The Study of Law

This entire article is intended to be a practical guide to assist you as you begin the study of law. It will be helpful, however, to take a few pages in this chapter to provide a brief overview of the objectives of the study of law. In this way, you will have a better understanding of the ultimate purpose of legal education before you get caught up in the daily preparation for your classes.

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A. THINKING LIKE A LAWYER

The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who had been a law professor, once said that the object of law school in the United States was not so much to teach law as to teach "lawyering." By "lawyering," Justice Frankfurter was referring to learning the critical analytical process that has become known as "thinking like a lawyer."

"Thinking like a lawyer" is developing a critical analytic skill that has proven to be very successful in problem-solving-whether it is a legal problem or any other kind of problem. As your class begins its law studies together, you represent a group of highly intelligent individuals who have been given the opportunity to study law from among many thou-sands of applicants. In your approach to problem-solving, you are not much different from any other group of very intelligent people that might be gathered together. As a result of your law studies over the next several months, however, you will change very significantly as you develop the unique skills and techniques for legal problem-solving referred to by the phrase "thinking like a lawyer." Because this skill or technique is so successful in problem-solving, lawyers tend to be very successful in many fields of endeavor.

Your approach to problem-solving will begin to change very early in your first semester. The class discussion will change noticeably as you and your classmates develop this skill. In addition, you will acquire a legal vocabulary, an awareness of policies underlying legal principles, an understanding of the importance of process, and a sensitivity to professional and ethical norms. It is a very exciting development for your faculty to observe. For this reason, faculty love to teach first-year courses and experience the excitement of this change in the class.

B. SOCRATIC METHOD

The pedagogical approach used in most first-year courses is known as the "Socratic method." It involves teaching by asking questions. The questions are asked by the professor of the whole class, but individual students respond. The whole class participates vicariously, however, by mentally framing their own answers to the questions. The professor will encourage this vicarious response by asking other students whether they agree with the answer of the responding student and by asking other students to critique the answers previously given.

This pedagogical approach was initially used by Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell when he was appointed the first Dean of the Harvard Law School about 125 years ago. Dean Langdell found that he could teach large numbers of students in a lecture hall effectively with this technique. Because the approach worked so well, it has been continued in law schools ever since, particularly in first-year courses. In fact; the Socratic Method has been so effective in teaching large classes of students, it has enabled law schools to provide high quality instruction without the lower student-teacher ratio that is o more common in other graduate studies.

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C. CASE METHOD

In your first-year classes, you primarily will study judicial opinions in appellate cases. This is referred to as the case method of instruction, and your course books will be called casebooks.

The case method of instruction involves a process of reasoning from the specific facts of a case to a general principle established by that case. Then, your professor will ask the class to apply that general principle to other sets of specific facts to determine whether the general principle has been identified precisely. In the process, your professor will ask the class to consider many hypothetical fact situations testing the scope of the general principle. The principle that is identified represents a precedent that will be controlling in future cases.

This method of law development is known as the common law, in which prior judicial decisions form the basis of determining how future cases will be decided. The factual patterns of the prior case and the subsequent cases may be extremely different, but the principle established in the prior case may control the decision in the different factual setting of the subsequent cases.

In engaging in case method analysis, you should be very conscious of the facts of the case. It will be necessary to distinguish relevant facts from those that are irrelevant to the decision in the case. Your professor will ask you many questions to ascertain whether a particular fact is or is not relevant.

Determining the scope of the principle of a case is critically important to predicting the result of future cases. When your professor asks a series of questions about the breadth of a principle established by a case, you may find yourself led far out on a limb as the professor changes the facts ever-so-slightly with each question. You then may find the limb abruptly sawed off, as your professor points out that you have asserted a principle that would produce an unwise or even ridiculous result on some set of facts. You should not take this criticism personally, because it is not intended to be. Instead, it is part of the process by which you will learn to think critically about the exact scope of a legal principle established by a case.

D. OTHER LAW SCHOOL INSTRUCTION

Law school instruction has improved enormously in recent years. You will have more clinical educational programs, more skills training courses, more seminars, more interdisciplinary courses, and more international study opportunities than law students had even a few years ago. But the Socratic method of instruction, combined with the case method of analysis, continues to be the dominant pedagogical approach used in the first year of law school.

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