A Good Law School Class
I’m just finishing studying for my penultimate law school exam ever (my last one is on Thursday), and I realized what makes a law school class great.
A great law school class doesn’t try to cram all of the doctrine from a particular area of the law down your throat. There’s no way you’re going to remember all the rules and details anyway. For many attorneys, much of their real work is legal research. As long as you know the general contours of the rules and where to look, you should be fine.
Instead, a great law school class has a small set of themes, and it attempts to show how those themes run throughout the cases you study. Those themes should be in tension with each other, and there should be instances where a given theme is, itself, self-contradictory. The class should show you how those themes developed historically, and the general “momentum” of the law at present, so you might be able to predict how a court will decide an as-yet undecided issue.
The course should push you to explore those tensions, because that’s exactly where there is an opportunity for creative lawyering.
Karl Klare·, who teaches advanced labor law, presents precisely that kind of course. I wish all law school classes could have been this good.
You might get a little bit of a sense of the course from my class notes, which I put online along with notes from almost every other law school class I’ve taken.