In the Freakonomics blog, Ian Ayres, a Yale law professor, described a Law Revue skit at his school:
A group of students [were] sitting at desks, facing the audience, listening to a professor drone on. All of the students were looking at laptops except for one, who had a deck of cards and was playing solitaire. The professor was outraged and demanded that the student explain why she was playing cards. . . . She answered, “My laptop is broken.”
Not bad. The professors in the audience were stunned.
The skit was “several years ago.” I wondered how Ayres would manage to connect revelation of a timeless truth about higher education (see For Whom Do Colleges Exist?) with something new. Here’s how:
Saul Levmore, the dean at the University of Chicago Law School, has recently announced an end to classroom surfing.
The big truth behind the little joke was . . . hard to see. Or at least hard for professors to see. The big truth is that law schools, like most institutions of higher education, are run in dozens of ways that benefit professors at the expense of students. Boring lectures are one example. In response to a small revelation of this big truth, Dean Levmore — presumably after consultation with many other law school professors — created another example of how law schools are run for professors rather than students.
Difficulty with basic concepts at Duke and UC Berkeley.
More. I suppose solitaire is still okay at the University of Chicago since it doesn’t involve surfing.
Seth, you hit one what used to be an interest of mine.
https://adrr.com/law0/ is material I wrote in the early to mid 90s (around the time period of the events in https://adrr.com/living) in response to a request from a friend who was doing a project.
I’ve not done much to edit or update it since I started being able to think again, but you’ve hit a very sharp point indeed.
Universities are a peculiar “working environment”. In certain ways they resemble jails — that professors have trouble seeing this is interesting, especially because they were once students. Given that law is about equity, it is especially interesting that law professors have trouble seeing this.
Yes, jail. Many students would not be in college if they had any choice in the matter. They feel forced to be there. Before Dean Levmore decided to ban surfing in classrooms, I’m pretty sure he didn’t consult any students, which is an indication of how little power they have — like prisoners. John Taylor Gatto has often compared school to prison.
If there is a way to become a lawyer without going to law school, I’m unaware of it. Of course, law school is unlike jail in dozens of ways; I thought that was obvious. The similarities — and the way professors have trouble seeing them — are what’s interesting.
It will cost you dearly if you flunk out of Yale Law School. A friend of mine got into Yale but for irrelevant reasons went to a much less prestigious law school. Huge mistake, she now says. She didn’t realize that where she went to law school would affect how she was treated for her entire professional life.