A Former Law Professor Speaks Out on the Majesty of the Socratic Method

One long-running debate that is central to the notion of the Law School Scam is whether or not law school instruction serves its students well and is worth the significant time and cost investment.  For years, the answer from the Establishment was a resounding "Yes, of course it does," if for no other reason than no one dared question it - peer pressure exists, even in the rational, hallowed halls of academia.  Those who did question the system were generally JD graduates in the loser's bracket of the law school sorting mechanism, and shame was allowed to do its dirty work and silence the critics instead of fostering real debate.

 

The times, they are a'changin.'  It is my opinion that Carthage must be footnoted's comment in MA's prior post deserved its own post.  Without further ado:

 

 

I’m a former law professor, and I have a slightly different take on this then Orin [Kerr].

When I was in law school, I would have disagreed with this post 100%. Law school can teach a handful of particular, distinct skills. The main skill it teaches is how to write a law school exam—which is a skill that has cognates in writing bench memos for judges/appellate briefs.

The questions that I didn’t ask until I was a law professor:

1. Does the Socratic method do a good job of teaching the above skills?
2. Are those the most useful skills for our students to learn?

Many law professors cannot answer those questions from an unbiased position because one side of the answers, if true, would be hard on their egos.

The Socratic method must do a good job of teaching those skills, law professors tell themselves, because we are invested in the myth of our own success. The system that produced us must be good. Maybe not perfect—maybe in need of some alteration—but generally good. Law professors are theory-heavy and practice-light. If the answer is “no, this skill is not useful,” then we have a huge problem, because law profs—and our colleagues—are fundamentally not equipped to teach any other skill.

And so we avoid the truth.

The Socratic method is a shitty method of teaching. As a law student, I could see only my own success. I did awesomely in law school, so of course the Socratic method appeared to work. As a law professor, when I graded exams, it became clear that a large percentage of my students weren’t learning the skills that I had tried to teach them, and when I talked to my colleagues, I was told that this was just the way things were, that the students who failed were dumb/lazy/slow to get it.

But I knew my students, and while I’m sure some were dumb/lazy (inevitable in any large class) I didn’t buy that most of them were. And I’ve learned a number of different skills in my life over a variety of disciplines, and I know how good students generally are at learning skills that are well taught.

Thinking like a law professor isn’t hard; we are just incredibly shitty at teaching it.

(The second problem is that we use the Socratic method to teach two things at once: both the substance of the law and this ineffable “thinking like a law professor” skill. When both are opaque, it’s sort of like blindfolding your students, handing them legos dipped in goo, and asking them to construct a railroad depot, with the added caveat that you do not, in fact, want a railroad depot; you really want a museum of trains, something that only looks like a railroad depot from a distance. The fact that some students manage to produce the appropriate museum is no reason to pat ourselves on the backs.)

As for the second question, it became quickly obvious to me that most of my students would not, in fact, ever need to think like a law professor—that if I wanted to help them succeed, I needed to give them projects and tasks that mimicked the sort of things they would actually be doing in practice even though I taught nonclinical classes.

But I know fuck-all about practice, and while people all around me told me it didn’t matter, it soon became apparent to me that this was a self-serving myth created by the practice-light environment of academia. In what actual world would a total lack of experience and knowledge ever be irrelevant?

I was not comfortable saying, “Oh, well, I just made this shitty exercise up, and I know as much as you about how you’d approach this problem in real life, so snap to it, and I’ll grade you based on what I think the right answer is. But I could be completely wrong, and also, do practitioners approach this problem like this? IDEK.”

In any event, TL;DR: Law school teaches low value skills badly, and law professors are by and large too invested in their own success to cop to this.     

 

 

Straight up, Carthage, and I hope we see you around here again in the future.  These ideas would have been considered heretical a scant few years ago, when the Law School machine was running full tilt with models and bottles.  Clearly, when a system produces "successful" results, it is clearly because the system was inherently a good system, not due to other outside contributing factors that are difficult to quantify.  Nope, it was nothing but sheer LawProf awesomeness, full stop.

 

Until the music stopped playing, of course, and the number of seats grew fewer than the number of players and the cost per seat rose out of control.  It took decades to see, but now we are all living the results now that they can no longer be swept under the rug.  Kind of like the Great Recession.