Section 3

Please note I may add to this post over the next few days - if so I will note it here in the first sentence.

Regular readers (such as they are) by now have no doubt noticed that I don’t blog overly much about law school itself.  This is due to several factors: the mundane nature of the daily law school experience; the relative expertise of other blawgers on matters topical and political; the desire maintain my classmates relatively anonymous status.  Hence few stories on what so-and-so said in class, my own reflections on tort doctrine, or on political matters.   

However, I thought I’d break form post up something further about Section 3, specifically about the current critique that’s being built my members of my class.  What follows is all anecdotal.  I may have mixed fact and fiction, but as a thumbnail sketch, it’s probably not too far off – however, I’d urge that no one take this as a kind of ‘official’ history of Section 3/Curriculum B.   There’s actually not a lot of public information out there on this (excepting a 1992 Toledo Law Review article), and a lot of this is scattered elsewhere in my blawg.

Section 3 (107 students) is the only 1L section at GULC (out of 5, including the evening students) which follows the alternative Curriculum B.  The other sections follow a first-year J.D. curriculum that’s pretty much standard across the rest of the law schools (CivPro, ConLaw, Contracts, Torts, Property, Criminal Justice, Legal Research and Writing, plus one elective). These traditional subjects are based on 19th century common law pleading categories.

Apparently, Curriculum B began about 15 years ago. In 1990, a group of Georgetown Law professors took a time off from teaching with the aid of a Department of Education Grant to formulate an alternative first-year curriculum.  They wanted the program to retain black-letter law elements of the standard curriculum, but at the same time take a more updated approach to teaching which emphasized interdisciplinary or cross-doctrinal elements of the law, i.e., addressed “the emergence of the regulatory state,” mapped the erosion of “doctrinal boundaries” (say between tort, contract, and property), and acknowledged influence of other disciplines, economics, poli-sci, philosophy, psychology, etc.

The program was also supposed to be heavy on theory as opposed to case reading.  Black letter law was supposed to be self-consciously critiqued as it was presented with attention paid to its historical placement within the various schools of American jurisprudential thought.  At the same time, students would read primary documents that inform current legal debates (a fav. of mine for example, Robert L. Hale, Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non-Coercive State, 38 Political Science Quarterly (1923), 470-478.) 

Lastly, as all the courses would be radically revisited (instead of merely adding a new course or two to the existing first year curriculum) the professors would make a concerted effort to coordinate their lectures so that certain topics would be taught concurrently (for example nuisance would be examined on a certain week in multiple (appropriate) classes).

The program was seen as offering an alternative vision of first year legal studies.  It was hoped at the time that it might act as a catalyst for other law schools.  Other alternative curriculums had been tried: Columbia in the 20s, more recently Stanford and Harvard.  But these failed due to a combination of academic pressure to preserve the status quo and professorial drift.

GULC’s Curriculum B began as a single section (3) in the 1991-92 academic year.  Initially Curriculum B was marked by intense student engagement and the formation of various student caucuses, including: The Vision of a New Curriculum Caucus, The Race and Ethnicity Caucus, The Personal Responsibility Caucus, The Gender Caucus, and, of course, the Non-Caucus Caucus.  The program sparked a lot of debate and outside speakers were brought into speak on how the still malleable curriculum might be shaped.  Richard Epstein apparently told his audience of Section 3 students that they weren’t actually getting a legal education and the best thing they could do would be to drop out in shame and apply elsewhere. 

The school tracked Section 3 graduates for six years and found they did very well in second and third year classes, and had no trouble finding employment.  After that, the Curriculum was more or less static – some changes were made in class structure, professors left, new professors came on board, some classes became more standard, then were (or are being) re-radicalized, the program drifted, as programs do.

There’s more to say about the intervening years – but it’s largely about what didn’t happen.  Curriculum B was never exported to another section, nor was it adopted beyond Georgetown.  The classes stayed the largely same, with three of them still taught by original professors.  The basic class structure – large classes, (some) Socratic method, case reading, single end-of-year issue spotter exams, lack of personalized feedback, seem uncomfortably dated in a way that undercuts some of the basic premises of Curriculum B.

**
Today

Although Curriculum B is politically stable within GULC, it’s oddly treated as somewhat of a dirty little secret, to the extent that often 2Ls and 3Ls here don’t have a solid understanding of just what Section 3 is or how it differs from the regular curriculum beyond, “more reading, more theory.”  Personally, had I known in depth what Curriculum B entailed, GULC would have been my first (not second) choice for law school. 

As a fairly radical innovation in the deeply conservative world of legal education, official references to Curriculum B such as those on the GULC website are always careful to point out that we cover “the same subject matter offered in more traditional curriculums” but that we simply approach it from a “different perspective that emphasizes the sources of law in history, philosophy, and political theory, as well as the influence of other fields, including economics.” 

