1L Contracts, the blog: a new educational tool

My law school starts class next week. For my Contracts course, I’ve decided to maintain a blog, 1L Contracts, to givethe class an opportunity to explore the course subject matter in greater depth than 3 hours a week of class permits and the the ways the issues arise every day in everyone’s lives. The initial posts are concerned with, among other things, emphasizing the enormity of the project the students are embarking upon and the proper ways to read case law.

I first used a blog for a class during the 2008-09 academic year. It was a more effective way of getting my students engaged in class subject matter  than few things I’d ever done. That blog, What is Fair Use?,  also garnered some attention in the academic world. People get excited when technology is used in new ways in the classroom. But in the case of that blog, the excitement wasn’t merely a matter of fascination with technology. The blog really made a difference to the level of the student’s engagement with the subject matter. It also happened to be the first forum in which I wrote about copyright and fair use in depth.

And I’m deeply gratified by the kind words about the new blog written by Stephanie West Allen — a lawyer, author, law professor, and expert on the neuroscience of learning — on her terrific law blog, idealawg.

If you’re interested in contract law and in the difficulties of the first year of law school, please read along there too.

The making of a lawyer

Most law schools are odd places.  I suspect most people outside the law believe a law school’s principal mission is to train lawyers.  I am a law professor, and I happen to believe that too.  But I am a very odd duck within law school academia.  Practice for twelve years and partnership in a top nationwide firm is of very little value as a qualifaction to be a law professor.  Rather, the valuable assets among law school faculty are articles published in journals edited by students and rarely read by lawyers.  Most law school classes address theory (or “doctrine”) in a manner remarkably removed from its real world application.  Qualifying for law school rests to a significant degree, perhaps primarily, on an applicant’s score on the LSAT test, which may correlate to success in law school but bears little relationship to one’ effectiveness as a lawyer.  To add to the gap between law school and legal practice, the principal criterion underlying the rankings on which law schools and applicants rely to rate the quality of a law school is the median LSAT score of the school’s students.  Those rankings provide a tremendous incentive for a law school to act in ways intended to accept applicant’s with higher LSAT scores — scores that don’t correlate to effectiveness as a lawyer — at the expense of acting in ways that increase the effectiveness of its graduates as lawyers.

So I am thrilled to read in yesterday’s New York Times that professors at the University of California, Berkeley, have studied what makes lawyers (not law students or law professors) effective and “have come up with a test that they say is better at predicting success in” practicing law than is the LSAT.  The study concluded, as I’ve long been convinced, that “LSAT scores . . . ‘were not particularly useful’ in predicting lawyer effectiveness’. . .”  What does the new test consider factors that contribute to lawyerly effectiveness?

“[T]he ability to write, manage stress, listen, research the law and solve problems.”

I am also not surprised to read that the new test is no better than the LSAT at predicting how well participants would do in law school.  As I wrote above, there is far too great a gap between most law school instruction and the actual practice to consider a test that measures effectiveness in the latter able to test effectiveness in the former.

I wish all my students would read this post.  They’ve been dealing with a considerable degree of stress of late that they blame on me and the problems I’ve given them to try to solve — problems that are down and dirty real life problems lawyers face — and they’ve been complaining a lot.  One student in my Contracts course yesterday complainied that online discussion boards made clear to him that students at other schools were covering a lot more “theory” than I am.  I looked at him a little in surprise.  That’s the whole point of my teaching.  And it’s the whole point of the rather unusual curriculum at the school where I am a visiting professor, the University of Detroit Mercy Law School, where it has been recognized that theory and practice are inextricably intertwined and that each can only be understood in the law in relation to one another.  Thus, the school offers a “revolutionary new curriculum . . . [that] complements traditional theory- and doctrine-based coursework with practical learning, providing a solid transition between law school and a legal career.

But it’s hard to teach students to manage stress, listen, and solve problems.  First, it mean subjecting them to the stress of solving problems they do not know the solutions to in advance because what lawyers do is solve problems they don’t know the solutions to in advance.  No one enjoys stress.  I like to think that the students realize the stress I am subjecting to them is not one intended to or that will break them.  It’s school.  As I’ve always told them, in law school we hurl you into the water to see if you can swim, but the water’s only about 4 feet deep, so when you can’t swim, you just get on your feet, come back, try to figure out what went wrong, and then try again.  It’s when you’re a lawyer trying to solve problems you don’t know the solutions to in advance that the stress can be truly overwhelming, especially if you have not been at all prepared for it.

Detroit Mercy is one of the most innovative law schools in the U.S.

Many people (more often lawyers than law professors) believe law school education is in dire need of innovation. I am very proud to note that the school where I am teaching this year, the University of Detroit Mercy Law School, was featured in the current issue of National Jurist’s PreLaw Magazine as one of the ten most innovative law schools in the U.S.

It’s Veterans Day