For God’s sake man, this is not public procurement rules or depletion allowance regulations or shipping laws which you will see only when you actually have to use them for a case/transaction. This is criminal law, which any lawyer needs to be familiar with even if you don’t use it. And law school courses have lots of stuff which a lawyer will never use, but should know; you’ll only get me to do wills, trusts and land law at gunpoint, but it was necessary to know them.
Plus lots of people will end up doing at least some criminal work, either as mandatory pro bono, continuing professional development or (most often)as a collateral issue in their normal practice field; *err no Mr Chairman, that supervisor’s penchant for ass slapping are not harmless fun, they are sexual assault. *
Besides ISTM it is not that they must be shown the raw footage or read the gruesome details of particularly egregious cases – but considering for instance the US jurisdictions where there is much public discussion of sexual assaults and rape culture and things like the Cosby case or the Brock Turner case, it is not out of place in the course of legal education to bring up what does the Law say about sexual assault and when do you have a case or not, with examples. The examples do not have to be especially sensationalistic in depiction, but sexual assault happens, it is a major crime and major social problem, and IMO those learned in the Law should have a minimal awareness thereof beyond that of the layperson.
It’s not about learning everything. It’s about learning what the students who pay you $40,000 per year want to learn.
Law School is not a public service. There is a bar admission process that is supposed to set standards for lawyers. And the bar exam doesn’t really test specific subjects. The questions in each subject area have no relevance to actual legal practice in those areas. The exam just wants to see that you understand how to apply a set of legal rules to a fact pattern.
If you do not learn about sexual assault laws, you probably will not make a good criminal attorney. But that is the attorney’s choice. They can learn whatever they want.
Do you honestly think a few more law school classes about sexual assault will change anything?
A better solution would be to increase funding for public defenders, or for judges and court officials who specialize in sexual assault cases. Then you will see attorneys doing a far better job with sexual assault cases. There is an even bigger problem of attorneys who want to learn more and do a better job, but can’t because they do not have the time or resources. If a few students do not want to learn the subject, then fuck them. We don’t need them.
With the caveat that different jurisdictions have different rules and regulations, most law courses and modules tend to be mandatory, with only a few electives. Prospective attorneys, for the most part, cannot simply “learn whatever they want”.
I do think you may be overestimating the need for students to study rape laws -or specific offences generally - as opposed to knowing the principles of criminal law.
No. Neither will a few less classes.
Is there a widespread and systematic problem in your jurisdiction of private attorneys providing inadequate defense in rape cases? If there is a problem in your jurisdiction regarding the successful prosecution of sexual assault matters, the cause is far more likely to be a combination of overworked public defenders, dated and inadequate legislation, outdated myths, a lack of specialized courts and prosecutors, and poorly trained presiding officers.
Not strictly correct because an attorney can decide not to learn these subjects and fail the class. But I understand your point.
Let me amend what I said and say that an attorney should be able to learn whatever they want.
Overestimating? I am saying it’s not necessary.
That’s why I said we should “increase funding for public defenders, or for judges and court officials who specialize in sexual assault cases”. We’re on the same page here.
Take that reasoning to its ultimate consequences and everybody gets a 4.0GPA. The parts they didn’t learn? Well, they weren’t interested in them, therefore the school should not require them to learn those parts.
Even without getting to evident absurdity, it leads to situations where someone has focused so much on their intended specialty that they do it like ass because they don’t understand underlying principles. For example, some colleagues of mine who had BSs in Organic Chemistry, Masters in Organic Chemistry, were working on or had PhDs in Organic Chemistry, and their reaction “recipes” barely worked because they had never bothered study anything about how to choose the best reaction conditions, that being a different specialty.
Uh, actually, we didn’t do digital but according to my friends from Telecos, our one-year, required, Electronics course in ChemE covered as much ground as they had in their two years of Analogical.
If you give me some time to dust off that part of my brain I should be able to at least analyze the analogical parts of any circuit and tell you what they do. Or, if you tell me what should the circuit do, I can design it.
The purpose wasn’t to have us actually be able to design circuits (normally you’d have a Telecos or other circuits-specialist type around), but there were several occasions on which that subject came in handy to help figure out what was broken with a machine, which was the course’s stated purpose.
Having knowledge of other parts of your field is pretty essential. I no longer do tax law, but I need to know the basics and how revenue statutes are construed (differently from regular ones) so I don’t look like an idiot when I take my killer precedent before the judges, who laugh me out of Court. I might not be a criminal lawyer, but I need to know some criminal law so I can guide my corporate clients in their HR work for instance.Being a lawyer is much more than trial work.
Funny how you cut off parts that are. I’m not particularly interested in doing the job of an electronics engineer, but there are a lot of things about which engineers are very much interchangeable; for any profession, I expect their practitioners to have a good general base.
If you can’t step from your job as a chemical engineer right into a job as an electronics engineer, then you don’t meet the standard proposed by Voyager, which is what I was speaking to.
The standard that you are apparently proposing is that students are the ones who are best entrusted to decide what they should or should not learn. (It’s a truism that they can always decide what they WILL NOT learn. ) To which students does that apply? All students? Any post-graduate education? Or just law students?
Please don’t imply in your answer that the only qualification a professional lawyer need have is ability to pass a bar exam without defending that.
I certainly don’t believe that, quite the opposite. Every profession has specialization, including lawyers. I certainly wouldn’t want a tax lawyer defending me for murder.
It’s an interesting question. I certainly should be free to pick an undergraduate school that doesn’t require foreign language study if I wish, but shouldn’t enroll in one that has such a requirement and then complain about it. I went to a college where I could design my own major, do independent study, and get credit for “real world” expeirence. Nonetheless, there were some “core requirements” that all students had to take, and of course, my major had some (flexible) requirements as well. I am in favor of empowering students with the responsibility to direct their own education, but I’m not troubled by reasonable number of required courses. Everyone’s definition of “reasonable” will be a bit different. I certainly would look closely at the cricumulm of any college I was considering applying to.
Is law school different? Every school I know of has almost the same first year program; torts, criminal law, civil procedure, property, contracts, evidence. This thread raises two questions, 1) Should every law student take a basic criminal law class, and 2) should a required criminal law class include discussion of sexual assault crime?
I come down on the side of “yes” to both. If handled responsibly, there should be nothing more traumatic about learning about sex crimes than reading a newspaper these days. On the other hand, it wouldn’t offend me or be the end of civilization if a particular law school wanted to make criminal law an elective and see how it turns out. (It might, however, cause problems with ABA Accreditation)
The law school I attended required a course in Criminal Procedure for 1Ls, but Criminal Law was an optional elective for upperclassmen (I don’t believe this is common, however). In layman’s terms this meant we focused on appellate cases with an emphasis on the actions of law enforcement and lower courts, with little if any attention paid to the details of what the defendant was arrested for and the type of crime they were convicted or acquitted of at trial, so I just don’t see it being an issue.
In fact, it would not surprise me if a newspaper article covering the arrest or trial of a defendant provides more details about what happened than the typical appellate decision does.