From one of our school’s web pages:

“The "B" curriculum, available to one section of full time students, requires seven courses different in emphasis from those in the "A" curriculum: Bargain, Exchange, and Liability; Democracy and Coercion; Government Processes; Legal Justice Seminar; Legal Practice: Writing and Analysis; Legal Process; and Property in Time. The "B" section emphasizes the sources of law in history, philosophy, political theory, and economics. It also seeks to reflect the increasingly public nature of contemporary law.”

You can see this does not do a very good job of "selling" the curriculum to prospective students or potentially exciting factulty (and students) elsewhere.

Some of the classes have a clear corollary to the standard curriculums, with Legal Practice = Legal Research and Writing being perhaps the closest to a traditional class.  Some are recognizable but radical; Bargain, Exchange, and Liability is more or less contracts and torts taught at the same time so as to emphasize the similarities, differences, and blurring of the two, and while Democracy and Coercion is concerned with issues of constitutional law (collectivity v. self-determinacy), it’s chock full of theoretical readings and organized around Kantian/Utilitarian poles.  On the other hand, Legal Justice (sort of a history of American jurisprudential theory) has no real corollary to the traditional curriculum.  Neither does Government Processes, a course that’s concerned with (as far as I can yet tell) how society uses various legal instruments to deal with social problems;  it draws on admin law, criminal law, environmental law, statutory analysis.

**

Questions for a later post:

15 years later, how radical is Curriculum B? How well has it met its philosophical/educational/pedagogic goals? Should overarching structure be continued in whole or in part during the second or third year?

What’s the future?   Should B rest on it’s laurels?  Should it impact the “standard” curriculum here at GULC?  Elsewhere?  Why aren’t other schools using this as a model?

Comments

[swanno]

One of many possible comments: Prof. Chused is overhauling Legal Process (which is still quite close to the traditional CivPro, though Pillard injects history and policy whenever she can) this summer to be more "Section 3."

[Scoplaw]

Yep - Process used to be fairly radical (if you look at the old outlines and the class proposal). I'm not sure how it became "CivPro Plus," even though Pillard does a great job with the class. Someone was joking as to what our philosophical readings were for that class and another student responded with "Well, the Brennan dissents obviously." (I did like the Luban piece though.)

I think I'll be adding sections to this post which might more overtly reflect my personal critique of law school and of Section 3.

[Scott Scheule]

What's your source on that Epstein bit?

[Hanah]

More please! I've been reading your blog since I was accepted to Georgetown about a month ago, and I'll be deciding between Curriculum A and B soon. Your thoughts are very interesting.

[ambimb]

I'll second Hanah: More more! Section 3 has fascinated me since I first learned about it, and from what you've said and I've heard elswehere, I definitely think it should be pushed and expanded and exported elsewhere. Now that you've been through 2/3 to 3/4 of the first year, you're probably more familiar than I am w/major critiques of contemporary legal education, but it certainly seems to me law schools owe society much more than they're giving. (Not to mention what they owe students in return for the incredble tuition payments, which is a related issue.)

[Scoplaw]

Hanah-
Some stuff for you a few posts up.

Scott-
The Epstein comments come from some of the original archived Section 3 materials which will soon go on the web for public access. These include some of the early documents like original Dep. Ed. grant proposal, memos from the professors explaining the unique courses they were developing, reports from the various first year caucuses.

Hopefully we’ll have this material up in 2/3 weeks. It should largely augment what I’ve written thus far, and makes for fascinating reading (esp. the proposed classes and the first-year student reactions). However I don’t think there will be huge surprises/revelations that go beyond the thumbnail sketch.

AI-
There are many areas of law school that are ripe for reform – (I’m with you on the whole cost/services critique). It’s sort of shocking that there’s been no move to export B/3 that I’m aware of. I think part of the reason why is that law school traditionally keeps students very busy (who has time to organize a conference on law school reform while in law school) and there’s not much incentive for schools to reform on their own – they’re too busy following the lead-dogs.

I’m hoping that just getting this information out on the web will start to produce a critical mass for change among both current and prospective students. Really, when you think of it, pre-internet, how would law students in different schools exchange information en mass? An article here or there I suppose in a journal. I think the key to change is both local pressure within schools, and a kind of generalized externalized pressure. I’d love to see what would happen if GULC got a ton of topflight prospectives all clamoring to get into B/3 – would they expand to two sections as was one time proposed? Would we see students passing over “higher ranked” schools (USNWR) specifically for B/3? What kinds of pressure would that create in other law schools? How far “down” in the rankings would prospective students go to attend a school with a B/3 curriculum? Honestly, if Uconn had one, I’d probably be there right now (especially at their modest cost).

One of the more distant phases of my own project will be to collect information on other law schools with alternative grading structures/curricula. I know a few of them are out there (someone placed the number at around 10).

I’ll be making a more public request for information sometime soon, but if anyone reading this would like to mail me (or post) pointers/information/suggestions on such law schools, I’d be very grateful.