The flip side of the last post is to talk about how the students respond to the professors' questions. My estimate is that 90% of the time, students do not respond very well.
It seems as though almost everyone in law school has read the material before coming to class. Not only that, but many students have written up detailed briefs on each case; sometimes a paragraph or two, sometimes an entire page. (I know this because I can see their laptops open right in front of me, usually opened to a brief in a Word document, though frequently they're on Facebook or CNN headlines or random Dashboard widgets. One woman who sits in front of me particularly enjoys a Dashboard program that is apparently just a red rubber ball that you can click, drag, and toss across the screen.)
There are several ways to get grilled by your law school professor, including but not limited to:
1. Mr. McGregor, did you get a chance to read International Shoe v. Washington ? Can you tell us what happened? (Translation: I'm going to test to be sure that you read the assignment very closely.)
2. Mr. McGregor, what do you think about Justice Breyer's dissent in this case? (You'd better understand the opinion writer's critical thinking and be able to say why you think it does or does not work.)
3. Ms. Johansson, what do you think of Mr. McGregor's explanation? (Were you prepared for Question #2? Please address it and your classmate's answer to it.)
4. If the court were to rule on an act of Congress that banned partial-birth abortion, how would its ruling be impacted by the decision on medicinal marijuana in U.S. v. Raich? (Although this question is harder and has higher stakes -- and is more like what the exam will be testing -- it's easier to answer in class, because (a) there's more room for you to have your own reasoning than in #1-3, and (b) good answers to #1-3 have already been set forth by the professor and/or other students, so you have a foundation of answers on which to draw, even if you would have been clueless to answer such a question at the beginning of the discussion.)
Students say all sorts of weird things to any type of question, but what bothers me the most is when they rely too easily on their brief when answering question #1 and variations on question #1. They don't know anything about how to tell a story! A few posts back, I wrote about how the regurgitation of the case facts can get into way too much detail. After a few weeks, the professors (even Prof. Tambor) aren't as demanding about this. They naturally expect that you're going to leave some facts out when you retell the story; otherwise, why not just read the whole thing aloud in class? But this is essentially what so many students do! Even if the professor gives a specific prompt to cut to the chase, they'll ignore it!
Example:
Professor: Mr. HAL 9000, what was the dispute in Greiner v. Greiner?
HAL 9000: Peter Greiner died and, um, left a widow. He disinherited three sons and one daughter. One of the sons died. His widow, who had been favored in the will, took active measures to, um, land to two of the sons... [Hal talks nervously for the next 2 minutes, as he basically recites all of the facts of the case, while somehow managing to insert even more passive voice than the opinion writer himself had used.]
The question was: What was the dispute? The answer should begin with the words, "The dispute was about x"! If you need to backtrack to fill in the gaps, fine, but the students willfully or unconsciously -- due to nerves and a lack of public speaking skill -- resort to burying the focus of the original question under a mountain of detail. However specific the professor's question may be, the large majority of the students only want to hear: Please read me your brief of this case, and pause to say "um" at every punctuation mark.
Being prepared to give good explanations is difficult. In each class, there have been several cases for which I'm glad I wasn't in the hot seat. But reading from your brief doesn't make engaging conversation, and it hardly encourages everyone to pay attention. More importantly, it doesn't teach you how to argue. I'm selfishly happy that a lot of these smart students seem so bad at cutting to the chase, because I know that I'll be scoring points against them on exams while they're obfuscating their answers. Listening to some of these kids try to explain themselves makes clear the problem with the large-lecture model of the undergraduate university: I wonder how many of them ever had to talk in class before. You can tell that they know how to read and think (almost without exception, my law school classmates would be in the top 5% of my former students at Big Ten U. English Department), but a good 75% of those smart students are very unskilled at the Socratic method.
