallels between literature and law. One of those is the way they're taught. As a teacher of introductory literature classes, it took me a while to get used to how slowly and methodically I had to baby-step students through the basic elements of a story or novel: Who are the characters? What is the setting? What's at stake for the characters? (What's the plot?) Why do you think the story does X, when it just as easily could have done Y? How does this story fit in its cultural and historical context? Now, in law school, I see my own professors doing the same thing I did with my students, but instead of baby-stepping us through short stories and novels, my law profs are baby-stepping us through cases: What are the facts? What was the issue? What was the holding? On what reasoning did the court base its holding? How does this case fit into the larger development of its area of the law?

While I often appreciate the slow pace of this method (no, I don't want anymore reading, thanks), I'm also frustrated by the fact that it leaves so little time for any sort of critical reflection or meta-discussion of the material. While Liable says it sounds like my classes focus a lot on policy, I don't think they spend nearly enough time on the big-picture issues and the "invisible" (taken for granted) assumptions on which the law is based. For example, what are the social and political implications of the fact that punishment in our criminal justice system is largely based on utilitarian justifications? What are the alternatives and why have we ended up with this system over others? Or why are economic incentives so vital to the law of torts, and what implications does tort law's emphasis on economics have for culture and society? In contracts, who gains and who loses when courts decide to prefer an "objective theory" of contracts over any other?

My takeaway lesson: I'm sure there are classes in law school that attempt to engage these questions—at least I hope so—but I bet they come later, in the second or third year. Try to be patient and master the fundamentals; then you'll be better prepared for all that meta stuff to come. If you're impatient like me, perhaps recognizing that impatience will make the whole process easier by reminding you that you have to walk before you can run.

Posted October 1, 2003 04:16 AM | law school