Archive for the ‘Teaching’ Category

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

Teaching Constitutional Law

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I’ve been working on my Con Law syllabus for next semester.  I must admit that I find Con Law the most difficult course to teach, even though it’s the subject that I enjoy the most.  Why is that?

Read the rest of this post »

  October 8, 2009 at 7:19 am   Posted in: Teaching   Print This Post   5 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

Using a Teacher’s Manual

posted by Elizabeth Nowicki

Textbooks and casebooks often have accompanying teacher’s manuals. These manuals range from limited, rambling copies of the textbook author’s classroom notes to detailed discussions of the book’s materials and related course structuring issues and classroom questions.

I have not really used a teacher’s manual over the years, in part because it was not an option when I started teaching years ago as I started teaching with a casebook that did not have a teacher’s manual. Later, when I began using books that did have teacher’s manuals, I did not always agree with the manual or the suggestions made therein, so I never really consulted the manuals.

That said, I will be working with a colleague on his teacher’s manual, so I am curious about what other professors find useful in a teacher’s manual. My impression is that a teacher’s manual should be geared toward:
(a) the new teacher who has never taught anything before,
(b) the teacher who is picking up a certain class to fill a curricular need, outside her/his area of primary expertise, or
(c) the teacher who needs help with the basics of a certain limited aspect of his course (such as tax in a mergers & acquisitions class).

Am I correct on the sort of faculty who tend to extensively use a teacher’s manual or are their teachers out there who do not fit the above parameters who find teaching manuals useful?

Perhaps it is best to ask professors who are reading this post: What would the ideal teacher’s manual include, and would an outstanding teacher’s manual sway you in favor of adopting a particular book for your class?

(Does this blog have a “poll” function, and should I know how to use it?)

  August 28, 2009 at 4:13 pm   Posted in: Teaching   Print This Post   11 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

UCLA Law Review 56:4 (April 2009)

posted by UCLA Law Review

Volume 56, Issue 4 (April 2009)

Articles

A Constitutional Birthright: The State, Parentage, and the Rights Of Newborn Persons (pdf)

James G. Dwyer

“Which Is To Be Master,” The Judiciary or the Legislature? When Statutory Directives Violate Separation Of Powers (pdf)

Linda D. Jellum

Normative Methods for Lawyers (pdf)

Joseph William Singer

Comment

Sex Outside of the Therapy Hour: Practical and Constitutional Limits on Therapist Sexual Misconduct Regulations (pdf)

S. Wesley Gorman

  April 19, 2009 at 5:11 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law, Family Law, Law Rev (UCLA), Law Rev Forum, Legal Theory, Teaching   Print This Post   No Comments

Law School Field Trips

posted by Sarah Waldeck

This morning I accompanied a group of kindergarten students on their field trip to a planetarium. The whole experience left me musing about how at some point in one’s education the field trip just disappears. The quintessential field trip, which is undertaken despite the knowledge that some students will simply goof around on the bus, reflects the belief that even the uninterested are enriched by participating. But by high school, not to mention law school, the general enrichment trip is replaced with targeted opportunities for students with particular interests. (Think clinics and externships.)

So, here’s my question: if you were planning a series of field trips for 1Ls, where would you take them? I’d start with a tour of a prison, which would be bound to leave some sort of impression. I’d also like to arrange for each student to spend a full shift in a squad car, although I’m not sure how to pull that off for an entire first year class. (Also, the Estates and Trusts professor in me would like everyone near Philadelphia to visit the Barnes Foundation and see what all the fuss is about. That, however, may be a bit too targeted for my list, which is aimed at general legal enrichment.)

Suggestions, anyone?

  March 24, 2009 at 12:40 pm   Posted in: Teaching   Print This Post   17 Comments

Prime Time is Crime Time

posted by Corey Yung

During the week, one can watch an incredible number of crime-themed television shows. Just on the major networks during prime time, a coach potato with a DVR can view Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, Without a Trace, NCIS, The Mentalist, Fringe, Criminal Minds, Life on Mars, Lie to Me, Bones, Numb3rs, Cold Case, Cops, and America’s Most Wanted. There are also highly rated cable shows like The Closer and Monk. Not too long ago, the greatest crime show of them all, The Wire, ended. A decent number of these shows are watched by law students on a regular basis. There are also scores of crime-related movies that students have viewed.

