Ponderings of a Law Professor: Where Are Women’s Voices?

I hated the silence.  In law school classes where the professor relied solely on volunteers, I hated the silence and ended up raising my hand more often than not.  I found I was most interested and engaged in class not when there was lecture but when there was some sort of dialogue, and there needs to be more than one voice to dialogue.  I didn’t really want to hear my own voice all the time (and I’m certain my classmates didn’t want to hear it all the time, either), but I would offer it if no one else spoke up.

Maybe I’m remembering myself speaking more than I actually did.  Or maybe I was an anomaly.  A female law student quoted in a recent National Jurist postsaid that “it feels like men do most of the talking during class discussions.” And indeed they might.  Data from the 2010 Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) suggest that women do not speak up as much as men in law school classes.  The National Jurist reports that according to the LSSSE, which for 2010 surveyed 25,000 law students at 77 law schools, 47% of women students frequently ask questions in class, while 56% of male students do.  This, LSSSE notes, is an area “that needs attention.”

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Mediation Tournament a Great Learning Experience

Two weeks ago I had to opportunity to compete in a mediation tournament. This tournament involved three rounds where each student rotated from round to round playing an attorney, a client, and a mediator. Being a participant and working with my fellow teammates has increased my understanding and skills as an attorney and a mediator.   In preparation for the tournament each of the competitors underwent a training session on effective mediation. Not only were we there to represent our schools in competition, but the session before the tournament provided us with an additional teaching element.

Round One: Attorney in a landlord-tenant action My client was involved in eviction proceedings against an intimidating ex-hockey player who refused to pay rent.  

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“If I’d Wanted to Teach About Feelings, I Wouldn’t Have Become a Law Professor”

That’s the intriguing title of a new paper by Andrea Schneider, Melissa Nelken, and Jamil Nahaud.  The title expresses the authors’ mock horror at the thought of “bringing feelings into the room when teaching negotiation.”  They recognize that legal education is not exactly known for helping students to get in touch with their feelings: “learning ‘to think like a lawyer’ has traditionally favored cognition and ignored the powerful role of emotions in all human undertakings.”  Yet, they are convinced that law students will benefit from studying emotions:

One of the goals of focusing on feelings in a negotiation class is to help students learn that they can be emotionally engaged with clients and, therefore, with their own work as lawyers without becoming identified with them. Lawyers who understand clients at an emotional level are better able to represent the client’s needs.  And a lawyer who is sensitive to the emotional cues of his counterparts in a negotiation is better able to navigate the tricky waters of dispute resolution in a way that satisfies his client’s needs without riding roughshod over the other parties involved.

After laying out the benefits of covering emotions in a negotiation class, the authors then provide several practical examples of how negotiation teachers can effectively incorporate a study of feelings into the classroom experience.

This paper is just one of three new papers by Andrea on various aspects of teaching negotiation, all of which appear as chapters in Venturing Beyond the Classroom (Honeyman et al., eds. 2010).  The abstracts and links for the other two appear after the jump.

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