Archive for the ‘Law School (Teaching)’ Category

An Anecdotal Survey on the Mommyprof Track

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

A couple of weeks ago, I invited readers to participate in a survey on maternity leave policies at various law schools.  This effort was aimed at provoking open dialogue on the topic rather than providing a scientifically defensible sample or survey of law school practices (a worthy endeavor but not one that this mommyprof can fit into her schedule!).  I received 22 responses to the survey, which could include some overlap from the same law school, so the results are not even close to representative of the 193 ABA-accredited law schools in the U.S.  Nonetheless, I think the findings are interesting.

It was striking that all but one of the respondents said that their law school did not expect women to wait until tenure to have children.  The other respondent was not sure how her school would view pre-tenure childbearing, but worried that a leave might attract stigma from male colleagues.  On the brighter side, one commenter noted that at her school, all of the junior women in relationships had children before tenure in recent years.  While I know from conversations with friends at other law schools that this norm is not universal, it’s nice to see that it may be more widespread than I had expected.

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  October 14, 2009 at 3:03 pm   Posted in: Feminism and Gender, Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   No Comments

A Civil Procedure Curriculum Challenge

posted by Spencer Waller

I read with great interest Jon Siegel’s recent post on curricular reform and the thirty or so comments it generated. I don’t really disagree with his main point that law school is mostly about “acquiring the ability to acquire skills and knowledge.” But at the same time, I don’t spend that much time on personal jurisdiction and Erie in my civil procedure class and wanted to use this post to explain why.

I started teaching civil procedure during my time at Brooklyn Law School where civil procedure was a two semester five credit course. When I got to Loyola, civ pro was a two semester six credit course. Two years ago we moved to a one semester four credit course as part of a general reform of the first year curriculum. So I have now taught the course in just about every possible permutation.

I currently spend the first 2/3 of the course on the litigation process and about the remaining 1/3 on personal jurisdiction and Erie. I am probably in the minority on this and it’s hard to find a casebook that is set up the way I prefer.

I do it this way because of my belief that only a detailed study of the litigation process reflected in the FRCP can convey a deep understanding of the American civil justice system and its strengths and weaknesses. For better or worse, we have a system that (until very recently) has deemphasized pleadings and uses discovery to lay the groundwork for settlement or summary judgment for those cases that make it into the system and is increasing reliant on ADR for those cases that don’t. Of late, the Supreme Court has seemingly raised the bar on pleadings in Twombley and Iqbal and reinvigorated motions to dismiss as a more meaningful part of the litigation process. One cannot understand what we do, how we do it, why the rest of the world thinks we are crazy, what is changing, and what needs to be changed without a large amount of class time, which of necessity limits the amount of time devoted to personal jurisdiction and Erie.

All this is driven by my view of in most litigation the law is easy, but the facts are hard. Discovery is where the facts come in. If you don’t understand how parties marshal, present, and protect facts from their files, from the real world, and from the other side through discovery then the students leave civ pro (and possibly law school) without any real clue how our civil justice system works. Read the rest of this post »

  October 12, 2009 at 9:56 am  Tags: ADR, Civil Procedure, discovery, Erie, federal rules of civil procedure, litigation process, personal jurisdiction, pleadings, subject matte jurisdiction, summary judgment, Twombley  Posted in: Civil Procedure, Education, Law Practice, Law School (Teaching), Legal Theory, Teaching   Print This Post   5 Comments

The Mommyprof Track

posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales

In many ways, law teaching is an ideal job for ambitious women who value a balance between work and family.  Many (though by no means all) law schools have generous maternity leaves — a semester paid, and if you can time your baby at the beginning of the calendar year or the end of the academic year, you can tack on a summer and win nine months at home with your newborn.  Once you’re back to teaching full time, the flexible schedule makes it possible to spend quality time with children during the hours they are available and to get your work done after the little ones have gone to bed.   And, at least in an ideal world, your colleagues view you as a lifetime investment rather than a disposable worker, so they will be flexible and supportive at this particularly challenging stage of your life.