One of my the things I like most about teaching Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure is that students often come into the class filled with opinions and “knowledge” about the two subjects from popular culture. That background makes for very lively discussions and even students who have no interest in criminal law often have strong opinions about the subject. I can also tap into that knowledge base by using television and movie examples, including using movie clips during class. However, the downside of all of that cultural baggage is that I often have to account for all of the bits of misinformation that my students might have.

Lately, I have been wondering if the problems associated with that misinformation have been growing. Once upon a time, the show Law & Order cited real New York cases and discussed legal issues in a way that was at least connected to reality. Perhaps based upon those fond memories, I still have the show on my DVR schedule despite the fact that it has taken a turn for the worse in recent years. The same week that I was teaching the first day of mens rea, I sat down to watch a few Law & Order episodes that I had recorded. In one episode, the defense made a bizarre suppression motion which was granted. After the suppression motion was granted, the defense moved for dismissal on the grounds that there was no remaining evidence of motive. Astoundingly, the motion was granted with prejudice. So, as I am going to teach my class that motive is not an element of the crime and that motive is different than mens rea, television is sending a very different message.

I’m not hoping for something even close to approximating perfection in terms of legal accuracy from television. However, I wonder if these shows are even employing lawyers as consultants anymore. The way criminal law is being portrayed is often so far removed from reality that I cannot even guess at what strange ideas my students are hearing. I’m guessing this phenomenon is unique to criminal law, but I’d be interested to hear if teachers in other areas have similar problems. And I’m curious to see if other professors teaching Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure have observed any increase in legal inaccuracies in popular culture or among their students.

  March 13, 2009 at 5:33 pm   Posted in: Criminal Law, Teaching   Print This Post   11 Comments

Drop Everything and Emulate, IV

posted by Mark Edwards

What a joy it has been blogging here at Concurring Opinions. I thank Dan Solove and the rest of the crew for the opportunity, and I thank the commenters for the great e-conversations that have followed my posts. For my last post, I want to enter the last installment in the Drop Everything and Emulate series.

In 1948, a graduate of an undistinguished and then defunct law school, whose parents had been born in slavery, stood before the Supreme Court and, against the urging of some of the greatest legal minds of the 20th century, made an argument that had been unanimously rejected by state and federal courts, including the Supreme Court: that court enforcement of private racially restrictive covenants constituted state action and, as such, was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Against all odds, he won, and Shelley v. Kraemer became a guidepost for the civil rights revolution that followed. Less than two years later, he was dead, and today is rarely remembered.

Read the rest of this post »

  December 19, 2008 at 2:43 pm   Posted in: Teaching   Print This Post   3 Comments

Need a Great Torts Exam Fact Pattern?

posted by Mark Edwards

Every once in a while, God inexplicably smiles upon law professors. To wit:

Driver of school bus full of middle school basketball players hits deer. Driver doesn’t stop. Deer gets caught beneath bus. Deer ruptures fuel line. Bus, on fire, pulls into school parking lot, and explodes.

Behold.

Best of all: no one was hurt.

  December 16, 2008 at 3:03 pm   Posted in: Teaching   Print This Post   6 Comments

Drop Everything and Emulate, III

posted by Mark Edwards

Here’s a question I pose to my property students when we begin to study takings: is that property which the law declares to be property? Or, are there some things that can never be property, no matter what the law says?

It’s a simple question, but answering it has ripped entire nations into pieces, including the United States. It was U.S. Senator Henry Clay, arguing that abolishing slavery would be a massive taking that would require just compensation to the slave-owners, who said, “that is property which the law declares to be property.”

Once they realize the context of his statement, most students disagree with Clay. But that begs the next question: if the law doesn’t give us the final word on rights, including property rights, then what does?

I then take the opportunity to introduce them to a dapper young attorney who argued that that certain fundamental rights inhere in man – including property rights, and in particular the just allocation of property rights in natural resources.

Read the rest of this post »

  November 22, 2008 at 1:00 pm   Posted in: Property Law, Teaching   Print This Post   6 Comments

Drop Everything and Emulate

posted by Mark Edwards

My kids’ school had a program called “Drop Everything and Read.” The idea was that no matter what else was on the agenda, every once in a while the kids just stopped what they were doing and made time to actually read (I told my kids that in my rough school, I followed a program called Drop Everything and Run). The point was to prevent them from losing sight, amid the constant hustle and bustle of school, of the joy of learning and storytelling.

Law students often lose sight, amid the alternating grind and panic, of what they might be able to do with a law degree some day. I like to think we’re training them to be wise counselors, people to whom others turn for guidance when the going gets rough. But how do we show them that?

