Thinking Like a Lawyer
At the start of each academic year, I cannot help but to think of Professor Kingsfield, the notorious contracts professor in The Paper Chase. The various classroom scenes where Professor Kingsfield grills student after student on classic contracts cases like Hawkins v. McGee have for years served as a sort of example of the “typical” 1L experience with the dreaded Socratic method.
While Professor Kingsfield surely sits at one end of the spectrum for professorial style, the Socratic method he uses endures. It is, as one text notes, law school’s “signature pedagogy.” It’s the way the law school professors across the country have been teaching law students about legal analysis for more than a century.
And students learn. They begin their first year of law school with, to paraphrase Professor Kingsfield, “a head full of mush.” Even by the end of that first semester, though, most 1Ls have developed an ability to turn that mush into cogent analysis, to make fine-line distinctions, to look for weaknesses in another’s argument, and to argue both sides of any issue; in other words, they learn to “think like a lawyer.” This “thinking like a lawyer” is undoubtedly a necessary professional skill; however, mastering the process can come at a personal cost.
For all of the successes of the Socratic method, some have argued that it has serious flaws. Most recently, Professor Elizabeth Mertz has criticized the Socratic method because of its “acontextual context.” She notes that the Socratic method virtually ignores morality and social context in its attempt to teach students “objective” analysis.
As we officially open the school year, I have been thinking a lot about what are the secrets to success in law school. I understand that Dean Rofes spoke at Orientation about the sausage races at Miller Park. (I personally always root for the Chorizo Sausage!) Law school may sometimes feel a bit like a race, or, to think more classically about Aesop’s fables, like the story of the Tortoise and the Hare. In that story, the tortoise ultimately wins the race using slow and steady steps to the finish line.