On Issue-Spotting and Hiding the Ball

As for the series on law school instruction and law schools in general that Jeremy started here recently: count me in!

I agree with Jeremy’s views that issue-spotting is very important in helping students develop their “practical skills,” as the industry now so extensively calls for.  As Jeremy and Professor Bruckner do, I also never give up trying to have the students correctly issue spot, which in my book not only means spotting what the issues are, but also omitting from their tests and in-class analyses what I call “misfires” (non-issues).  In my opinion, the latter is very necessary not only for bar taking purposes, but also in “real life” where attorneys often face not only strict time limits, but also word limits.

But I’ll honestly admit that my students very often fail my expectation on final tests.  Some cannot correctly spot the issues at all.  Many have a hard time focusing on those aspects of the issues that are crucial and instead treat all issues and elements under a “checklist” approach overwriting the minor issues and treating major issues conclusorily.  Yet others seem to cram in as many issues as they can think of “just in case” they were on the test (yes, I have thought about imposing a word limit on the tests, but worry about doing so for fear of giving any misleading indication of how many words they “should” write, even if indirectly so on my part). 

Maybe all this is my fault … but maybe it isn’t (this too will hopefully add to Professor Bruckner’s probably rhetorical question on how to teach issue-spotting skills).  Every semester, I post approximately a dozen or so take-home problems with highly detailed answer rubrics.  I only use textbooks that have numerous practice problems long and short.  I review these in class.  I also review, in class, numerous other problems that I created myself.  I give the students numerous hints to use commercial essay and other test practice sources.  Yes, all this on top of teaching the doctrinal material.  All this is certainly not “hiding the ball.”  Frankly, I don’t really know what more a law professor can realistically do (other than, of course, trying different practice methods, where relevant, to challenge both oneself and the students and to see what may work better as expectations and the student body change).

So what seems to be the problem?  As I see it, it doesn’t help that at least private law schools at the bottom half of the ranking system have to accept students with lower indicia of success than earlier.  But even that hardly explains the problem (who knows what really does).  Some law schools have to offer remedial writing classes and various other types of extensive academic support to students in their first semesters and beyond.  Some of the problem, in my opinion, clearly stems from the undergraduate-level education our students receive.  In large part, this makes extensive use of multiple-choice questions for assessments and not, as future lawyers would benefit from, paper or essay-writing tests or exercises.  Thus, undergraduate-level schools neither teach students how to spot “issues” from “scratch” nor do they teach them how to write about these.  Numerous time have my students told me that they have not really written anything major before arriving in law school.

Why is that, then?  Isn’t that problem one of time and resources; in other words, the fact that not just law professors, but probably most university professors, are required to research and write extensively in addition to teaching and providing service to their institutions?  For example, see Jeremy’s comments on his busy work schedule here.  Something has to give in some contexts.  At the undergraduate level, maybe it’s creating and grading essays and instead resorting to machine-graded multiple-choice questions and not challenging students sufficiently to consider what the crux of a given academic problem is.  Just a thought.  I am, of course, not saying that we should not conduct research.  I am saying, though, that I find it frustrating that lower-level educations, even renowned ones, cannot seem to figure out how to use whatever resources they do, after all, have to train their students in something as seemingly simple as how to write and how to think critically.

At the law school level, some “handholding” and various types of practical assistance is, of course, acceptable.  But to me, the general trend in legal education seems to be moving towards a large extent of explaining, demonstrating, giving examples, setting forth goals, assessments, and so forth.  I agree with what Jeremy said in an earlier post that we should at some point worry about converting the law school education process into one that resembles undergraduate-style (or high school style!) education.

Recall that the United States is not an island unto itself.  Many studies show that our educational system is falling behind international trends.  Where in many other nations in the world (developed and developing), students are expected to come up with, for example, quite advanced research and writing projects for their degrees, we are – at least in some law schools – teaching students just how to write, and what to write about.  This is a sad slippery slope.  Until the American educational sector as such improves, I agree that we should do what we can to motivate and help our students.  But I also increasingly wish that our “millennial” students would take matters into their own hands more and take true ownership of learning what they need to learn for a given project or class with less handholding, albeit of course still some guidance.  Nothing less than that will be expected from them in practice.