That has been my experience and that of several of my friends, but I have heard significantly more negative stories from other women, ranging from law schools that refuse to provide more than six weeks paid leave to schools that expect female professors to wait until they have tenure to bear children.  I’ve heard of other schools that require women to “make up” the classes they miss while on leave; I can only imagine what a 2-2 or 2-3 teaching load while juggling a toddler (or nursing!) does to one’s research agenda.  And of course, for all of us, there’s no “part-time” option as a law professor; while working moms in many other fields can opt to work only two or three days a week for less pay, there’s no “mommy track” to tenure.  So while law prof moms often have the flexibility to work from home two or three days a week, those days must be productive and can’t be spent playing with little ones.  (To be sure, that’s just fine with many of us, including yours truly, but may not be ideal for all law prof moms.) Read the rest of this post »

  September 30, 2009 at 4:03 pm  Tags: gender  Posted in: Feminism and Gender, Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   No Comments

Curricular Reform

posted by Jon Siegel

Professors on the Civil Procedure professor listserv are debating the recurring question of why we devote so much energy to topics that come up only rarely in practice, particularly personal jurisdiction and Erie.  Some are suggesting that the civil procedure curriculum should be much more practice oriented, which would mean spending a lot less time on these subjects and more time on what most lawyers actually do in practice, particularly discovery.

I think it is an error to imagine that the law school class time devoted to a particular subject needs to be proportional to the time students will spend on that subject in actual practice.  Law school is partly about acquiring particular skills and knowledge, but also, and probably more, about acuqiring the ability to acquire skills and knowledge.  We will never teach the students all they will need to know as they practice law, but we can teach them how to learn what they need to know.

The amount of time devoted to personal jurisdiction and Erie in many Civ Pro classes makes little sense in terms of the practical importance of those topics in typical litigation.  But personal jurisdiction provides a lovely illustration of the process of legal change over time that students can appreciate as the law they learn changes over the course of their careers, and Erie provides an illustration about how imoprtant theoretical issues relating to federalism impact practical doctrines.  The students need to know how to appreciate the ways in which legal change interacts with social change and the ways in which theory impacts doctrine just as much as they need to learn what Rule 26 says about discovery and disclosure.

  September 23, 2009 at 11:55 am   Posted in: Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   29 Comments

The Art of Renaming

posted by Daniel Solove

If people don’t like something, the solution is often as simple as a name change.  Consider fish.  Some of the most popular fish today are renamed versions of less desirable fish.  Orange Roughy used to be called slimehead.  Chilean sea bass used to be called toothfish.  Monkfish used to be goosefish. The result of these name changes has been a dramatic increase in popularity, so much so that many renamed fish are now overfished and endangered.

The renaming trend is now spreading to academic courses. From the Boston Globe:

Boston College German studies professor Michael Resler went searching for a way to boost flagging interest in his “German Literature of the High Middle Ages’’ class a few years ago, and settled on the idea of simply giving the course a sexier name. The resulting “Knights, Castles, and Dragons’’ nearly tripled enrollment.

Resler then replaced his class on “The Songs of Walter von der Vogelweide,’’ a great German lyric poet, with “Passion, Politics, and Poetry in the Middle Ages.’’ Again, enrollment swelled.

“I suppose the moral of the story is that we live in an age where everything has to be marketed in order to find a willing audience,’’ Resler mused.

