Finding Your Inner-UCC
posted by Nate Oman
I just finished my first bit of teaching as an academic. The first day of class went really well. I am teaching Commercial Law (Secured Transactions). I started out by talking about contracts in Elizabethan drama — in particular in A Merchant of Venice and Dr. Faustus — and why they get treated so badly. We then went on to the central role of contract in a modern society and the problems that it creates. From there we moved on to the idea of security and how it interacts with contract, outlining the the central economic and normative problems that it creates. We finished up by discussing a California case the illustrated the policy and normative arguments. The students seemed very engaged and we had a good discussion going. The second day of class we went through the rules governing the attachment of security interests to personal property. It was a bit of a flop. The students hadn’t read the code. We worked through the problems and spent a large amount of time on basic questions and never even got to the difficult interpretive issues or policy questions. Afterwards I was talking to one of my colleagues about the difference between the two days. Why did the first day go so well, while the second day went so badly?
He responded, “The first day is easy. Talking nothing but big picture and policy is about getting students in touch with their inner moral sense. It’s not really all that hard. On the second day, you were teaching law. Students don’t have an inner Uniform Commercial Code to get in touch with, and getting them to grasp the real UCC is hard. Of course, you could be teaching con law, where there is no law to get in touch with and it is just students’ inner moral sense for the whole semester…”
August 28, 2006 at 10:19 am
Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Law School (Teaching)
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Responses (3)
anon - August 28, 2006 at 10:40 am
I find the way you went forward interesting. Is there an argument that if no one has read the code, you end the class early by saying that class time is a waste if no one has read the complex code, and that you’ll try it again next time? Sounds harsh, but learning is a two way street.
Bruce Boyden - August 28, 2006 at 12:58 pm
I had that happen once in grad school. Very effective, although it was a 6-person class, and the shame might be diluted in larger sections.
Avery Katz - August 28, 2006 at 7:36 pm
You didn’t say what you told them the first day about your expectations for class preparation, but my experience is that students who have never taken a statutory course need to be told explicitly that statutory analysis is a distinct skill, that the class will focus on it, and that they should make sure to read the statute and to read it carefully. They don’t know this automatically.
[More generally, talking about policy and big picture the first day of class is useful, but what's most essential is establishing the ground rules for the course -- the contract between student and teacher, if you like. This is just as important in con law as in UCC.]
I would also add that the second day may not have gone as badly as you think — it usually takes a couple of classes just to get students up to speed on the basics of statutory analysis before you can get to anything subtle. In fact, you probably taught them rather more in the second class than you did in the first, even if they hadn’t done the reading.
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