I want to thank one of my former clients, now a 1L at a top law school, who has been sending me pithy little stories about her first few weeks of law school. I thought my readers would get a kick out of the e-mail she sent me today (S- thanks for letting me share it! I think it shows that the Socratic Method isn't quite as scary as law school applicants believe....)
Things my Contracts professor actually said in class last week:
"If you say President Bush is competent, you are wrong. If you say President Bush will do something right, and clearly he doesn't (because he can't), did you break a promise?""Raise your hand if you think what the defendant did was wrong. Ahhh, all the social workers."
"Katie, Mary...these are all lovely names. I thought people in your generation all had atrocious names like Tiffany."
"Drinking champagne at dinner is nice, but making your own Jager Bomb at home is just sad."
Lovely to see this sort of atmosphere being built in lectures, it's too easy for them to be impersonal recitations of facts in the introductory courses and nothing sends even dedicated students off to sleep quicker than dry lecturing on dry topics.
ReplyDeleteI appreciated the "who thinks the defendant was wrong question." One of the very first tasks my criminal law lecturer set tthe class in the first week of first year was to take a list of scenarios and decide if it was wrong (as opposed to unlawful) behaviour, the debates that developed really brought the subject home for us.