Will Tomorrow's Lawyer's be Able to do the Job

[Melbourne]

@Voyager

In England, you’d think that someone who had to go to court in a wig could handle anything.

??? Barristers, (the people who go to court in a wig) are specialists. There is by no means an expectation that they can handle “anything” – only the law they have choosen to specialise in. ???

[amarinth]

@Procrustus

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’d also agree yes & yes.

That said, sexual assault crimes are not a major feature of any class that students are likely to take (a few days, at most, of a class or two). Law students already know what’s going to be discussed in class (there shouldn’t be surprises in class. Students are supposed to have read the work ahead of time). Attendance isn’t mandatory in law school; there are no participation grades. The only thing that counts is the final.

So, if a student decides that they’d rather not discuss violent sexual assault in a classroom setting, but instead learn the elements of the crime on their own (or just not learn it at all and take the chance that it won’t be on the final and won’t be on the bar). So what? I don’t see it as an issue at all.

I also wonder how much of this is hyperbole. Are students actually saying “I don’t want to hear anything that disturbs me” or is that a teacher putting words into his students’ mouths? Is what they’re actually saying more nuanced than that? Could it be that the that the prof is doing a crappy job of handling the subject? Also, I don’t think it’s too much for the prof to say “we’re talking about rape tomorrow including issues of consent.”

[Lakai]

@Nava

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.

I wouldn’t take my comment to its ultimate consequences then. There are some basic principles that an attorney has to learn, but sexual assault or rape is not essential.

@WilyQuixote

Why? What purpose do you think it will serve?

This is a serious question.

It would give law students more autonomy. If rape is a stressful subject for someone, I really see no need to require them to learn about it. Especially if learning it in a law school class has little to no bearing on how well an attorney will be able to handle the subject after law school.

[drewder]

Seems to me with the emphasis placed on curbing rape and sexual assault in today’s colleges perhaps the first semester of every major should be a fairly in-depth coverage of criminal law particularly dealing with these subjects. There might be far fewer in need of trigger warnings when they get to law school if they did.