Maybe it’s time to rename law school classes:

Torts –> Crashes and Accidents

Criminal Law –> Murder Most Foul and Other Dastardly Crimes

Trusts & Estates –> Dead Hands: Power After Death

Corporate Law –> Gold and Parachutes

Property –> The Story of a Whale and a Fox

Hat tip: Inside Higher Ed

  September 8, 2009 at 7:32 am   Posted in: Culture, Education, Humor, Law School, Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   10 Comments

Sabbatical Blogging

posted by Dave Hoffman

This semester, I get to take my first sabbatical. As Larry observed, law firm sabbaticals are a thing of the past, and so lawyers might see this opportunity as yet more evidence that academics are insulated, head-in-the-clouds, wastrels. Perhaps, though it might help to see the sabbatical, like tenure, as simply a form of alternative compensation for professors, rather than a serious spur to productivity. And, like tenure, the sabbatical is a relic: while many years ago, a regular sabbatical policy was commonplace, now it’s my sense that it’s somewhat more rare.

I’ve got to say, I find the prospect of a fall with no duties other than those I set for myself more than a little terrifying. Putting aside the absence of structure, and colleagues to talk to, there’s the problem of figuring out which kinds of projects are the right size. If I pick something too big, I’m not going to finish (and thus feel pretty bad about having nothing to show for the immense privilege that the Law School and its stakeholders have extended me). If I pick something too small, well, you get the idea. So I’m looking for the sabbatical goldilocks. As I’ve learned, painfully, promising goldilocks projects in the empirical world are often (forgive me) wolves in sheep’s clothing. You start collecting data, and before you know it it’s two years later and you realize you never fully specified your research question. Yikes!

Some folks use their sabbaticals to do something entirely different, e.g., hiking the Appalachian trail (no, seriously); writing fiction; constructing toasters from scratch. I fear I’m more conformist than that. Apart from some personal business, I’ll probably be spending the fall writing more articles, coding more data, thinking about how to be a better corporations teacher, and blogging a little bit more often than I did over the summer.

I do have two larger intellectual projects that I’m going go try to fold in. The first is to read (again) the works of the Situationalist project. I’ve read several of the project’s papers – in one case, multiple times – but I still don’t think I really understand many of the claims, and, more importantly, the project’s motivation. Since there are tons of brilliant folks affiliated with the group, this obviously is a situation that I’ve got to remedy.  Second, I want to read at least a large sample of the articles that Herb Kritzer identifies here as fruits of pre-1940 empirical legal studies work. One of the few abiding disadvantages to not having a PhD is is a missing sense of the intellectual history of your field. That problem is particularly acute in ELS, where (to read the dates on citations in most recent papers) nothing useful was written before 1995.

I suppose that’s it. I’m not training to climb Everest. I’m not going to reorient my scholarly path. I’m not taking on a court case (though the amici in Jones appear to be having tons of fun). I can’t imagine that I’ll pick up a new hobby. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure I’ll be spending more hours working than I do when I’ve got classes to teach!

  September 2, 2009 at 6:16 pm   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching), Teaching   Print This Post   7 Comments

Teaching, and Grading, Colloquium Courses

posted by Dave Hoffman

In the Spring of 2010, Peter Huang and I will be co-teaching a colloquium on Law and Human Behavior for the second time.  The course invites outside speakers to present their work to an audience consisting of upper-year law students.  (Faculty are invited to attend as well.)  Students are graded on response papers that they write about the presenters’ works.  We hope they get good value from this kind of course, primarily: repeated writing opportunities with lots of feedback; exposure to a wide variety of current scholarship; and learning from the presentation styles of different speakers.  Teachers get return too –though the constant grading load makes the course at least as much work as an ordinary seminar, and probably more.

As Peter and I begin to think about the Spring’s colloquium, I wonder whether any of you have experiences with this kind of course, and if so, how you answered the following questions:

(1)  Do you have “off-weeks” where you introduce the readings to come, or do you schedule a speaker every week? The last time we taught the course, we had four weeks without speakers which we used to preview the coming papers.  I’m not convinced these were particularly useful.

(2)  Do you require the students to write a response to every speaker? The last time we taught the course, students wrote responses for around three-fourths of the speakers.  An advantage to this approach is that it allows the students to pass if they really feel out of their element on a particularly paper.

