Khan Academy: an invaluable new resource in your effort to learn everything

As I’ve written before,  good lawyers need to know everything. In other words, your professional life is  a constant and endless process of learning. One of the foremost skills you bring to your clients is an ability to become fluent in their affairs and to be able to communicate your understanding of those affairs clearly, concisely, and persuasively to audiences who may never have encountered those things.

Libraries, of course, are therefore invaluable. And the internet is a miracle. But still, finding the right resources to learn a particular topic is difficult. I came out of college and law school knowing Latin and Ancient Greek and a lot of history and literature, but I needed to learn an awful lot very quickly about things like finance, insurance, economics, and business, and the effort to educate myself was an adventure. The internet has, of course, only multiplied the tedious, obscure, and downright erroneous “authorities.” So I am always thrilled to find a source that speaks to me and genuinely teaches me. And I am thrilled to have found Khan Academy. As the home page explains:

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere.

We have 1400+ videos on YouTube covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance which have been recorded by Salman Khan. . . .

The Khan Academy and Salman Khan have received a 2009 Tech Award in Education. The Tech Awards is an international awards program that honors innovators from around the world who are applying technology to benefit humanity.

Here is Mr. Khan’s introductory video:

What is the best preparation for law school? I’d suggest it is a liberal arts education.

I am often asked what type of undergraduate education best prepares a student for law school. Most of my life I’ve been completely baffled by the question. It never occurred to me that my very Classical liberal arts education — I double majored in Ancient Greek and Latin — would be something to recommend, and while I have always been a huge supporter of liberal arts education, I never felt confident in recommending it as preparation for law school. But neither was I ever persuaded that my students who had thought long and hard about choosing the “right” major to prepare for law school — and ended up thereby majoring in political science, business, or economics — were any better prepared than those students who had not chosen an undergraduate major based on a desire to “prepare” for law school.

I was reminded of this question in reading Rebecca Mead’s commentary on the views of certain economists that an undergraduate degree is not an economically wise way of earning a living. As Mead explains, this conclusion is based in part on the fact that the greatest opportunities to earn money in the near future are in fields in which a college degree is not required:

Economics majors aren’t doing badly . . . : their starting salary averages about fifty thousand a year, rising to a mid-career median of a hundred and one thousand. Special note should be taken of the fact that if you have an economics degree you can, eventually, make a living proposing that other people shouldn’t bother going to college. This, at least, is the approach of Professor Richard K. Vedder, of Ohio University, who is the founder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. According to the Times, eight out of the ten job categories that will add the most employees during the next decade—including home-health aide, customer-service representative, and store clerk—can be performed by someone without a college degree. “Professor Vedder likes to ask why fifteen percent of mail carriers have bachelor’s degrees,” the paper reported.

In addition, “[a]nother economist, Professor Robert I. Lerman, of American University (Ph.D., M.I.T.), told the Times that high schools, rather than readying all students for college, should focus on the acquisition of skills appropriate to the workplace. According to the Times, these include the ability to ‘solve problems and make decisions,’ ‘resolve conflict and negotiate,’ ‘coöperate with others,’ and’listen actively.’”

These opinions awoke in me a gnawing feeling that has been building in me the past couple of years — the feeling that the best educational preparation for being a lawyer is a liberal arts education.

One particular moment in the last 2 years stands out form me in considering this question. I was reviewing an exam with a student and explaining a clever argument another student had come up with in connection with the interpretation of ambiguous contract language. The contract called for the supply of sweetener to the manufacturer of a soda being marketed to the types of buyers who would be interested in “healthier” alternatives to mass market sodas. The contract provided for the supply of “sugar,” and the dispute arose when the supplier substituted high fructose corn syrup for granulated sugar as the sweetener. The other students argument was based on the greater attractiveness of granulated sugar to the buyers the soda manufacturer was targeting to argue in favor of an interpretation that would limit “sugar” to granulated sugar even though high fructose corn syrup is also, chemically, a “sugar.”  The student with whom I was meeting thought about this point, realized the argument was a good one and one she herself had not come up with, but still felt my point was objectionable because the argument was grounded in facts about the world she didn’t know. So she told me, “You’re not testing us on Contracts. You’re testing us on what we know about the world!”

I smiled, and I explained: if you don’t know about the world, you can’t understand law. Law doesn’t supply answers that exist independent of the world it answers questions about. In contract interpretation, courts are asked to determine, based on the available evidence, what they believe people  intended contracts to mean. The “rules” that govern those interpretive acts don’t work like mathematical formulas — they constitute a structured way of approaching the question of what people intended, nothing more, and therefore don’t provide any way out of answering the question; what do you think the people entering this contract intended? While the rules might limit the scope of evidence that can be considered, within that scope anything that persuades the court about the intended meaning is fair game for the court to consider. So, in the question I was considering with my student, the attractiveness of granulated sugar to the  manufacturer’s target market was a very relevant consideration — if you could show that both the supplier and the manufacturer knew and understood the marketing strategy, you could argue persuasively that they both intended “sugar” in the contract to mean only “granulated sugar” and not to include high fructose corn syrup.

And so, more and more often I have found myself telling my students that in addition to studying law they should be learning everything they possibly can about everything. I hate to be that vague, but, at the same time, I am quite serious. Would a better education in “decision making” have helped BP decision makers planning for offshore oil drilling than an education grounded in Greek Tragedy? I don’t think so.

Why would a mail carrier consider an undergraduate education worthwhile even if the tuition is economically out of balance with his earnings as a mail carrier? I hate to say it — because I hate the thought it needs to be said — but the education might make him a happier person and the money he will earn is not the only measure of his happiness.

And what should you learn to prepare for law school? Anything and everything, but learn it well.