I’ve read Mike and Paul’s recent posts on classroom “rigor” with great interest, both as a relatively new law teacher, and because “rigor” was a significant topic of discussion at our faculty retreat this weekend. We attempted to generate a universal definition for “rigor” in legal education, one that not only leaves appropriate room for academic freedom and individual teaching styles, but also one that students will understand and respect. The law student as “consumer” viewpoint explored in Paul’s post is one we have encountered at our institution, and it was discussed at the retreat.
My sense is that the law student as consumer viewpoint generally does not reflect a student belief that a legal education should not be terribly rigorous, but rather that rigor should be largely student self-defined: I pay a lot to be here and earned my spot through hard work, so I should determine when and how I will approach my education with rigor, subject to the institution’s overall academic standards. You, teacher, should just give me the knowledge I need to pursue rigor on my own.
A view on student-defined rigor, and a question for readers, after the break:
Although I understand this law student as consumer position, in my view it doesn’t work in legal education for several reasons. And, at least one of these reasons should resonate with the consumer-minded law student. A legal education does not only involve the acquisition of new information, a straightforward knowledge set the necessary rigor for which experienced students might be able to gauge fairly well. A legal education also requires the acquisition of a whole new skill set, a new methodology for problem-solving. I can’t imagine that most individuals unschooled in a new and challenging skill set accurately can gauge whether they are working effectively to master it without regular illustration of the expectations held by the teacher. The insecurities expressed by many new law students reflect this learning dynamic: it’s about much more than whether you know all the cases or rules.
I do not mean that all law students need to work exactly as hard to do well; we all know that some law students succeed at exam time with less work input. But classroom rigor for me is not about mandating uniform work input levels as much as demonstrating performance expectations in a new field of study for students. If my classroom standards fail to demonstrate the output levels that I expect on an exam because I don’t want unnecessarily to push a few students to input more work than they ultimately may need to, many students in the class will be left to a very unpleasant and unfair surprise come exam time – as well as come bar time and practice time. I would think consumer-minded law students would appreciate classroom rigor for this very reason: in a rigorous classroom environment, whatever the work input levels, if a student can hang in class, he or she can count on being ready for the exam; and if not, the student will know that he or she has more work to do.
That’s just one reason. But now a question: How would you as a law teacher, student or ex-student define the necessary “rigor” that students need to encounter in legal education to succeed as lawyers?
Posted by Brooks Holland on October 8, 2006 at 04:32 PM
Comments
Patrick: That’s a really interesting distinction you draw between “intellectual challenge” and “learning a great deal” in law school on the one hand, and learning “how to be a lawyer” on the other. I wonder whether two really are so separate from each other, although as a current law professor I recognize that I have a vested interest in not thinking so! 🙂 What are the things law profs should be teaching in law school to prepare students to become good lawyers?
Posted by: Brooks | Oct 13, 2006 12:14:44 PM
Brooks wrote: “If “law professors can’t or won’t actually help students become good lawyers,” what accounts for the numbers of tremendous lawyers out there? Are they all self-taught, essentially?”
Yes. And its “won’t,” not “can’t.”
Law school was a fun, intellectually challenging period of my life. I learned a great deal.
How to be a lawyer and how to do a job as a lawyer were not part of this. It could have been, I am sure, but it was not.
Posted by: Patrick | Oct 13, 2006 10:57:23 AM
‘You know I’m right’: A very valid observation about the perceived lack of connection between law school classes and exams, and one of the reasons I asked the question. I myself recall law school courses where professors hammered us in class on difficult theory and then tested on commercial outline doctrinal points that seemed to make 90% of class irrelevant to the exam. But not all did, and I really appreciated those courses that did both – and I still learned important things from those that did not when I began to look past my exams. If “law professors can’t or won’t actually help students become good lawyers,” what accounts for the numbers of tremendous lawyers out there? Are they all self-taught, essentially?
