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.
Stephen Jay Gould, the eminent scientist and Harvard professor, was interested in human pattern recognition in stories. He referred to the patterns that human minds want to create as “canonical stories.” His essay entitled “Jim Bowie’s Letter and Bill Buckner’s Legs”, which appears in I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History, describes two famous stories — one of Jim Bowie at the Alamo and the other of Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner. 
This past year I came across a terrific article by Professor Ruth Anne Robbins on using archetypes to develop a client’s story. (Harry Potter, Ruby Slippers and Merlin: Telling the Client’s Story Using the Characters and Paradigm of the Archetypal Hero’s Journey, 29 Seattle U. L. Rev. 767 (2006)). An archetype is an innate prototype, or epitome, of a personality. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung advanced the theory that some personality types or characteristics are universally recognized. The American mythologist Joseph Campbell was influenced by Carl Jung’s work on archetypes and considered how archetypes manifest in mythology. Professor Robbins examines how Jung’s and Campbell’s theories can be used in a practical litigation and courtroom setting.