Category Archives: Law School

This is a new one.

After class last Friday, I first took questions from a long line of in most cases needlessly anxious first year students, then stopped to chat with a group of students who seemed to have stayed behind in the classroom to study. I asked them how it was going, the usual questions.

In the course of that conversation I got a complaint that I've never had before. It seems, they all agreed, that I wasn't mean enough. How were they going to be able to cope with mean people in the future if I didn't toughen them up? They expected law school to be tough, and were they getting the full experience?

It has to be said that the other professors in my section are particularly nice people. If there's a candidate for the bad guy, the scary one, it clearly has to be me. I'm the one teaching in a suit (the Dean has her own unique style that I will not attempt to characterize; Patrick Gudridge wears ties and jackets, but frequently the very professorial ones. George Schatzki doesn't wear a tie and sports a pony tail.)

But I don't want to be mean. Tough, sure; rigorous and exacting, you bet. But it's not meant to hurt.

Anyway, back to Friday: Slightly taken aback by this critique — one reason I stopped teaching first semester first years about a decade ago is that they found me too scary — I deflected the issue by saying that it reminded me of the story about the sadist and the masochist.

The masochist says to the sadist, “Please hurt me.” And the sadist says, “No.”

Then again, maybe I've just gone soft.

I have my first meeting with my (rather large) Torts class this afternoon.

I suspect the greatest challenge I'll face this term — other than the sheer size of the group and the unfortunate room geometry (it's narrow and deep, and full of mini-jumbotron TV screens in the back half) — is mediating the tension between the need to go really really slowly and the nagging desire to get to the even more interesting stuff in the back of the book. My current syllabus has me doing a pretty standard torts course, without the fun extras. But it's not like you can decide not to do negligence this year.

I’ve written my Torts class a note about my class policies and about how to read and study law. I’m reprinting it here because it may be of interest to other people about to start law school. I’m hiding it below the fold because it’s longer than the average blog posting, and I doubt many others will be interested.

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I've been saying for a long time that we ought to require all law students to learn some basic statistics. Now comes Kevin Drum, with his pulse on the body politic, in Revenge of the Nerds:

Multivariate correlations and data cluster analysis are the new black.

It's a truism that students go to law school because they are afraid of numbers. But there's no escape.

I got an unusual email today, and it prompts a small disclosure. Here's the key part of the email:

Hi. It's been a number of years since we've spoken, but I figured I would take a shot at inviting you to lunch when I am on campus September 10th … if you are free that day, I'd be happy to treat my favorite 1st year professor to a sandwich or something.

I choose to treat this as a good omen, and an occasion to reveal that my teaching plans for the Fall semester have undergone a radical change. As you may recall, UM over-admitted its entering class — by a lot — so much that we offered them a bribe to wait a year. But even despite that we've got a lot of incoming 1Ls.

One consequence of this, um, bounty is that we're putting on a whole extra section of first-year classes. And I've been tapped to teach Torts. So for the first time in 15 years I won't be teaching Administrative Law — we've found a fine substitute¹ — and I will be teaching my first common law course ever. It's also a return to a first-semester first year course after a layoff of more than a decade; back in the Dark Ages I used to teach Civ Pro I (first semester) and more recently, but still a long time ago, Constitutional Law I (second semester).

Torts is a partial departure for me. Most of my work and all of my teaching has been national or international, procedural, or frankly theoretical (Jurisprudence). But as I think more about privacy issues, torts and tort-like thinking looms larger, and of course common-law reasoning is at the root of so much of what we do, even if it is not a common law subject. Plus, of the common law subjects, tort remains the purest, the least overrun by statutes and codes.

I am looking forward to the class, although not to its size, which could hit 130 students(!). First year students are different: they are very highly motivated, they think entirely like civilians rather than at least partly like lawyers, and there is an unreasonably high fear factor. It's this last aspect that used to put me off what is otherwise a fun and exciting teaching experience: I don't like or want my students to be afraid. By the second year students mostly see through us, so it's no big deal. But first years come in with visions of “Paper Chase” dancing in their heads, and my teaching style, which tends to the dialectic more than to lecture, does not seem to blunt that enough. Or at all.

¹ Why, you might ask, move me to Torts and move someone else to Administrative Law? There are a lot of reasons (including that a few years ago I asked to teach Torts), but one of them is that the new Adlaw teacher will be a part-time member of the faculty and there's a policy of staffing first-year courses with full-time (or full-time visiting) faculty whenever possible.