For
some law students, life experience and a strongly held point of view can be
immense stumbling blocks to law school success.
I began to think about
this last semester working with several students in my 1L class. Relative to
the majority of law students, these students were older, which is to say they
had lives after undergrad – careers, families, mortgages and other “grown-up”
milestones. Each came to law school with a clear point of view, seeing his or
her world through a lens of experiences, beliefs and ideals accumulated over
years. One student had been a nurse and another was a university librarian. One
had struggled with substance abuse and one student, already a working mother of
four young children had recently earned her undergraduate degree. When I met these students it was clear that
each was rightfully proud of where they had been, or at least what they had
overcome to get here. They remained very mindful of and connected to the lessons
learned in former lives and seemed hesitant to loosen their grip on those
memories for fear of losing themselves in the disorienting new world of law
school.
As I worked with these
students on ways to approach hypothetical fact patterns, I noticed that many
had great difficulty issue-spotting. They focused rather on the implausibility
of the fact pattern and how unlikely or unfair a scenario seemed in the context
of their own experience or personal values. Most often, talking with a student
about why he or she didn’t raise a certain important issue in his or her
practice answer, I would find out that the student saw the issue, but chose not
to raise it, deciding that in “real life” nobody would seriously go to court
over those facts, or that it didn’t make sense to spend time discussing an
action that would be obviously unsuccessful. Years of engaging in moral
reasoning and practical life decision-making seemed to have handicapped these
students’ ability to engage in effective legal analysis.
This challenge posed a
difficult conundrum. In order to support
my students, I needed to connect with them, earn their trust and demonstrate
that I sincerely understood and valued who they were and where they had come
from to get here. On the other hand, I had to ask them to look past those
valuable former-life lessons and experiences in order to develop the analytical
flexibility required to succeed in the law.
So my compromise
solution has been to adapt an essay exam strategy that capitalizes on the
likelihood my students would focus on the story and the actions of the parties
in a fact pattern before recognizing the legally significant issues.
I start with one
general instruction: Always, always
always add a single phrase to the beginning of the first sentence of every
essay question, “On an island that you’ve never been to and where no visitors
ever go…(essay question begins). I
remind them that fact patterns exist in isolation, as if on an island. No facts
can be added and no additional facts are needed. They must also be mindful of
the island’s inherent hostility and distrust toward visitors, outside opinions
or new perspectives. A student’s point of view and common-sense life lessons,
while personally valuable and hard-won, will prove
confusing and unwelcome if brought to the island and applied to the facts. With this simple, starting prompt, I hope to
remind students, whether they are prone to mix life experience with legal
reasoning or not, to keep an objective mind about the fact pattern so that
they, in turn, don’t lose the objective
of the exam. The additional tools I give
students to avoid this pitfall and others will follow in a later post.
Seth-Thomas Aitken,
UMass School of Law – Dartmouth
