Career Center, Career Files, Law Students

Rainbow Vomit And Law Professor Advice Part 1 Of 2

Hey, 1Ls and LLMs: So, . . . confused much? Having fun yet?

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The normal bromides on how to succeed in law school from law profs follow a predictable template:  Go to class!  Brief cases!  Make your own outlines (don’t use commercial outlines)!   Make love not war!   Sleep!  Fart quietly and blame the least attractive person sitting closest to you!  Have a life outside of class!

Well, allow me to retort!

This is not just another “law-professors-are-good-professors-for-me-to-poop-on” piece.  (Plenty of others on that bandwagon.)

But I am here, pants down, to poop just a little bit, too.

Here’s my beef:  Law professor advice on how to study in law school is useless, for two reasons:

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  1. The professor conflateshis expertise in judging good exam answers with expertise on how to study so you can write a good exam. Of course the professor is an expert in what he likes on exams, as he grades them.  But how do you know he knows how to study to write an exam he likes?  Law profs are, in the sense, like food critics:  Just because you’re good at judging how food tastes does not make you an expert in how to cook food that tastes good.
  2. This situation is exacerbated by the central incoherence in law school teaching (usually unacknowledged by law profs in their advice):
  • Almost all in-class instructional and intended outside study time in law school is spend on doctrinal analysis (reading appellate cases and arguing outcomes where facts and laws are given and known).
  • Most exams assess a wider range of skills – attempting to identify which laws studied apply to completely new facts. More than application, you are graded on how well you analyze the application of law to new facts, and your judgment in coming to conclusions that are probabilistic rather than certain (“It depends on the meaning of what “is” is.”).

This week I will we will discuss Point 1 above.

Next week, we will talk about Point 2, the central incoherence in law school teaching.

* * *

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Brief interlude:  Who am I to talk here?

My side hustle is tutoring law students.  Mainly 1Ls.  From the gamut of schools:  top law schools (HLS, SLS, NYU, CLS, Chicago, Texas, Berkeley, etc., but no YLS, UVA or Michigan), next-20 schools, regional schools (almost all NY), TTTs, and even online schools (suck it, Concord; you too, Northern California).

Point is, I serve individual students, not whole classes.  My students want to do well.  If they don’t look good, I don’t look good.

In my work, I’ve seen thousands of practice exam answers, lots of outlines, and hundreds of students in person and online.  I talked with many about precisely how they study and prepare for exams.  (Average law prof sees 200-400 exam answers a year, no?  Some, more.)  I’ve seen many of their results.  I’ve begged and cajoled students to do more practice exams, and begged and cajoled them not to brief cases or do other stupidities.

So that’s my perspective.  I don’t know it all, but I’ve seen some a lot

* * *

Painful analogy:  You’re in a cook-off.  Something like Iron Chef.  Two people offer you advice:

  • Gordon Ramsey, he of the three Michelin Stars and anger management issues, screams at you: this kitchen is a bloody mess, you’re burning the skate, just burning it; no, now it’s raw (throws skate at your head), etc.
  • Anton Ego, fictional food critic voiced by the late Peter O’Toole, hisses advice at you on how to prepare skate, and the best skate he ever tasted, and things like that.

What do we know?

  • Gordon spent his life in kitchens, cooking for tyrants, and teaching cooking. He is an expert in reproducing excellent taste consistently and teaching people the same.
  • Anton has judged a million meals. He is the greatest (fictional) arbiter of taste in the food universe.

And incidentally, Anton Ego is the sole judge of the cook-off.

So who do you listen to?

False dichotomy, right?

Of course, since Anton’s the judge, you cook to his tastes.  You listen when Anton tells you what he likes and doesn’t.

But why would you listen to Anton over Gordon when he tells you what pots to buy, how to set up the kitchen, how to cut celery, how much butter to use?  Does his good taste inform those mechanical questions?

So — that’s the analogy.  Imperfect and pedantic!

My point:  Your prof is the Anton Ego of exams.  He is an expert in judging exams.  Listen carefully for what he says, openly or impliedly, about his tastes.

But, surprise!  Law schools don’t have Gordon Ramseys, really — someone to teach you the mechanics of answering issue spotting law school exams.  (Sometimes TAs, and sometimes profs in review sessions.)

Here’s my argument, more straightforwardly (but still rambling a bit):

  1. The law professor is the only person who grades your exams. (Obvious point.) He alone decides who gets the all-important A, and who does not.  He is — by definition — an expert in what he likes on an exam.
  2. The law professor grades your exam blind. By design, he does not know (at the time of grading)who he is grading while he is grading, so he can focus on the quality of exam answers themselves.
  3. I do not think law professors know, in any systematic or near comprehensive way, what their students do to study and prepare for exams. A practical way to prove this is the following challenge:
  • To law profs: if you have this data, please send it to me or (if you don’t want to share) write me to tell me you have it:  address is larrylawlaw at gmail dot com.
  • To law students: This week, go to office hours to any prof and ask “How do your students study?”  Politely interrupt when he tells you what they should do, and repeat your question:  “OK, great, professor, but how do most students, or top students, actually study?  What do they actually do?”  Write me if your prof gives you an answer.