It seems to me that it’s worthwhile, every now and then, to drop everything and talk about some ordinary lawyer who, when history conspired to give them a choice between trying to help people who needed it, and turning away, chose to try. I think of it as “Drop Everything and Emulate.”

The criteria are that the lawyer must be either someone they’ve never heard of who tried like hell to help when needed, or someone who did great things, whom they never realized was a lawyer. And, there must be a tie-in with whatever we are studying at the time.

Last year, I chose the the 75th anniversary of the ‘Reichstag Fire’ Decree of February 28, 1933, to introduce my students to a lawyer named Hans Litten. We were studying zoning and takings at the time. Here’s what I told my students:

Read the rest of this post »

  November 5, 2008 at 10:43 pm   Posted in: Teaching   Print This Post   2 Comments

Thoughts on non-traditional legal writing

posted by Howard Wasserman

At Prawfs, Hillel Levin has a post asking for suggestions on where to place a short, somewhat tongue-in-cheek essay that nevertheless explores important legal ideas (I am looking forward to reading the paper). He is looking for suggestions as to where to place the article, noting that the writing game is somewhat “confining.” I added my two cents on possible outlets in the Comments, but I wanted to break out a broader point.

Hillel received a ton of good responses as to where he could place this article. And I think that suggests that the rules for legal writing in the academy are not as confining as Hillel’s post suggests. There actually are a lot of opportunities to write and publish short and fun pieces such as this one that make creative (and often important) legal points. Many journals will jump at them. The expansion of outlets, both in the number of journals as well as the addition of on-line supplements (that really were intended for precisely this sort of thing), means there is a place for this type of work. One of my great frustrations was my inability to place this piece (like Hillel’s, it was short, tongue-in-cheek, but, I think, hit on an interesting idea about the law) in some law journal forum, settling instead for FindLaw.

Of course, something like this does not “count” if you are at a school that counts publications and are just trying to meet the statutory minimum for promotion and tenure. But I think committed and successful scholars just keep writing, doing many different types of projects for many different forums, all of which form an overarching body of legal writing. The short piece that Hillel is describing is a perfect example of the sort of things that should be part of that corpus, in addition to the traditional books and big law review articles. And that is why I do not believe blogging is anathema to legal scholarship–it is another way of exercising the writing muscles.

  October 13, 2008 at 10:18 am   Posted in: Teaching   Print This Post   One Comment

Shiny Happy Laptopless Students

posted by Susan Kuo

As luck would have it, I stumbled into a laptop-free section this semester. What started as a decision of one of my section colleagues to stamp out the scourge of laptops in his class had a domino effect. A second colleague signed up and, suddenly, we all were members of the Laptopless Society.

Do I like it? You betcha!

How much do I like it? Let me count the ways.

I like it to the depth and breadth and height

Of my classroom, when marveling at the sight

Of 1Ls engaged in class discussion.

I like it to the level of my students’ gaze,

With which I now have a direct eye connection.

I like it freely, as the students set discourse ablaze;

I like it purely, as they turn from malaise.

I like it with a teaching passion once deflected

By the tops of student heads bent over their PCs.

I like it with a like that I formerly rejected

When looking out over a laptop sea, — I like my shiny

Happy, laptopless students! – and, unless otherwise directed,

I shall but like it better even after course evaluations skewer me.

  October 11, 2008 at 6:10 pm   Posted in: Education, Law School (Teaching), Teaching   Print This Post   No Comments

Teach Me

posted by Susan Kuo

I’ve been thinking a lot about teaching lately. Specifically, I’ve been wondering about my effectiveness in the classroom. After my 9:00 AM class, my 1L students line up at the podium to ask me questions – obviously a consequence of my uncanny ability to convey information in an unclear and unconcise manner. My upper-level students, however, make a beeline for the door as soon as I quit my yammering. So, either I morph into a paragon of teaching clarity in the hour that I have between these classes or my upper-level students prioritize lunch over knowledge. Or maybe they know that a trip to the podium would be futile.

How is it that so many of us (maybe I should just speak for myself) become teachers without any training on how to teach? Is teaching truly so unimportant that we’ll let most anyone (e.g., me) in the classroom? If it is unimportant, then why do we pass out teaching evaluations to our students? And why is it a factor in the promotion and tenure process?

Maybe the better question is “how can I improve?” I know that there are annual teaching conferences and panels on teaching methods at the January AALS. But do law schools offer training and mentoring on teaching to their faculty members? I’m curious to know what folks are doing at their schools. Continuing to exhort my class to “Love the One You’re With” when they grumble about my (or anyone else’s) teaching may be entertaining, but it doesn’t address their concerns.