(3)  Do you require (or strongly) suggest prerequisites for the course? We haven’t done so, though it became clear in the course that students with undergraduate backgrounds in statistics, economics and psychology were getting more out of the presentations.  This is obviously more of a problem in law-and courses than in, say, a colloquium course on constitutional theory.

(4)  Do students hand in their responses before, or after, the speaker’s presentation? Our approach was before, but students reported they would have preferred after.

(5)  Do you give all of the student responses to the speaker, or do you screen?  Our approach was inclusive, though this probably was a mistake.

(6) How did you deal with grading?  One issue here is that mastery grading (of the kind that is appealing in a writing course) means that you ought to start grading very “low” to give yourself room to increase grades over time. Another is that you have to be careful not to overly reward students who (as described above) have a substantive leg up because of their college majors.  An added word of warning: it’s my experience that students are much more likely to dispute their grades (or at least argue about them) in a writing seminar than in a large exam course, although the overall mean in seminars is much, much higher.

  August 6, 2009 at 5:06 am   Posted in: Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   6 Comments

Nudging the exam takers

posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger

I’ve recently been reading Dan Ariely’s book, Predictably Irrational. One fascinating chapter is about the psychology of dishonesty. The experimenters gave two versions of a test – one graded by proctors, the other entirely self-graded, with a small monetary reward (10 cents per correct answer). They found an incidence of cheating in the self-graded answers, no surprise there.

The experimenters gave the same tests to another group of students, but first made those students do a task designed to make them think about morality and honesty. One group of students had to write out as many of the Ten Commandments as they could remember. Another group was asked them to simply sign the statement, “I understand that this study falls under the MIT honor system.”

These moral reminders had the effect of eliminating all (!) of the statistically significant cheating — with either one of those moral reminders in place, the students in the self-graded group had results that were statistically indistinguishable from the proctor-graded group.
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  June 24, 2009 at 9:58 pm  Tags: behavioral, cheating, exams, psychology, Teaching  Posted in: Law School (Teaching), Psychology and Behavior   Print This Post   3 Comments

Does Law and Economics Destroy Law Students’ Sense of Justice?

posted by Dave Hoffman

A draft paper by Raymond Fisman (Columbia Business),  Shachar Kariv (Berkeley Economics) and Daniel Markovits (Yale Law) has gotten surprisingly little attention given its potentially radical implications.  Maybe it’s the title: Exposure to Ideology and Distributional Preferences. I would have gone with something different.  Perhaps “Law and Economics Eats Law Students’ Hearts.”

The authors looked at first-year students at Yale Law School taking contracts and torts.  They labeled the students’ professors by their purported tendency to emphasize economic and “humanist” rhetoric in class.*  They then used the natural experiment of law school sorting to determine the effect that exposure to economic ideology had on law students’ distributional preferences in the dictator game. That is, did students taught by economically-minded professors behave differently than those taught by professors disposed toward humanism or critical-legal studies?

The bottom line: students taught by economically-minded professors were both more selfish and more likely to see fairness as a form of kaldor-hicks efficiency.  By contrast, students taught by humanists were more generous and also  likely to see fairness as a matter of equity.

These are important results for those interested in legal education.

• First, and most obviously, it suggests that our preferences for altruism and the content of fairness are highly manipulable — one semester of teaching by a professor – at Yale, no less – can affect them.  I admit to being a bit surprised by the size of the effect, given the mixed results from earlier work on the relationship between economics and altruism.  It’s also surprising that Yalies are so impressionable!  I wonder whether the effect persists past a semester, and whether better coding of actual classroom discussion would have changed the results.
• Second, it suggests yet more reasons for researchers to think hard about the effect that law school teaching has on the content of legal doctrine.  As I’ve argued, it’s quite likely that some law school professors who never published a lick have had more effect on substantive legal doctrine than those who’ve written reams, simply by influencing how their students (who went on to be lawyers and judges) thought about the content of rules and the byways of arguments.  We should do more work like this!
• Third, and most personally, this makes me nervous.  I’m a highly socratic teacher who places lots (and lots) of emphasis in the first-year on efficiency-arguments and on the need to look beyond questions about distributional equality in the present case.  I thought that by doing so I was helping students to think critically about the dynamic nature of contract law – the relationship between contract rules and market price; the usefulness of an intelligent system of defaults; the importance of getting beyond gut intuitions.  But maybe I’m also indoctrinating the students to grab more of the pie for themselves.  Nuts.

