Law Students Who Use Laptops Aren't Any Dumber Than Those Who Don't

Law professors may not like laptops in the classroom, but students have to read Above the Law sometime.

Given an opportunity, law professors will complain to you for hours on end about two things: faculty meetings and laptops in class. And perhaps because they know there’s nothing a law professor can do to prevent another meeting with their insufferable colleagues, they’ve allowed their hatred of laptops to reach a fever pitch because that’s the one thing they can control. I mean… they really hate those laptops.

Whenever a professor rails against laptops, the clutch of studies indicating that handwritten notes lead to better academic performance will soon follow. It’s a warm and toasty nugget of “get off my lawn” to throw at students about how much better you were in school because you chiseled your notes. But as students are increasingly raised on screens and keyboards, one has to wonder if at least some students will soon arrive in law school simply incapable of effective handwritten notes. For these students, maybe laptops aren’t the problem.

There’s also the “distraction” question. Can a student really be learning if they’re occasionally checking the score? I don’t know, but maybe don’t schedule classes during ball games. This one’s on you, professors.

From Karen Sloan’s piece in Law.com:

A 2013 study found that second- and third-year law students are more likely than their first-year counterparts to goof off on their laptops during class, while a separate study in 2012 found that second-year law students spent 42 percent of their class time using their laptops for nonacademic purposes.

Maybe 2L and 3L classes are expensive and useless vanity projects for professors looking to wax philosophic about their latest research kick? It seems like the laptop itself may not be the issue here. What we need is a real, practical analysis.

Professor Ruth Colker of THE Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law has a new law review article reporting her research on laptops in the classroom. Her conclusion? Let students use whatever they feel serves them best.

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Colker then conducted a study of the 57 students in her spring 2016 constitutional law class. Among them, 25 requested the use of a laptop while 32 did not. She assumed that the laptop users would underperform based on published studies, but they did just as well as the nonlaptop users. Those results held even when Colker took credentials, including her students’ scores on the Law School Admission Test and undergraduate grades, into account.

Almost like they’re “adults” training to be “professionals” or something.

“In law, we are always teaching our students that answers are murky, there are two sides to most issues, and one needs to assess facts with care,” her article reads. “A professor’s reflexive ‘no-laptop’ policy fails to hold us to these high standards.”

Neil Gorsuch had a blanket no-laptop policy, which makes all the sense in the world.


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HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.