Page 300 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
basic skills that I learned and employed in practice was communicated in the classroom.
For many students, law school is seen as valuable, not just because graduating from one is a condition precedent (there’s a legal concept) to practicing, but also because it is at law school that you are taught to “think [and act] like a lawyer.” I suppose that that means that, in some sense, you are taught to appreciate the nuances of language, to speak and write with precision, to read closely, to think under pressure, to make distinctions, and to reason closely. If you are taught to do those things at law school, you are taught to do them in your first-year courses, most likely in your very first semester. You are taught them in the caul- dron created by the professors in your introductory courses, and you learn them under the pressure of a relentless barrage of questions— under the pressure, that is, of the “Socratic method.” If you had experienced the freshman year at Amherst in 1961–1962, none of this would be new to you, and you would be far less likely to be impressed by the experience.
So, if learning how to think like a lawyer, at least as the law schools view it, is not new to you, you might justifiably think that law school would teach you something about actual practice. But here’s the rub. The better the law school is or aspires to be, the less that it wants to be viewed as a “trade school.” It seeks professors who are uniformly very smart to brilliant, who thrive on theory, and who make their reputations, for the most part, by writing. Few, in my experience, actually practiced before getting in front of a second- or third-year class, and fewer still actually practiced before getting in front of a first-year class.
And the fact that the “case method” (the reading and discussing of opinions that were rendered by appellate courts) is generally the method that is used to teach students in introductory courses only adds to that problem—or, in any event, illustrates it. The case method makes sense because it is in the context of controversy that issues are defined with a certain degree of clarity. Thus, cases become a tool to spark controversy in class and, in the end, insight. When I taught—and I always taught second- or third-year students—I found it natural to use the case
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