*The method they used to code economic preferences was, to be frank, a little mystifying.  They gave points for PhD’s in economics, but had to make exceptions for Alan Schwartz, PhDless but L&E to the bone, Guido, for obvious reasons, and both Robert Gordon and Carol Rose, who are similarly off-set.  Why not simply ask the professors themselves how much they emphasized economic rhetoric in class?  Or the students?

  May 18, 2009 at 6:17 pm   Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Contract Law & Beyond, Economic Analysis of Law, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching), Law Student Discussions   Print This Post   4 Comments

The Heart of a Center

posted by Jacqueline Lipton

So here’s a question for people thinking about the nature of law schools and the nature of scholarship (and with thanks to Mike Madison for picking up on my invitation to blog more about his research deanship).

I’ve talked to a lot of folks at a lot of schools with different philosophies on law school centers.  Even folks within the same school often have widely divergent views about what law school centers can and should be doing for the overall law school enterprise.  And of course, it must be acknolwedged that centers can serve a variety of different functions within a law school – and different individual centers can have different individual roles.

So my question is whether there is any way to get to the heart of the center question.  Are there one or more key ideals that all centers in law schools should be able to live up to, or to contribute to the school?  And, if so, is it something other than:  “It’s a marketing device to attract faculty/students.”  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that – I’m asking the question out of legitimate interest.)

We’ve been talking about this recently at my school and the question is of particular interest here because we have a number of different centers that were set up under vastly different conditions for vastly different purposes.  Some are research focused and obtain grant funding.  At least one has a private endowment.  Some take advantage of collections of faculty who specialize in particular subject areas.  Presumably none of them are cost-neutral for the school, although none of them drain big bucks out of the budget either.

There are always political questions within faculty about centers and the role of faculty who happen to operate as center directors (I plead guilty to the charge of being a center director).  “Why does s/he get [a lighter teaching load/a director's stipend/a dedicated administrative support person/_______]?”  Pick one or fill in the blank.

But politics aside, what do centers ideally contribute/potentially detract from a school? Read the rest of this post »

  May 12, 2009 at 2:17 pm  Tags: law centers  Posted in: Education, Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   One Comment

The Beauty of Casuistry

posted by Nate Oman

When I get asked by non-lawyers about teaching law school (and this happens about once or twice a year) I tend to tell them a certain kind of myth about the case method.  I try to throw my students into the particulars of the common law and force them to engage in a casuistic process of pushing the limits of their intuitions by testing them against new, but slightly different fact patterns.  Likewise, when a student asks me something like “Yes, but what does reasonable reliance really mean?” my answer is generally that they have to look to the cases.  I can’t give you a set of abstract principles that answer that question, I say, what you have to do is find a case with a fact pattern similar to yours and then either distinguish it (if it is bad for you) or argue that it covers your case (if it is good for you).  In my more nominalistic moments, I will insist with what I hope is a suitably wild-eyed look that there really is nothing else there when it comes to many legal concepts.  It is just the cases.  Just the particulars.

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  May 8, 2009 at 8:43 am   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   3 Comments

Open book or closed book?

posted by Jennifer Collins

My students are taking my crim pro exam as I type, so exams are very much on my mind this morning. One issue I have continually wrestled with over the years is whether to make my exams closed book or open book. I have always made them open book, with one caveat — students cannot bring in commercial study aids or outlines. My theory is that life and law practice are “open book” — how many practicing lawyers have committed the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to memory, for example? But is that really accurate? In the middle of a suppression motion, you obviously cannot ask the judge to hold on so you can consult your crim pro casebook (althought you might be able to ask for some time to formulate a thorough response). I also wonder, to be candid, if making exams closed book would spread the grades more. I would love to hear what other folks’ thoughts are on the issue.

