Law in Contemporary Society

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Control the Narrative

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<		I believe that the way in which professors teach class and grade exams encourage students to focus less on the stories behind cases and more on creating useful generalizations that one can deploy under time pressure to apply to the facts. This is problematic because story telling is as integral a part of effective lawyering as is issue-spotting. Law schools should provide more opportunities for students to practice their story-telling skills; failing to do so might prove damaging, especially if we are the future of the law.
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>		I believe that the way in which professors teach class and grade exams encourages students to focus less on the stories behind cases and more on creating useful generalizations that one can deploy under time pressure to apply to exam fact patterns. This is problematic because story telling is as integral a part of effective lawyering as is issue-spotting. Law schools should provide more opportunities for students to practice their story-telling skills; failing to do so might prove damaging, especially if we are the future of the law.
 At the beginning of law school I learned that each case had a unique story behind it. Professors forced us to recount the facts of a case in detail before moving on to the legal issues in play. You might say: "and then the plaintiff cut his hand on the gear of the machine," and the professor would promptly correct: "you mean he cut his arm, right?" Initially this seemed tedious to me. His arm, his hand, -- who cares -- let's get to the interesting part - the reasoning. However, I soon changed my opinion. The more cases we studied, the more important the factual details became. Two cases with seemingly identical facts would be decided differently. A closer comb-through usually brought to light a minuscule factual distinction of monumental importance. By continually going through this exercise I came to recognize that each case was different, albeit sometimes only slightly.

Revision 10r10 - 11 Jul 2012 - 05:33:18 - PrashantRai
Revision 9r9 - 10 Jul 2012 - 03:47:13 - PrashantRai
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