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Do you remember those old RC Cola commercials from the 1980s? They would always tout that people consistently picked the cola over stalwarts Coke and Pepsi in blind taste tests. And yet, despite being armed with this data, my friends and I never bought it, and we were not alone. By the mid-1990s, Royal Crown products reached only 2.5% of the soft drink market, compared to 43% for Coke and 31% for Pepsi; RC Cola was eventually bought in October 2000 by Cadberry Schweppes. This sounds like it could form the basis for a good business school case study. Could the same be said about the Problem Method in law school?

When I guest blogged here last April, I posted about what I call my "law school case method." As you can see from that post, the method works as follows: We cover a topic such as the search incident to a lawful arrest in a given class using the Socratic Method. Before the next class, I send students several excerpts from recent opinions dealing with that topic. At the start of that next class, I have students read the excerpts out loud and ask them what the prosecutor and defense counsel would argue in each case and how the court would likely rule. I started by giving 4 such excerpts, but now I give up to 8. The discussions of these excerpts can take up as much as half of a given class session. 

As I noted in a previous post, "ninety-seven percent of those teaching first year classes report using the Socratic method, with the use of alternative teaching techniques decreasing as teacher became more experienced or tenured!" And yet, 

So, are you a professor who incorporates aspects of the problem method into your classes? Is it something you are considering? Is it something that you tried but didn't like? You can answer these questions by responding to the following poll and/or leaving a comment.

 

-Colin Miller