March 18, 2004

Symposium Follow-Up: A Quick Tour of the Blogosphere

by Jeremy Blachman

Waddling Thunder has posted some thoughts on his blog reacting to Nate Oman's thoughts linked in a post below. I'll give you the beginning and the end of his post and you can click over there if you want to read what's in between:

Nate's point, I think, is an interesting one - law schools should focus on teaching theory because 1) they're better at it and 2) no one else will teach it, whereas firms will teach us how to practice. I don't think there's anything objectionable about that argument - in fact, I agree that understanding theory lets you understand the blackletter much better. I still remember the rule against perpetuities, and the only reason I do so is because I learned it as a historical matter rather than as some sort of arbitrary rule...

I don't think it matters what you teach, so long as you provide enough choices to get enough of your students excited about some part of the law, and so long as you get them the basics of a professional and theoretical vocabulary so that they don't sound entirely ridiculous when they make their way into the world.

Greg Goelzhauser (one of our former co-bloggers over at En Banc) had this to say:

That most law schools continue to adhere predominantly to a black letter approach boggles the mind. The usual response to this argument is something along the lines of, "Students need to know the law." Of course! No one could argue with a straight face that law schools should abandon the practice of teaching "the law" to students at least in some form. But this should simply be a starting point. People learn and quickly forget the doctrinal structure of most courses, but it has been my experience that solid theoretical foundations remain past the final exam.

Feel free to post more links in the comments.

March 18, 2004 11:05 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Just noting that a new blog, Rasgullas & Gulabjamuns, posted here about his/her views on law school as a bored 3L.

Posted by: Chris Geidner at March 18, 2004 08:38 PM
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