Gadfly: I didn’t mean that law school teaches an entirely “new” mode of reasoning in the relative sense you seemed to infer, just “new” to students arriving in law school. I’m sure many other graduate programs that emphasize logical reasoning skills teach comparable skill sets, although not every law student I’ve seen with a Master’s degree or PhD in philosophy, economics or political science, for example, necessarily makes a great lawyer from the get go. As to your second point, maybe I’m equally misreading your comment, but I think your point may have been my own – I don’t push for high classroom performance because I’m terribly interested in modeling how students should perform in class. Rather, I try to push high performance expectations in class because I want to model for students what legal analytical skills will be expected on the exam and, I believe, in practice. My concern with your hypothetical student is that I do not know how accurately she can gauge whether her understanding in fact matches the professor’s performance expectations. But, maybe this concern returns me to “You know I’m right’s” point that I “vastly overestimat[e] the importance of individual professors and classes to a student’s future career.” ☺
Posted by: Brooks | Oct 9, 2006 12:11:04 AM
I’m skeptical that law school teaches an entirely new way of reasoning, and believe that it simply familiarizes students with certain terminology and concepts; logic is logic. Imho, the reason why less humble lawyers pride themselves on being able to understand everything is not because they are trained as lawyers; it’s because logic is universally applicable.
But given it does:
I may be misreading your post, but I think you’re conflating expectations of growth in analytical skill level with expectations of total classroom performance. The latter will involve the memorization of facts, perhaps many facts, and the analyses which follow.
Total classroom performance = analytical-skill * labor-spent-reading-assigned-cases
The professor might provide important benchmarks for growth in legal-analytical-skills, but that often seems muddled with simply expectations of labor.
Suppose a student reads and prepares one case out of three, and sees how well her analysis matches with the teacher’s. And she does the same the next class. And so forth. Wouldn’t that enable her to measure her growth in analytical skill against your expectations, while not meeting your labor expectations?
Perhaps that is all the rigor required.
Also… one would think that 1L students who are told at the outset “we’re teaching you how to think” and to view the cases as learning exercises to that end, will grow rapidly bored with assignments of several cases at a time if the student easily can analyze those cases.
And I’m speaking as someone who finds cases fun and the Socratic method entertaining.
Posted by: gadfly987 | Oct 8, 2006 10:29:56 PM
In philosophy and the social sciences, the more the words like ‘rigor’ and ‘robustness’ are bandied about it’s time to read between the lines, to detect further signs of intellectual insecurity and the quest for elusive certainty. There just seems to be an inverse correlation between verbal employment and their presence as concrete intellectual virtues. It might be different in law school.
Posted by: Patrick S. O’Donnell | Oct 8, 2006 8:09:50 PM
“How would you as a law teacher, student or ex-student define the necessary “rigor” that students need to encounter in legal education to succeed as lawyers?”
Well, I will give you one way in which how I would *not* define the necessary rigor: parsing cases into their various component and reciting those components back to the professor. Reading and memorize the facts of 10 cases may be rigorous, but it is frequently useless.
1L year indoctrinates students into thinking that the proper way to analyze a legal issue is to “find the case on point.” Given that Congress cranks out thousands of pages of legislation each year, there is more often than not a “case on point,” and the rigors of legal practice involve parsing statutes and regulations, not distinguishing one case from another “on the facts,” etc.
I do think that 1L year should be rigorous, and of course learning how to read cases is important. But the current system is overkill. Profs should feel free to throw piles of work on students, but that work must not consist of parsing one case after another.
My idea of rigor would be to train students to recognize that the “law” comes from numerous sources and teach them to wade through those numerous sources to determine what the law is. This is not an easy task– there may be cases, regulations, agency decisions, statutes, treaties, and legislative history relevant to a legal issue. Most law students are only able to analyze the cases on point (though I’m inclined to blame the law schools, and not the students, for this). It takes a long time to understand how these various sources interesect with one another, and professors should rigorously demand that their students take steps to reach that understanding.
Less time needs to be spent on teaching 1Ls the “law and economics” method, etc.– save discussion of “theories” for 3L seminars. I agree that learning “law and economics” may be rigorous, but again, it is useless. Unless a statute’s terms incorporate economic concepts (e.g. “unfair trade practices”), then the economic analysis of a statute is irrelevant; the question is whether a given interpretation effects the intent of the legislature, not whether that interpretation is efficient or inefficient.
Training students in “law and economics” may make them smarter people, but rigor is not an end to itself. Though professors may (wisely) prefer academia to practice, surely they should be cognizant of the fact that they are training future lawyers, and generally not future professors.
Posted by: andy | Oct 8, 2006 7:58:32 PM
It sounds like you’re vastly overestimating the importance of individual professors and classes to a student’s future career. Let’s be honest: a professor’s questions in class have nothing to do with the content of the exam, and exams have nothing to do with practice.
Students understand this quite well, but law school is a hoop one has to jump through to become a lawyer, so people do it. Since law professors can’t or won’t actually help students become good lawyers, students just want the professor not to make the process needlessly painful.
Posted by: You know I’m right. | Oct 8, 2006 7:52:25 PM