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Wednesday, September 14, 2005
The Socratic Method
Leiter invites us to revisit his strong condemnation of the Socratic Method from a while back. He doesn't open room for comments anywhere -- and Dan Solove had much success recently by opening a string to discuss Leiter's thoughts about Ph.D.s and interdisciplinary work. Accordingly, I shall take up more Leiterian business with the hope of getting a discussion underway.
My perspective on the issue is that pure lecturing would be a disservice to students just as giving students the black-letter law they can easily access with commerical outlines wouldn't be much of a legal education. This has little to do with the platitude that we teachers are trying to get students to "think like lawyers." We are, in short, trying to develop a panoply of skills for the profession that the Socratic Method (modified from its pure form) seems well-poised to accomplish. Students are forced to listen to their peers respectfully; they are forced to think on their feet; they are forced to respectfully deal with a "superior" who thinks s/he knows it all; they are forced to revisit their understanding of why cases are decided the way they are; they have to negotiate the fear of being publicly shown to have less than fully thought out ideas; they have to learn to speak articulately and loudly; they are forced to work out problems out-loud and refine their views so other students can see the process of problem-solving in an interactive way.
Perhaps Leiter's "mandatory participation" would accomplish all of this skill-building, so it isn't clear to me that we wholly disagree. But the fact that students find ways to get "black-letter law" outside of class does not, in my view, condemn the Socratic Method. In any case, I would suspect that "orthodox" Socratic teachers who never answer a question with anything other than a question are pretty hard to find these days.
Posted by Ethan Leib on September 14, 2005 at 02:17 PM in Life of Law Schools | Permalink
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Comments
I should note one area in which the Socratic method is probably ideal training -- oral argument in court. Being hounded by the professor is good preparation for being hounded by the judge.
That said, oral argument is about 1% of what most lawyers actually spend their time doing. So it may not make sense to include oral argument prep -- Socratic method -- as such a large component of law teaching.
Posted by: Kaimi | Sep 19, 2005 5:44:56 PM
I'm a 1L and I mostly agree with Prof. Leiter. BUT, last week our torts class was guest taught by Dean Levmore (U of Chicago). He used the socratic method after giving a brief set ups and simple fact patterns of cases that we had not read and just went down the rows. It was great. He was creative, energetic and able to match the level of argument each student was capable of, so everybody was pushed and had their mental blind spots revealed, but no one was humiliated. It was really something to see.
Posted by: a-train | Sep 17, 2005 8:35:49 PM
As a student, I am the most annoyed by professors that use the Socratic method poorly. The four components of poor use of the Socratic method are: 1)little or no interruption of the method for actual leture, 2)refusal to answer direct questions posed by the students about the material, 3)an inability of the professor to direct their questions at the students that can answer them, requiring that the class sit through long periods where students grope around with confusion instead of realizing when a student just isn't likely to come up with an answer, and 4)allowing gunners to constantly pop in with boring and uninsightful comments.
I do think that you learn less material through the use of the Socratic Method than you would through a lecture. But students know that most of the knowledge that you get from law school isn't really applicable in the legal world. We know that if there is anything to be gained in law school besides the credential, it is a set of legal skills like research, writing, thinking, and oral advocacy (or a network).
Also, if professors only tested on the material that they cover in a non-Socratic lecture, there'd be no way to differentiate the performance of 90% of the class. The Socratic method/hypo-based exam separates students based on their ability to figure out on their own what type of non-obvious information and skills a professor wants. It seems to me that the ability to figure out non-obvious info and skills with little direction is also the key to success at a large law firm.
Posted by: Jeff V. | Sep 15, 2005 1:53:16 AM
BL's problem is apparently that he's never been at a school where the Socratic method is done right.
It does help to have bright students who are capable of making an argument, and who are capable of recognizing the weaknesses of various arguments.
An hour in Geoff Stone's capable hands would change his mind.
Posted by: anon | Sep 14, 2005 11:15:08 PM
A few things...
1. Calling it "the Sophistic method" is brilliant (and accurate too).
2. We should differentiate between the socratic method and simply calling on people. By the socratic method, I take Leiter to mean the repeated questioning of a single student to elicit a series of answers that explains what the case is about, what its pressure points are, how legal arguments can be used in favor or against etc. Cold calling a student to summarize the holding of a case and then asking whether it was right or not is not the socratic method; it's just calling on a student out of the blue.
3. I'm not sure why one has to take a socratic method yea or nea position. The socratic method is useful for some things -- teaching (or at least rewarding) verbal dexterity and quick-on-the-feet reasoning. This might be useful for 1Ls and others who need the crash course on arguing "like a lawyer." But it's pretty bad for just about anything else -- e.g. policy discussions, cross-discinpliary issues.
Posted by: BuddingProf | Sep 14, 2005 8:57:50 PM
Not a comment on the merits (perhaps later this week), just on the procedure: because I'm on the road, and all comments have to be approved (you probably have that Typepad option too), it didn't make sense to open comments and have them languish in Cyberspace. Also, of course, this topic was hashed about quite a bit when Posner's original piece appeared, the one on which I commented.
Posted by: BL | Sep 14, 2005 5:08:50 PM
Leiter has some points here. I'm a 1L this year, and I'll agree that there is a lot of time wasted by poor responses, and that there is often confusion about what "the rule" is.
On the other hand, I am not at school to just learn "the right answer". So far there don't seem to be that many correct answers anyway. The questions professors ask usually lead me to think about the underlying ideas or (when an annoying student speaks up) the best argument for the other side.
As far as students grumbling about the method, I've been hearing complaints about profs since the first day of undergrad. Lectures can be deadly boring, socratic method can be intimidating. It still comes down to the skill of the teacher.
I'll give the socratic method one big benefit though, it makes staying awake much easier.
Posted by: bitterman | Sep 14, 2005 3:08:23 PM
Ethan, I agree. I recognize as a rookie that there isn't a fount of experience to draw upon personally, but when I taught my philosophy classes to undergrads with cold-calling and lots of back and forth, and use of hypos, most students were excited by the energy in the class room; if I'm not mistaken, that same energy is reproduced this year in both my torts theory seminar as well as my crim pro (adjudication) class. That said, I often mix things up, sometimes using problems in group form, sometimes assigning half the class one position and the other half the opposing view. For the reasons you mention, I think this is vital to good legal education. Indeed, the real scandal, in my view, is when law professors just talk for 75 minutes about what the doctrine is, the various policy implications, etc., and students never have to crack open their casebooks through the semester to do well on the exam. While that is rare it is not unheard of. And there is a happy medium between that and the prawf who only utters questions all semester, drilling one student per class... One needs a quiver full of arrows and some variety in teaching methods by one professor (not across professors) is probably the best route to take. Others?
Posted by: Dan Markel | Sep 14, 2005 3:00:46 PM
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