Albany Law School implements mandatory pasta marshmallow structure building to teach effective lawyering skills.

                                                 

(Albany Law students posing with pasta-tive pride beside their mandatory marshmallow monolith).

Like many experienced practitioners, I have often reflected that the practice of law is much like building a tall pasta marshmallow structure. Eliciting and arranging the facts is a long and twisty process, like spaghetti. Legal principles and precedents are sticky, yet spongy, like marshmallows. You must be diligent and creative as you build your case, or your pasta marshmallow structure. But you must also proceed cautiously and with due care, because an insufficiently sturdy foundation, or even an ill-considered motion, can cause the whole thing to collapse.

That is why I am delighted that Albany Law School, at the behest of Alicia Ouelette, its then-acting and now full-blown Dean, has introduced pasta marshmallow construction as a mandatory facilitated collaborative skill-building exercise during law school orientation. Followed, of course, by law professor-led discussions about the appropriate legal lessons to be digested.

http://bestpracticeslegaled.albanylawblogs.org/2014/08/13/shultz-and-zedeck-collaboration-and-motivation-in-orientation/

In these enlightening post-pasta discussion sessions, the Albany law professors and their students noodled such topics as "[W]hat might these exercises suggest about effective lawyering?"; "[W]hat was challenging about mandatory collaboration?"; and "[W]hat might they have done differently to more effectively collaborate?" Many students reflected on the "significant importance" of communication skills, particularly listening. Encouraged by faculty, the students discussed the gender confidence gap, time and resource management, and problem solving techniques. And, of course, "[s]tudents also pondered what kind of teams they might participate in their post-graduation future." (I wonder if any mentioned wait staff at an Italian restaurant).

In lauding the importance of this activity, Albany Law Professor Mary Lynch, the Director of her school's Center for Excellence in Law Teaching, displayed the exuberant eloquence noted once before on this blog:

"As graduates, these students will be participating in teams and in collaborative enterprises that we faculty probably cannot now envision.  However, it is our job to facilitate their acquisition of the kinds of skills and capacities and attitudes that will best serve them in the uncertain but potentially exciting future. . . . Happy Facilitating."

You know, as preposterous as this all sounds and is, it is not an incorrect application of alleged visionary Prof. William Henderson’s "competency-based" conception of legal education, wherein law school courses are designed to bolster personal habits (aka "competencies") that legal employers allegedly favor. Or, as Henderson puts it, "the knowledge, skills, behaviors, and attributes of highly successful professionals," which include "for example, teamwork, communication skills, emotional self-control, problem-solving, and decision-making." William D. Henderson, A Blueprint for Change, 40 Pepp. L. Rev. 461, 496, 505 (2013).

Indeed, the Albany pasta pedagogues drew inspiration from a text favored by Henderson, a list of 26 extremely general qualities and habits that supposedly add up to an effective legal you. See Marjorie M. Shultz and Sheldon Zedeck, 26 Lawyering Effectiveness Factors. Among the Shultz/Zedeck factors are problem solving, creativity/innovation, and practical judgment. Unsurprisingly, "thinking outside the box" is mentioned, though Shultz and Zedeck do not specify whether it has to be a box of uncooked noodles.

What is happening, I think, is that law faculty are trying to serve up some tempting innovations in place of their repulsive standard pedagogical cuisine. And it is a worthy impulse, even if this particular innovation is, to be charitable, pretty weak sauce. [insert bad joke about watery pesto or marinara]. But for obvious reasons of self-interest, they cannot implement the innovations that are really needed--drastically lower tuition and class sizes, and a clinical/apprenticeship training model in place of Socratic hide-the-ball (or, shall I say, hide the meatball?) classroom bullying. The fairy tale pig who built his house of straw had a famously bad outcome. So too will law school deans who build their innovations out of macaroni.