I am not sure that most law professors have the time or means to find out how their students study, even if so inclined.  Career advancement is based on “publish or perish.”  Great teaching reviews don’t help.   And one step removed from great teaching reviews is taking time to find out how students actually study and how that compares to how well they do on exams.  Doing that advances none of their career goals.

  1. Combine 2 and 3 and we can conclude that law professors have no comprehensive basis for saying what study methods produce superior exam outcomes.
  2. So, when law professors give advice on study methods, what is that advice grounded in?

Three sources, I think:

  • Anecdotes based on inferences they can make on the text of exam answers themselves (hint: bad ones stand out; good ones fit the prof like a glove)
  • Anecdotes – self-selected students who show up to office hours AFTER their exam to complain about their results (I had only one good student show up after his exam to ask his professor why he did so well on the exam.).
  • Their own study methods that let them succeed in law school.

But I think this anecdotal evidence, based on the travails of struggling students, skews law professor advice to the general population

Example:  Standard law professor advice is not to use commercial outlines:  “Unless you have a commercial outline written by someone whose name your professor recognizes, then, in my opinion, you should probably avoid it like the plague.”)

Some profs I have read or spoken with give this advice because they graded terrible exam answers that clearly cribbed from Emanuel’s or Gilbert’s.

I guess, then, law professors who say “don’t use commercial outlines” believe that students who use them do so to the exclusion of going to class, listening to the prof, or doing the reading.

Query: Did commercial outlines cause student failure?  Or (leading question here), is the obvious use of commercial outlines, made apparent on an exam, a symptom?

Ooh, I feel another another terrible analogy coming along!

Suppose you are starving to death.  It’s your fault.  You haven’t left the house for weeks to shop for food because of, I dunno, Worlds of Warcraft, or something even less seemly.

You are so weak that you can’t leave the house.  You ransack the house and all you can find that is close to food is a bottle of Flintstones vitamins, and a big bottle of Vitamin E.

You gobble them down and pass out.

A medic later finds you vomiting rainbow-colored sand.  You jack-knife on the floor, retching from both ends, to borrow from Cervantes.

(Note:  Wikipedia tells me.  You’re welcome)

When you wake up, the medic berates you:  “Dude, Flintstones and Vitamin E are not food!  Bad you!”

But Dr. House arrives and berates the medic:  “Of course they’re not food!  He ate Flintstones and Vitamin E because there was no food, dipshit!”

To be even more pedantic:

Flintstones and Vitamin E are supplements, which help people when used properly.  Similarly, Emanuels or Gilberts are supplements which help law students when used properly.

Flintstones and Vitamin E are not food replacements.  Similarly, Emanuels or Gilberts are not replacements for going to class and preparing properly (I won’t say “preparing as your prof asks).

People who use Flintstones or Vitamin E correctly are hard to spot because they do not walk around in broad daylight, vomiting.  Similarly, law students who use Emanuels or Gilberts correctly may be hard to spot — they may write good exams tailored to the prof and know well enough not to crib from commercial outlines or apply law never studied in class.  (And others — such as my law prof friend Eric Johnson — have advocated the use of commercial outlines as a starting point to understand the law before turning to cases.

  1. On top of all of this, law professors themselves had law professors who believed that legal analysis is a gift from God/Crom/Ctuhulhu/Whomever.

The corollary of this is:  legal analysis is a God-given gift cannot be taught.

This is self-validating for professors, but a destructive, self-fulfilling prophesy that excuses professors from teaching the precise skills that result in exam success.  Maybe not to the small number of people who would get it in any case, but what about everyone else?

Consider this quick, assholish FAQ I wrote:

Q:        Who has two thumbs and kicked ass when he went to law school?

A:         [Thumbs pointed inward.]  This guy!

Q:        Who has two thumbs and is teaching at a law school because he kicked ass in law school!

A:         [Thumbs pointed inward.]  This guy!

Q: Who has two thumbs, is teaching at a law school, and kicked ass in law school because he worked very hard to master teachable methods that can be reproduced by diligent students and that I would now like to share with you!

A: [Droopy thumbs + cough]  Wait, no, I’m a natural, dude!  Like my professors before me!

If you believe in innate specialness, well, you can’t teach what you think is simply given.  (See:  Babe Ruth, John Holmes.)

And in a way, I think this is the legacy of Christopher Langdell, who first created the muddled, bow-tie, cold-calling, some-students-are-special-snowflakes-and-all-others-get-Bs system we have now.

I turn to that shit next week in Part 2: Bait and Switch.

I turn to that shit next week in Part 2: Bait and Switch.

Larry Law Law, formerly ATL’s as Mansfield Park — helps law students, including 1Ls from top law schools, kick the crap out of law school (mainly online now).  You can reach him here.  

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