I wish that liberal professors didn’t try to force or threaten students to give away their time and assume that some students are somehow “bad” if they don’t or can’t do it when and how and if they want. One cannot know each student’s situation and abilities, and it’s wrong to put them into situations that create more stress or conflicts for them.

Such thinking goes along with “forced volunteerism” aka “service learning.” Just teach the subject for which you’re being paid and worry about your own social consicence rather than those of others.

“Actually, this method of teaching is very successful at instructing law students in the substance of many areas of law and at developing skills of legal analysis.”

I disagree. Law schools do ok using this method to teach analytic skills to students who have been very selectively prescreened by the LSAT and other more or less standardized measures to be able to learn those skills in that manner. As law schools with access and diversity missions know, there are many more students who can and do succeed in law school, on bar exams, and in practice, when afforded varied and more innovative pedagogy.

I disagree. The schools do an OK job in those areas with students who have been pre-screened by the LSAT and other more or less standardized measures for exactly the ability to learn from the case method. As schools with a mission of access and diversity know, there are many more students than those who can and do succeed in law school, on bar exams, and in practice, but who require more varied and better pedagogy than teaching from cases.

I think that you are referring to medical professors who teach the clinical side of things; not the basic science of the first two years, correct?

What saved me during law school was being able, with the encouragement of faculty members like Erwin Chemerinsky, was to forge interdisciplinary ties to the field of women’s studies. As a graduate student who had, what was considered by some faculty members to be irrelevant real-world experience acquired in the trenches of the criminal justice system, I preserved my sanity by taking courses in law and society studies.

Unfortunately it often requires a great deal of energy to swim against the mainstream. For example, last spring I was invited to present the preliminary results of an ethnographic research project that I was conducting on the decision-making practices of German prosecutors within my political science department. In the question and answer period after my presentation, a tenured faculty member asked me: What kind of job do you think you are going to get with that dissertation? While I can happily report now that I have secured a tenure-track position on a law faculty, it would be my hope that law faculties find a way to penetrate some of these disciplinary borders. Although many scholars write about topics that cross disciplinary boundaries, between the fields of political science and law, there is still a solid wall. Only a small minority of legal scholars are familiar with the attitudinal model that is present in political science research on judicial decision-making. On the other side of the aisle too many political scientists pay sufficient attention to what it means to “think like a lawyer.”

I sincerely hope that the innovative ideas currently being discussed in legal education will ultimately make it possible for students who would like to probe both theoretical and practical problems that lie at the intersection of several disciplines to swim with the stream.

Nicely said. Those types of experiences in law school help students learn and apply context, and give meaning to the structure.

Wish you well in your approach and attempt.

One of the major distinctions from United States Legal Education that separates us from our foreign friends is the prerequisite that students first obtain a bachelors degree before gaining admittance to law school. This is unique not only because it makes legal education in United States a graduate level program, but also that it gives a palette of colors (i.e. academic disciplines) which a law professor can employ to paint the picture of what the law is, and how to think and employ it.

First, definitional distinction. Many confuse multi-disciplinarity with interdisciplinarity. It is a difference in degree, but a difference nonetheless. The former, muli-disciplinarity, brings forth multiple fields’ methodologies and theories to solve a problem. Interdisciplinarity, on the other hand, adds a step to the analysis. it tasks the thinker to not only use multiple fields of thought, but also to try and synthesize those two fields. This idea of synthesis is central to the process of interdisciplinary thinking.

I don’t necessarily think Dean Chemerinsky, or other bloggers, have conflated the two, but I have learned – from too many banal faculty meetings (serving as a student representative)-that if going to discuss interdisciplinary thinking best to start with the definitional distinction.

Now, stepping off my definitional soap box (yes, I consider the forgoing paragraph one of the reasons I know I belong in law school), returning to my point. Law students come from a variety of academic backgrounds. Take for example my small group of ten law students that I studied with my first year. Among us the following majors came out: accounting, criminal justice, criminal justice, history, political science, philosophy, and sociology. Add my roommate and you get physics; allow me a couple more and I get to engineering and music. A multi-disciplinary panacea awaits the law professor walking into his classroom.

Now, if you’ll allow me an assumption, I assume human nature works for law students too. Further, that human nature implicates the employment of thought based on past experiences.

Now put the multi-disciplinary group of students together with a new subject: law. What do you get? My assertion is you get implicit, but unrecognized interdisciplinarity.

Sure, law school introduces a new methodology and ultimately a new sets of constructs by which to analyze and ultimately solve problems. But foolish we are to think that students don’t already bring to that study their prior experiences; including their experiences about how to solve problems in a different, but possibly equitable fashion.

How students reconcile this new method with their previous approach, I suspect, is by synthesizing their previous approach with the new approach. Thus, shazam! Interdisciplinary thought.

My concern as the discussion ensues on how to bring interdisciplinary thought into law schools is that faculty and institutional planners will not see the forest through the trees.

Faculty should seek to engage the potentials for interdisciplinary thought at the time they are most ripe, which happens to be the same time faculty try to teach legal thought: the first year. Students have just left the experiences of their past and come ready to engage a new method of problem solving or social ordering. The moments are perfected for the capture.

As I stated at the forefront: United States legal education is unique. Why not capture its uniqueness?

**Caveat: This comment comes from a student. Commonly thought to be the mute and blind in curricular issues.