  April 27, 2009 at 8:28 am   Posted in: Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   9 Comments

First Amendment Theory Study Aid: Make No Law

posted by Neil Richards

Thanks to Dan and everyone else for inviting me back (and then putting up with me as I delayed accepting the invitation). At this time of the year, as the semester ends and the opportunities for faculty writing time increase, student attention turns understandably towards exams. I’ve been teaching the basic First Amendment course at Wash. U. for six years now, and the more I have taught the course, the more interested I have become in the theory and structure of free speech law at the expense of its often technical doctrinal rules. As my course has evolved to reflect these interests, my students understandably have asked me to suggest a study aid that could supplement some of the things I talk about in class (though “gibberish” may be more accurate). For doctrine, I have always suggested the First Amendment section of Erwin Chemerinsky’s excellent one-volume treatise Constitutional Law. But I always struggled to suggest a good, one-volume, accessible primer on the history and theory of the First Amendment. But in rereading Anthony Lewis’ Make No Law (Vintage 1991) for a paper earlier this semester, I think I might have found the answer. Lewis’ book tells the story of the landmark 1964 case of New York Times v. Sullivan, which applied rigorous First Amendment scrutiny to state defamation law, and held the “core meaning” of the First Amendment to be criticism of public officials. What I had forgotten about the book is the masterful and accessible way that Lewis situates the Times case in the evolution of First Amendment thought more broadly, both in its intellectual origins in the work of Milton, Madison, Holmes, and Brandeis, as well as in its effect on First Amendment law more generally. It’s not perfect; Lewis has a tendency at times to be uncritical of the Court’s opinion in Times and to view the result as foreordained. But although it is a bit of a hagiography of the case, its early chapters are the best basic treatment of elementary First Amendment history and theory that I’ve seen. So I thought I’d pass it on, should any First Amendment teachers or students feel the need to brush up on their free speech theory as we approach the business end of the semester.

  April 21, 2009 at 11:53 am   Posted in: Book Reviews, Constitutional Law, First Amendment, Law School (Teaching), Teaching   Print This Post   No Comments

My Laptop Ban

posted by Sarah Waldeck

Ever since Eugene Volokh shared the results of his laptop experiment, the blogosphere has been talking more than usual about laptop bans. This is the second semester I’ve banned laptops and at this point I’d describe myself as a ban enthusiast. The reasons for this enthusiasm are nothing new: my class is more engaged, class room discussions have improved, and students are asking better questions. I also hadn’t realized how difficult it is to talk to the back of a laptop screen until I made everyone close them. On this point, I would echo Howard Wasserman: I’m a better teacher when I can actually see my students’ faces. Finally, I think that the process of note-taking on a laptop often short-circuits the learning process. Kevin Yamamoto has summarized some of the research on this point here. A couple of things, however, did catch me by surprise.

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  March 10, 2009 at 2:55 pm   Posted in: Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   24 Comments

How is Tom Barr Like Shane Battier: Or, Measuring Individuals’ Roles in Group Success

posted by Dave Hoffman

Michael Lewis recently published a Times Magazine story on NBA player Shane Battier. The article is largely an anecdotally driven portrait of Battier, a player who supposedly makes his teammates better and opposing players worse, while engrossing few individual gains. But the Houston Rockets, who employ Battier, recognize his value, because they’ve finally cracked the nut of regressing success in group sports. According to Lewis, the Rockets use a sophisticated plus-minus measure:

