Legal Commentary

When I was in my first year of law school, I remember periodically returning to the same thought about the way law school classes were taught: "This is so inefficient."  I was actually enjoying most of my classes, but still, the basic approach of having us read cases on our own and then spend class time answering questions about them seemed backward to me.  Why wasn't the professor starting out by explaining the basic principles to us, and then having us read and discuss the cases to see how they illustrated (or deviated from) them? 

So I was fascinated to read Prawfs-blogger Eric Johnson's "A Populist Manifesto for Learning the Law" in the current Journal of Legal Education.  Eric argues that "law professors should cease to regard as sacrosanct the process of learning law through the reading of judicial opinions."  What's more, he spends the first few days of his Torts and IP classes providing an overview (through lectures) of the blackletter law.  He then has the class start over, working through the doctrine again with a casebook.  This is exactly the model I envisioned during my 1L year.

What gives me pause, though, is the epiphany (or at least it seemed that way to me at the time!) that I remember having during the summer after my 1L year, when I was interning for a federal judge.  I was thrown into working on lots of different cases, including ones in legal areas that I knew nothing about.   I often ended up teaching myself the relevant law -- by reading judicial decisions.   That summer gave me a new appreciation for the casebook method and the experience I'd gotten in having to make sense of cases on my own.   I had similar experiences throughout my time in practice.  So now, as a law professor, I find myself sticking much more closely to the model that I'd originally questioned as a student.  But I do spend more time in class answering questions and providing end-of-class summaries than I remember my professors doing.   I think Eric is right that many students think law professors "hide the ball," and that is something I really want to avoid.

What about the rest of you--how do you balance the competing considerations of having your students learn to teach themselves the law, while not having them feel like you're hiding the ball?