Reminiscing About Legal Education – How Technology Changed Examinations, Course Materials, and Instruction

[Editor’s Note: This month, we asked a few veteran faculty members to share their reflections on what has changed the most in legal education since they became law professors. This post is the second in the series.]

In 1983 when I became a law professor, no one had a personal computer.  Dictaphones were a common piece of office equipment.  Secretaries typed our syllabi, handouts, and examinations. Examinations had to be reproduced on the mimeograph machine and collated by hand. Of course, students handwrote exam answers in bluebooks.  The law school didn’t allow students to type their answers, even if they offered to provide their own portable typewriters.

Around 1985 faculty members received personal desktop computers for the first time, thanks to Dean Frank DeGuire’s advocacy and generous donations from the members of the Woolsack Society. Those computers changed our lives and made instruction so much more efficient, especially once we learned how to press “Escape,” “Transfer,” and “Save” to save a document to a 5 ½” floppy disk. (Lost documents were a constant problem for neophyte computer users.)  

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The Making of a Law Professor

There’s an adage in law that claims that the students who earned As in law school become law professors, the students who earned Bs become partners, and the students who earned Cs become judges.  I can’t verify that the adage is correct, but there is some truth to the first part.  Typically law professors had excellent law school grades.  But that’s not all.  They often members of their school’s law review, and most have held at least one – sometimes two – judicial clerkships.  A good number also spent a couple of years in practice.

As my colleague Gordon Hylton recently noted, such qualifications are considered indicators of the person’s potential to teach law.  The irony here is that few law professors have any background in education or pedagogy and even fewer have any experience teaching. And while law schools often support a new professor as she develops her classroom skills (through formal or informal mentoring or paying for the professor to attend conferences), law schools don’t offer any formal training in teaching law.  Generally, a law professor’s only real teaching qualification is that she once was a law student.

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Growing Pains

I recently had the opportunity to re-read the personal statement I submitted with my Marquette Law School application, now almost three years ago, for one of my current classes.  While many things had changed—for example I am now far less idealistic, definitely less “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” and no longer have a passion for criminal law—the opening and closing statements still ring true and effectively capture the development as a person and future lawyer I have experienced during my law school career at Marquette.  As the new class of future Marquette attorneys has only recently began this journey at Eckstein Hall, I wanted to write a blog post to them explaining what I think the most influential and important aspects of my almost-complete legal education have been.

“When a butterfly struggles to free itself from its cocoon, it causes fluid to be pumped back into its wings. This independent act of vigilance, determination, and extreme effort is what allows the butterfly to take flight. This fact has inspired me as I enter the next phase of my life, and has shaped my perception of law school’s purpose. I enter the ‘cocoon’ of law school well-prepared and with the knowledge that with conviction and a lot of hard work, after three years I too will take flight.”

The above paragraph, while admittedly a bit hokey, was the opening to my personal statement.  It reminds me of a fact that Father O’Meara shares with the entering 1L class each year: it is common knowledge in biology “that growth occurs along places where there is tension, stimulation, or irritation.”  His point is that tension is necessary for both development and learning. These statements illustrate the personal growth I, and I’m assuming most other students, experience during law school. 

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