One well-known statistic the Rockets’ front office pays attention to is plus-minus, which simply measures what happens to the score when any given player is on the court. In its crude form, plus-minus is hardly perfect: a player who finds himself on the same team with the world’s four best basketball players, and who plays only when they do, will have a plus-minus that looks pretty good, even if it says little about his play. Morey says that he and his staff can adjust for these potential distortions — though he is coy about how they do it — and render plus-minus a useful measure of a player’s effect on a basketball game. A good player might be a plus 3 — that is, his team averages 3 points more per game than its opponent when he is on the floor. In his best season, the superstar point guard Steve Nash was a plus 14.5. At the time of the Lakers game, Battier was a plus 10, which put him in the company of Dwight Howard and Kevin Garnett, both perennial All-Stars. For his career he’s a plus 6. “Plus 6 is enormous,” Morey says. “It’s the difference between 41 wins and 60 wins.”

The problem with the article is that it offers no perspective at all on how the Rockets tweak the statistic to make it useful and a competitive advantage. In that sense, the piece could be thought of as Moneyball III: This Time With No Data and No Human Interest. (Moneyball Had Data; Blind Side had a compelling story; this piece is unripe on both fronts.)

Nevertheless, in some quarters Lewis’s work has again caught the attention of legal innovators. Jim Chen, who has already opined that Deans should use a version of plus-minus to evaluate faculty performance, suggests that Battier is a promising case study: “the single factor that makes a great team player is the mirror image of the single factor that turns even the most productive scholar into a toxic Arschloch: selfishness.” To which an astute commentator responded: “If anything, a stats-driven evaluation process will almost certainly lead to the Battiers of academia being under-rewarded, rather than the reverse. Wouldn’t it be enough to reward those who just seem to distinguish themselves by their selflessness? . . . Note that, even within the NBA — in which it is much easier to do a plus/minus assessment — Battier gets undervalued by most teams, and if he weren’t still riding a six year contract would probably get paid a lot less even by the Rockets.”

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  March 2, 2009 at 12:32 pm   Posted in: Corporate Finance, Economic Analysis of Law, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Rankings), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   4 Comments

How I teach cumulative voting

posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger

I use M&M’s, of course.

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  February 25, 2009 at 4:50 pm   Posted in: Corporate Law, Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   3 Comments

Mid-terms and more?

posted by Jason Mazzone

This is the time of the year when 1Ls have received their first set of law school grades and are asking what went right, what went wrong, and what they can do differently the next time around. These conversations inevitably raise the point that the final exam counts for the entire grade for the course. Many students who do poorly consider this unfair: they do all the work during the semester but none of that is rewarded if they have an off-day when the exam is given. In thinking recently about this issue, I have been asking upper-level students whether they would preferred as 1Ls to have had mid-terms and a series of other graded assignments during the semester so that less depended upon the final exam. Under the model I suggested to them, the professor would give back the graded assignment so students would know how they were doing during the semester. Many of these students have taken seminars and other upper-level courses in which there is component grading. The feedback I have received from upper-level students has surprised me.

Upper-level students tell me to stick with final exam as final grade model. This is as true of students who did very well as of students who did poorly during their first year. These students tell me that component grading would have been much more work for them because they would have had to prepare for every graded assignment. (More work for professors, too, of course.) In addition, they say, component grading would increase the level of stress during the first year. Their reasoning is that students would be worried about every assignment; that getting a bad grade on a mid-term or other assignment would make them panic; and that it is less stressful to get a grade after the course has ended (and, in the spring semester, after everyone has headed off for the summer). Even if they would have done better under a component grading system, the costs, they say, are not worth the grade bump.

  February 8, 2009 at 12:01 pm   Posted in: Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   8 Comments

Singing in the Classroom

posted by Dave Hoffman

It’s not just for Christine Hurt, the Kelo-haters, the singing contract professors , and various other folks who’ve fessed up. Now, thanks to Microsoft, every professor can create a professionally-produced song for their students.

(If you can take the heat.)

