Legal Commentary

As President Obama pursues reform of public education in the primary schools, a major issue is what to do about bad teachers.  Be assured, however, that bad teaching is not restricted to grades K-12.  

Law schools ostensibly have measures in place to detect bad teaching.  We are all forced to submit to teaching evaluations by colleagues while we are untenured, and we undergo student evaluations each semester.  Yet I seriously doubt if a majority of my faculty would refuse to grant tenure to a good scholar who is a bad teacher unless the teaching were truly atrocious, and I know we're not alone.  

The problem of bad teaching is difficult to address for a number of reasons.  It can be hard to reach agreement about what constitutes bad teaching.  The evaluation system is imperfect.  Moreover, so many variables go into teaching that it is tempting to succumb to relativism and simply declare that no objective standards can exist for judging good and bad teaching.  Certainly it is true that there are myriad different paths to becoming a good teacher.  One of my favorite teachers in law school was a hard core practitioner of the Socratic method and was loathed by a significant contingent of my fellow students; another favorite teacher used a grad school seminar style and was the kind of guy with whom you'd like to have a beer and discuss Nietzsche. Both were excellent teachers, and I use analytical tools they gave me every day.

Despite the wide variations in teaching styles, however, it is still possible to identify bad teaching.  To mangle Tolstoy, all good teachers may be unique, but the bad ones still share common characteristics.  Chief amongst these characteristics are an indifference to whether students are learning the material, an unwillingness or inability to communicate at the appropriate level, an unwillingness or inability to listen (and adapt) to student responses, and an unwillingness to devote the time necessary to master the relevant material or to write appropriate testing instruments.  These characteristics can manifest in different ways.  For example, in my experience as a law student, the two teachers I had the least respect for were (a) the teacher who spent the lion's share of the class telling war stories designed to make him look important while never teaching any actual law that I could discern, and (b) the teacher who taught his own vision of what the law should be as if it were the actual law.  In my experience as a law professor,  . . . prudence dictates I don't finish this sentence.  [But please feel free to leave your own horror stories in the comments, sans perpetrator names please.]

I digress.  The real thesis of this post is simply the following:  Bad teaching of 1Ls is worse than any other kind of bad law school teaching, and bad teachers should be drummed out of the 1L curriculum (no matter how much work it creates for everyone else.)  We require students to take 1L courses because they are foundational.  A bad teacher in the 1L curriculum lays a weak foundation that can follow a student throughout his career.  I had only one bad teacher in my 1L year, but because of this teacher, I avoided two upper-level course that built on his course.  My decision-making was clearly flawed: I should have taken the upper level courses to remedy my poor foundation, but unfortunately I wasn't confident that I had the knowledge base or analytical tools necessary to succeed in them. 

Perhaps this blow to student confidence, rather than lack of knowledge per se, is the worst legacy of bad teaching in the long term. A bad 1L teachers kills off possibilities before they are ever even explored. Students in their 1L year rely on their teachers to show them what their capabilities are and to sketch a vision of what a fulfilling career in law might look like.  I don't know about you, but I didn't really know what a tort was before law school, and I certainly didn't envision making a career out of studying them.  Luckily a good teacher opened my eyes to how exciting Torts could be, and he seemed to see potential in me I didn't see in myself.  Not every 1L teacher will play that role for every student, but it should at least be a possibility.

Even from a strictly mercenary perspective, bad teachers should be kept out of the first year curriculum.  The 1L year is the boot camp experience, the bonding experience.  The impressions of law school formed in the first year are the most lasting.  If a student hates her 1L professors, it is unlikely that she'll donate when the dean calls.  If for no other reason, we should care about bad teaching.