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PrashantRaiSecondPaper 11 - 01 Aug 2012 - Main.PrashantRai
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Control the Narrative | |
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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. | >
> | 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 they 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. | | | | |
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< | 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. | >
> | 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. Courts often decided differently two cases with seemingly identical facts. But 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. | | | | |
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< | However, as classes progressed, the tone that professors took towards case-facts changed. At the beginning of the semester my Property professor was quite sensitive to the idiosyncrasies of the epic family rivalry surrounding Pierson v. Post. In contrast, by the end of the semester the professor had a penchant for repeating the word "Less" while students recited the facts until they reduced the entirety of the fact pattern to one sentence. It seemed as though the professor was recasting his initial focus on the particularities of each case as simply something he does when introducing students to the law, but not a practice he continues once we get the hang of it. Put differently, it seemed to me as though the professor was telling us that the facts of the case matter less for an advanced practitioner. | >
> | However, as classes progressed, the tone that professors took towards case-facts changed. At the beginning of the semester my Property professor was quite sensitive to the idiosyncrasies of the epic family rivalry surrounding Pierson v. Post. In contrast, by the end of the semester the professor had a penchant for repeating the word "Less" while students recited the facts until they reduced the entirety of the fact pattern to one sentence. It seemed as though the professor was recasting his initial focus on the particularities of each case as something he does when introducing students to the law, but not a practice he continues once we get the hang of it. It seemed to me as though the professor was telling us that the facts of the case matter less for an advanced practitioner. | | | Moreover, as exams loomed and we began to prepare outlines and do practice exams, it became clear that in order to receive good grades, one should spend less time studying the story behind each case and more time thinking of useful ways to generalize about the case so as to apply generalizations to new sets of facts. The subtle distinctions between the circumstances surrounding Hawkins' hairy hand and those of the Peevyhouses' coal deposits seemed to matter little for exam writing. As a result, cases that were once stories became bite-sized propositions for use as one sentence citations on an exam. "Peevyhouse establishes that when cost of cover would grossly overcompensate the plaintiff, the measure of expectation damages should be the diminution in value." People forgot that the Peevyhouses' farm was a family farm, and was probably of much greater personal value than the $300 the court eventually rewarded them in damages. The problem is that a student who wishes to do well on her exam has an incentive to ignore the narratives that underlie the cases in favor of a generalized, impersonal approach. |
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