  January 25, 2009 at 12:11 pm   Posted in: Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   One Comment

In Defense of Mr. and Ms. So-and-So

posted by Nate Oman

Over at Prawfs, Jay Wexler confesses that early on his “Doofus-Prevention System” caused him to give up on calling students by their last names. My own DPS being considerably less developed, I actually call all of my students by their last names, at least in class. Of course, the sad truth is that I am really bad at remembering names of all kinds, and I regularly screw-up even my own students’ last names. I had been married for several years before I was able to sort out all of the names in my wife’s extended family. I am still working on all of the names in my own. Given that some sizable proportion of the male law student population is named “Matt” I might be better off simply dispensing with last names entirely. Still, I keep last names because I actually think that there is some pedagogical and social value to formality.

In part this is probably simple insecurity. I arrived at William & Mary the summer before my first semester teaching, and after I had been at the school for several weeks one of my deans confessed that she had seen me around the building and thought that I was a student. More recently, a 1L who was working the reference desk in the library tried to keep me from using the faculty copier because, he informed me, “those are only for professors.” His look of horror when I informed him that I was a professor was priceless, although come to think of it, I don’t actually know if the horror was caused by his own faux-pas or the knowledge that he was at an institution that would let me be a professor. I console myself with the knowledge that many of my senior colleagues would love to be mistaken for students.

I do think, however, that a little formality does more than provide a security blanket for the gravitas-challenged like myself. I’m not a hard-core curmudgeon on this, but I do think that there is real value in carving off the class room as a social space where students are encouraged to see themselves as playing a certain role. I believe in being friendly with students, but I also want them to feel like when they are in my class we are engaged in something more than friendly banter. I am mindful, of course, that the detailed discussions of the UCC or the doctrine of consideration may be sufficient to signal this without insisting on calling students Ms. So-and-So, but I still think that a bit of formality is a useful reminder. Finally, I think that addressing students by their last names with a Mr. or Ms. attached encourages them to think of themselves as adults engaged in an adult enterprise. More importantly, it is part of how I signal to them that I think of them as grown-ups embarked upon a profession rather than kids involved in the great and fun-filled hiatus between high school and grown-up-dom of undergraduate education.

  December 10, 2008 at 9:59 am   Posted in: Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   18 Comments

Exam Writing History: The Fall of the Monster Issue Spotter?

posted by Dave Hoffman

Like many professors, I’ve been spending much of my time this past week putting together my exam (this semester, I’m teaching a Human Behavior Colloquium and Corporations). In doing so, I’ve been thinking about the tension between an old poll I did on best exam writing practices and the comments that it engendered. In particular, I was interested in the possibility that short-answer questions and multiple choice have been on the rise of late in law school exams.

I believe, based on conversations with older lawyers, that back-in-the-day (which is much more recent than it used to be) most law school exams consisted of one, two, or at most three large issue spotter questions. (LISQs) LISQs in turn gave rise to IRAQ, which is a terrific idea if executed with enough preparation and facts on the ground. But over time, in seems, more professors have turned to multiple choice, true-false, short-answer, and other forms of evaluation.

You might be tempted to think that this choice was caused by the movement toward higher academic output standards, since there is a well-known relationship between the intensity of teaching/grading and articles one produces. Or you might think this is pure laziness/Arschlochkeit in action. But I think that there’s an alternative hypothesis: the law has gotten much more technical and complex over time, making it harder to test in one LISQ even a fair proportion of the materials covered in class. Compare, for example, administrative law or corporate law from a generation ago to today, and I think you will find exponential increases in the amount of caselaw, density of the regulatory statutes, and the theoretical nuance of the commentators. Since most professors feel some obligation to test what they teach, smaller, more discrete, questions become more attractive. This despite the fact that law professors are given almost no guidance on how to write exams, and (especially) how to design multiple choice or true/false questions so that they don’t mislead students.

We could test this hypothesis if we could identify an area of law that has resisted the turn toward complexity, and compared the design of old and new exams. I’m thinking perhaps property law fits the bill? Shucks, now that RAP is dead, that course is a cinch.

  December 8, 2008 at 7:07 pm   Posted in: Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   14 Comments

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