[QUOTE=Doctor Who]
Let’s say you’re in first-year torts, doing something easy. Like battery. You’ve read the case and your professor starts drilling someone on it. There are nuances to that case, and throwaway comments that you need to get down - because they will probably be a wrinkle on a test. Then you have to get the black-letter law down in your teacher’s vocabulary (nothing they hate worse than reading black-letter law you cribbed from some commercial outline). So you’ve got all the elements of battery, definitions of those elements, examples of what fits under each element, nuances to the case(s) you discussed that day, and throwaway comments that could be the difference between an A and a B. Stuff that during finals week, you’re going to have to learn like the back of your hand.
And you don’t write any of that down. And then you go to another class and repeat except in a different subject. And another and another. All semester long.
Yeah… I wouldn’t recommend it.
[/QUOTE]
Is this your way of saying that law professors don’t actually teach, nor do they read the test answers & papers generated by their students for content, but instead rely exclusively on memorize-and-regurgitate?
My assumptions as a teacher would be:
a) If you answer my questions all in my words, that probably means you don’t know the meaning of what I said and therefore aren’t capable of expressing it in your own words;
b) If you’re transcribing what I’m saying in class, you aren’t concentrating on the questions that I’m asking or the implications of the points I’m making. It puts you in passive mode, sponge mode. I’m waiting for you to interrupt and contradict me (I’m the professor, I’m allowed to troll ;)) and you should not assume that what I’m presenting are “facts”.
c) While law is not at all my venue and never has been, my attitude is that any course of study in which students are expected to memorize quantities of material that no one realistically expects them to keep memorized permanent are just hazing the students, deliberately making them miserable so as to drive as many as possible out of the program. I’m not saying law is like that, but I’m curious to know whether the typical attorney 10 years in practice post bar-exam can still rattle this stuff off (and needs to be able to) or if most of them just look it up if they need it (or could if they had not been made to memorize it).
d) Again, while law is not my area, I think if I were teaching law I would be less interested in whether or not you could list in a, b, c order verbatim the arguments made in Smith v Bubblefuck than in the ways in which Smithis a turning point establishing that a prior contract isn’t enforceable if yadda yadda, what the implications of that being established are, how the ramifications would be different were that not so, strategically how that established jurisprudence might be elabored upon, modified, overturned, overruled at a higher or more-encompassing level, etc, and again strategically who is tending to try to build upon that foundation and towards what end, i.e, where are you most likely to encounter it being cited and what are the most likely counterarguments you’d be likely encounter in such cases. Maybe in order to be able to discuss that you first need a rich layer of memorized case law, but still, the emphasis on memorizing and regurgitating makes it sound more like hazing and dreary mindless cramming.
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