mythago

Aaron has an excellent post at The Stopped Clock about Ann Althouse’s rant about how law professors nowadays (do I even need to go on?).

It was a long time ago, but I don’t remember ever being told we were going to learn to “think like a lawyer”. It was sort of assumed, perhaps because we knew that if we wanted to “think like a law professor”, we should have gotten into the University of Michigan; since we didn’t, we were by-god going to have to learn to practice law. There were really only two incidents that made it clear how our skull innards were going to be rearranged:

1) One of the traditional methods of education in law school is to start off reading old cases, some of which are ‘foundational’ but many of which are obsolete, to illustrate the development of the law. That’s the ostensible reason, anyway; the real reason, I am convinced, is to get you over the notion that the legally correct result is the “right” one. So you spend a lot of time reading cases about widows being kicked out of their homes, people whose children were injured by products being told that there is no “privity” between the manufacturer and the kid, etcetera.

Early on in Contracts, taught by the impeccably correct Professor Dolan, one of my classmates couldn’t take any more legally-correct injustice and called out “But this is just a game of semantics!” Professor Dolan stopped in mid-Socratic inquiry, ran to the blackboard, seized a piece of chalk and wrote A GAME OF SEMANTICS in foot-high letters.

“Son,” he said, pointing to the blackboard, “welcome to the law.”

2) I was lucky enough to have Civil Procedure taught by a GM products-liability litigator, who was taking a sabbatical because he had just become a father. Civ Pro is generally not what you’d think of as the most exciting subject, and I can’t say Professor Mann actually made it exciting, but he made it important with his very first lecture: “You may think of civil procedure as dull, but let me tell you something: Even if you are not the best lawyer, or you don’t have good facts or the law on your side, if you thoroughly understand civil procedure, you can run rings around your opponent.” It’s a lesson I never forgot, and one I put into practice, to great advantage, every single day.