Legal Commentary

This is the last post in my series on LRW.  In it, I will share some of my own plans to bring LRW into the doctrinal classroom and offer some final thoughts for doctrinal faculty to keep in mind about LRW.

First, some cautions against bringing practical lawyering into the doctrinal classroom:

• Doing so is difficult because it may require more time and effort giving feedback to students.  (I believe that more feedback is a good thing, but descriptively, it is difficult and time-consuming.)
• Doing so is difficult because most standard law school teaching materials (casebooks and teaching manuals) don't obviously lend themselves to it.
• Doing so may be difficult, particularly for junior faculty, if the law school is traditionalist.
• Doing so may require professors to be highly selective in the materials and issues they can cover.
• Doing so may be difficult if the professor doesn't have experience with practical lawyering skills.

All of that said, I have decided to give it a try.

This semester, a primary goal of my Legislation course is to prepare students to craft briefs and memos interpreting statutes.  To be sure, this is probably an implicit goal of any class that focuses on statutory interpretation.  But I am making it explicit, and the final weeks of the course will be devoted to constructing legal briefs or memos addressing difficult questions of statutory interpretation.  We will deal with several different cases and issues, working as a class, in small groups, and individually.  I will also give out real briefs and have students deconstruct them.

The students seem very eager to get to this part of the class, as am I; and I think the practical payoff will make the extra work worthwhile. 

The real cost is that I can only cover a fraction of the casebook (Eskridge/Frickey/Garrett).  We began the course with an introductory section, then moved to the theories of statutory interpretation, and then to the nuts-and-bolts doctrines of interpretation.  In order to make room for the practical skills section at the end, I have had to skip everything else in the casebook (which is a lot).  In this case, the tradeoff is worth it, because I'm fine with the class being about Statutory Interpretation alone, rather than a broader Legislation class.

However, when I teach my other (much bigger, enrollment-wise) courses--Civ Pro II (the Rules of Civil Procedure) and Con Law II (basically the Bill of Rights, minus a lot of stuff that gets covered elsewhere)--it will be more difficult to integrate practical lawyering skills.  I plan to use attorneys' briefs and pleadings in Civ Pro, and will likely require students to draft a complaint, answer, discovery requests, and so forth.  But I can't see how to do much more than that without skimping on breadth of coverage.  And beyond deconstructing briefs, I'm not really sure how to integrate LRW into Con Law. 

I am eager to hear what others have been successful (or unsuccessful) with.

Finally, for those who are uninterested in integrating practical lawyering skills and who don't spend much time thinking about LRW, please just keep the following in mind:

• Doctrinal courses and LRW are closely related and mutually reinforce one another;
• Doctrinal professors should reinforce the importance of LRW and other practical lawyering classes when possible;
• The LRW course teaches students crucial practical skills that are central to legal education--it is not a throw-away course;
• Teaching LRW is difficult and extremely time-consuming;
• Students spend a lot of time on LRW (and should);
• In many cases, first-year students only get serious feedback from LRW instructors;
• LRW instructors often get to know students better than doctrinal faculty do, and may know if students are having personal or academic difficulties before any other member of the faculty or administration;
• Students who do well in LRW are often (but not always) the same students who do well in doctrinal classes.

Thanks to everyone who has read all of these posts (hi mom!) and for the provocative comments along the way.  Go hug an LRW instructor.