The Vanished Socratic Contracts Class
posted by Dave Hoffman
The Contracts professor listserve has been abuzz with a discussion of the difference between the four- and six-credit contracts course. (No one seems to have read the definitive work on that topic.) In one message, Jean Braucher (Arizona Law) offered a set of comments about her own contracts teacher, John Dawson, who taught at Harvard, Michigan, and Boston University. Her comments were so rich and interesting that I asked for her permission to reprint them here:
“I took a six-hour full-year Contracts course from a Socratic master, John Dawson. We had one year-end, four-hour exam in each of our courses and got all our grades in the mail at the end of July. There was no credit for class participation or anything other than the one exam. Contracts was taught as it had been taught a generation earlier (Dawson was then in his 70s). He put a few notes in his casebook on background points so that he would never have to lecture about anything. In class, mostly Dawson smiled at the 110 of us seated in a large classroom and asked one difficult question after another. The only declarative sentence he said in class all year will never leave me. He was a courtly gentleman, kind and patient in the extreme, but one day he couldn’t get a student to budge despite many sallies with different questions. A rare look of frustration clouded his face, and after the student repeated his position one more time, Dawson said, “I beg to disagree.” We all froze; this was as harsh as he ever got. He called on another student.”
She continued…
“Dawson’s idea of a syllabus was, “Stay 10 to 15 pages ahead in the book.” He gave us a practice exam question in April to do on our own and asked for volunteers to hand in answers. He picked one answer (name removed to protect the guilty) to share with us in an extra session he held late one afternoon (not regular class time for this frill!). He read the first sentence of the answer and said, “I would not give any credit for this sentence.” Then he read another sentence and said, “I would not give any credit for this sentence.” Then he read another sentence and shook his head. He read the fourth sentence and said, “Now we are getting somewhere,” without elaboration. We felt lucky to get this much “feedback.” After I started teaching Contracts, I looked at my student Contracts notebook, and it had very little other than my briefs and an occasional question. At the end of the year, if memory serves, the doctrine was a complete blur but there were some new grooves in my gray matter. Was this a good course? I thought so at the time (Dawson was generally beloved by his students), but no one could get away with such an approach today.Now I teach from the Macaulay et al. book. Its first volume is designed for a four-hour basic course (there is a second volume for an advanced course). It starts with a background chapter on various perspectives on contract law and then turns to remedies. It compresses treatment of formation and consideration and puts all the material in social and theoretical context and places way at the front some problems that call for close reading of UCC sections. It has empirical notes and excerpts from Gilmore and Leff and Macneil, among others. It is a rich, challenging, fabulous book. I try to picture Dawson teaching from such a book. Can’t do it. I’m convinced, however, that this is one of those times when change has been for the better.”
I think this is great, but I don’t know that I agree with Professor Braucher that the modern class is an improvement over the Dawson/Socratic variant, as she evocatively retells it. Or to put it a different way, which class would you rather have taken? The modern class, where you learn skills and culture and context? Or the socratic class, where you get “new grooves in your brain matter”?
March 2, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond
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Responses (4)
A.J. Sutter - March 3, 2009 at 7:38 am
To whom is your concluding question addressed, the prospective professor or the typical student? I don’t recall the casebook I used 25+ years ago, in what I recall as a 6-credit course, but the book was reputed to be, and indeed was, very implicit in its methods. Chapters were long; there was zero introductory matter or expository matter of any type, just occasionally some subchapter headings. Extended excerpts were followed by some short case briefs that it was left up to the reader to figure out why the editors placed them there. In this, it seemed Socraticaly-designed. (The course itself was more lecture with occasional questions, than truly Socratic, since the (associate) prof loved the sound of his own voice, even when it was saying things was contrary to the holding of the case he thought he was explicating.) As Prof. Braucher experienced, the doctrine was a complete blur. We had a practice midterm, and I sucked. Halfway through the second semester, I decided to ignore all my profs’ admonitions (in Contracts and all other courses), and got a Gilbert’s. I got an A in Contracts.
Ultimately, I found it far more satisfying to understand contract law than to figure out the casebook editors’ intellectual puzzle, even though I’d bought into that challenge for most of the year. I don’t see how the social contextual matter in a modern casebook would help a student to achieve that understanding, any more than the Socratic course. So from a typical student’s perspective, the question would be whether all that contextual matter interferes with learning the blackletter law. The less it does so, the better. This assumes, of course, that all that contextual stuff won’t be on the exam — and in a 1st-year required course, it shouldn’t be.
dave hoffman - March 3, 2009 at 7:57 am
AJ,
Great comment. I guess my mild disagreement with you would be about the point of the class. I tend to think that most first-year courses (and maybe most upper level courses) are supposed to be really teaching *judgment*, not rules. Judgment means distinguishing good from bad arguments, and figuring out a strategic, forward-looking, problem-solving approach. Maybe (certainly?) the S-M isn’t the best approach to the judgment-teaching problem, but it isn’t obvious to me that a Gilberts-blackletter-approach is good either.
A.J. Sutter - March 3, 2009 at 9:58 am
Thanks for your reply. I agree, learning the Gilbert’s version should not be the only objective. Nor do I mean to suggest that skills, culture and context aren’t worth learning, even for first-years. But since most law students will go into practice, I’d bet that most of them would want to have some (justified) feeling that they’ve got a handle on the blackletter core of the subject — especially when it’s what’s tested on in the course. At a minimum, profs should skip the Paper Chase/”think like a lawyer” purism, and acknowledge to students that canned outlines might be a useful adjunct to their education. And maybe a more forthright way to sell classwork would be as a way to learn stuff that makes the blackletter knowledge more useful. That’s better than allowing students to expect that class will be the primary source of that knowledge, if that’s not what the prof intends.
JP - March 3, 2009 at 10:55 am
Drawing on A.J.’s comments, a major (perceived, at least) issue for students is that even the excellent socratic professors, who could truly teach new ways of thinking, tend to test doctrinal knowledge. It’s incredibly difficult to test “judgment” in a single, written exam.
This might be a good system, if it both develops critical thinking skills and also forces students (as in A.J.’s example) to learn the blackletter law. But I think it also understandably leads to frustrated students who think their professors are deliberately “hiding the ball” or that grades (especially the critically important 1L grades) are random.
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