Legal News

What?s the Point of the Socratic Method, Anyway?

By Ashby Jones

You know that old saying about violence and ice hockey — “I went to a boxing match and a hockey game broke out”? Well, we’re twisting it around a bit to meet our present needs (and yes, we’re really twisting it). Here goes: We went to a blog post about potential Supreme Court nominees and a (very interesting) debate over the Socratic method broke out.

Okay, let’s bring you up to speed. It seems this started with a post by Temple Law professor David Hoffman, with whom we’re not familiar but whose impossibly youthful visage we definitely envy. Last week, on the Concurring Opinions blog, Hoffman responded to the whirlwind of criticism of Second Circuit judge Sonia Sotomayor with a post about the qualities the legal profession generally uses to evaluate “smartness.” At the end of the post, Hoffman wrote:

[T]he quality of the information we use to evaluate the smartness of judges is terrible. So why the focus? I blame the Socratic Method, which teaches young lawyers that being a good lawyer is the same thing as being a good debater: quick, witty, cutting, etc. We don't want the smartest justice. We want the wisest. Or at least someone who understands that smartness correlates with wisdom about as well as law does to justice.

Responded GW’s Orin Kerr, in the comments section of the same post: “I don't see the connection to the Socratic Method. The Socratic Method does not reward intelligence; it rewards glibness. But as far as I know, no one claims to want a Supreme Court Justice who is exceedingly glib.”

So far, so good. (Anyone who bashes the Socratic method, which we loathed during our law-school days, is okay by us.) But then comes Scott Greenfield, who on his Simple Justice blog, puts forth with a pretty robust defense of the Socratic method. Writes Greenfield:

We work with a gun to our head, demanding that we analyze and react in a split second. We risk public humiliation if our utterances are foolish or incomprehensible. We face a room of people who are wholly unconcerned about whether we feel warm and fuzzy, and are by definition judgmental and critical. So what pedagogical exercise best prepares a law student to survive in this environment? . . . The Socratic Method forces law students to face the circumstances they will face in the courtroom, and to either figure out how to deal with it or figure out what else they should do with their lives. If you can’t handle the pressure, then you don’t belong in the trenches.

LB Readers, where do you stand on the Socratic method? In addition to cringe-inducingly awful, we always suspected that outside of an appellate oral argument, the skills it taught had little or no relevance to real-life practice. Greenfield makes a compelling argument, we think, hat for lawyers in “the trenches,” i.e., the courtroom, skills taught by being grilled by an authority figure in front of your peers actually teaches invaluable skills. Then again, not everyone becomes a courtroom litigator. Let us know your thoughts.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on May 11, 2009 (boomark / email).