  October 10, 2008 at 4:56 pm   Posted in: Education, Teaching   Print This Post   4 Comments

All RAs are Not Created Equal

posted by Dave Hoffman

At least, not for Larry Tribe:

Both allies and critics sometimes concluded that Mr. Obama was too gifted, or in too much of a hurry, for the tasks that consumed others.

“I thought of him much more as a colleague” than a student, said Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard for whom Mr. Obama worked. “I didn’t think of him as someone to send out on mechanical tasks of digging out all the cases.” Other students could do that, Professor Tribe added.

I love Larry Tribe. He is a gifted teacher, and amazing scholar, and, so far as I can tell, a genuinely decent person. (He brought a huge basket of granny smith apples to every conlaw class. When I was at HLS, this made him the most student-friendly professor at the place.) But this is a bad quote. Bad for Obama. Bad for the other RAs Tribe hired that year. And bad for those of us who think that digging out the cases is an act invested with a dignity and meaning all its own. Without the cases, after all, we’d be nothing more than history or philosophy professors! What did Larry and Barack do? Chat about the how to define “one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”?

  August 28, 2008 at 5:34 pm   Posted in: Teaching   Print This Post   6 Comments

Pedagogical Nomenclature

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

The traditional style of doctrinal illustrations in the American Law Institute’s Restatements of Law identifies parties by meaningless letters such as A, B, C and D. In Contracts, at least, it would be clearer for the illustrations to identify parties by meaningful normative categories they occupy, such as General-Sub, Company-Inventor, Buyer-Seller, Borrower-Lender, Father-Daughter, or even Promisor-Promisee, Obligor-Obligee and so on.

Using meaningless letters adds unnecessary, if slight, cognitive demand to exercises that should be maximally parsimonious. Normative categories in Contracts are especially useful to emphasize the context in which an exchange occurs. The abstract lettering system should be abandoned in future Restatements. A few examples from Illustrations to Section 227 of the Restatement (Second) of Contracts appear below.

Read the rest of this post »

  August 11, 2008 at 5:01 pm   Posted in: Teaching   Print This Post   3 Comments

The Hippo and the Panda Talk Teaching

posted by Sarah Lawsky

Hippo: Hey, Panda, did you see this study that says that students consistently give lower teaching evaluations to hippos than to pandas?

Panda: How do we know that’s true? I’m very sophisticated statistically, not to mention ridiculously cute due to the fact that I am a panda, and I can tell you that that study has a lot of flaws.

Hippo: But there are a lot of other studies like this, so can we just assume for the purposes of our conversation that it’s true?

Panda: Ok, let’s make that assumption. So maybe hippos get worse evaluations because hippos are just lousy teachers—maybe you all need to learn how to teach.

Read the rest of this post »

  July 18, 2008 at 9:01 am   Posted in: Teaching   Print This Post   9 Comments

Wait, What? Oh. Never Mind.

posted by Sarah Lawsky

Helpful law school tip! If you have a class that is taught using the Socratic method, you’re in luck! No need to prepare! You should be able to handle class using only the following phrases (all from Jowett’s translations of The Republic and Meno):

You are quite right.

Certainly not.

To be sure.

That is true.

Precisely.

Clearly.

Certainly.

That is the inference.

Assuredly not.

I think that what you say is quite true.

It cannot be otherwise.

And, my personal favorite–

I agree, as far as I am able to understand you.

  July 17, 2008 at 10:07 am   Posted in: Humor, Teaching   Print This Post   14 Comments

Teaching Evaluations

posted by Sarah Lawsky

I have been wondering lately about teaching evaluations: how they are best structured and analyzed, disseminated, and used to make decisions, and, in the larger scheme, how differing interests should be weighed as we address these issues. I have no answers, but I have a lot of questions (they follow after the jump).

I would love to hear people’s thoughts on the answers to these questions, or suggestions for more questions to add to the list. Also, I’m sure there has been a tremendous amount of research on all of these subjects, but unfortunately I’m entirely ignorant of it, so among other comments, I’d be very curious if anyone had particular reading they would recommend on these subjects. It would also be great to hear how other law schools approach these issues now, and how other law schools arrived at their decisions about to address these issues.

Read the rest of this post »

  July 16, 2008 at 9:14 am   Posted in: Teaching   Print This Post   5 Comments

• « Older Entries