Scoplaw

Exhibit 6.4

As to why Section 3 rocks.

Non-3peeps might be interested in seeing that, yes, we do deal with the same black letter law. Prospectives might note that there *are* resources available to them (in addition to the applicable commercial study guides, insofar as they go);  you’re not going to sign up for 3 and be jettisoned into space.

And now back to work.  My outlines look like crap - a hodgepodge of verbatim notes, old outline fragments, and my own parenthetical side notes (which is why they're not up there.)  Thankfully though, we're not graded on the outline.

Giddy

EJF funding was announced today, and I will be able to pursue my quixotic tilt against home grown human rights violations.  No need to go abroad really. 

Rockstar, SisterSchool and I have been fooling around with the initial numbers.  Of the 82 initial awards announced, 30 went to 3peeps (as in 1L Section 3 students).  The list was populated with names I was happy to see - friends doing cool shit around the world.  Cairo, Mozambique, Costa Rica, Ghana, Venezuela.  And, more locally, at least six Public Defenders.  “Section Other” also makes a fine showing, with, interestingly, a number of "honorary 3peeps" in attendance.

This elation is tempered by 8 or so 3peeps who did not receive funding.  Already plans are being hatched to rectify this.  How I love my mates. 

Now, a celebratory beer, briefing (ack!) and some Boston Ska to set the mood – Steady Ernest’s “Rock Steady.”   

More Rumblings in the Blawgosphere

Re: law school reform.  Yea! 

AI's getting into the act (he's been in the act a long time actually - so have so many of the Blawgers). He hasn't taken up the Stick yet though.  Last time I let him play with the cool kids.  Speaking of cool kids, Monica, up at Northeastern has also left a comment in AI's post. 

Elsewhere, Purr Se (GULC 0L) has gotten some imput from In Limine (GULC Sec 1) and Swanno (GULC Sec 3).

While I love the fact that info and opinions are spreading about the internet, and that people are taking ownership of their legal education by questioning it's structures and assumptions, I'd invite anyone interested in these issues to check out lawschoolcanbedifferent.org and to especially consider posting on the Bulletin Board.  Perhaps the BB won't be used and these issues will achieve a critical mass on their own - which'd be great.  But I'm hoping the BB can act as a neutral host for law students discussing their concerns with their educational experiences, that it can gather some voices and ideas together. 

Kissing and Telling

I grow laggard in my blawging.

**

Swan and I had a meeting with one of the Deans on Thursday regarding the Section 3 critique.  It was quite refreshing. 

There’s always (always) a tension between open reportage and alluding to things.  In this case I feel constrained and will not communicate many of the specifics of our conversation with her. 

I can say that there’s a great feeling of compassion and energy about her, and that she has what I consider to be an appropriately broad and balanced perspective.  She not only informed us of a number of applicable threads we could follow up, but seemed really to take our own suggestions seriously, in the spirit in which they were given.  It was, oddly, or not oddly, a loyalty inspiring moment. 

I think I feel far easier with my emotional reaction to this kind of meeting than I would have even only a few years ago.  I’d have feared co-option, seized on the 10% divergence in opinion, made that a locus to define my own stance.   I grow old.  Thank god.

**

I also did some informal Section 3 ambassadorial work yesterday for (yet another) prospective student who was thinking about public interest work, wandered onto campus, and wanted to know about Georgetown.  She was surprised that Curriculum B existed and was very curious about it.  I keep wondering how many of these types are out there.  I keep wondering if I’d have gone back in ‘98 instead of ‘04. . .

Minor Rumblings in the Blawgosphere

My early afternoon was occupied with a bike ride and a response to some posts over at ProperWinston which I was referred to this morning.  PW is, as far as I can tell, a 2L who has been through Curriculum B.  Based on a quick skim through the blog (which I’ve linked to on the sidebar under “GULC” but do not read regularly) he?, Grant?, appears to be somewhat conservative?  or perhaps of a largely libertarian bent?   or is a Marxist?  He’s certainly enamored of the history of western philosophy (which has its own problems).  It’s difficult to characterize his blawging personality without more reading, which I’ve really no inclination to do at this moment.  However, a few of the points and criticisms he makes about the program (not the critique) are interesting and should be considered in future discussions of Section 3.

I’d like to respond to two of his posts here.   

The first post is Do-Gooders

I’d characterize the post as largely high-handedly paternalistic: “Deep down they aren't bad people, just mildly confused and highly ignorant about jurisprudential matters.”  Beg pardon – do you even know any of us?   Overall, it’s also amusing, especially considering PW is reacting to a kind of mushy first-shot manifesto that was sent out to stir up discussion.  I was pretty pleased with the manifesto at the time, and it fulfilled its end, considering that it jumpstarted the current multi-pronged and politically varied critique group.  Most of PW’s arguments in this post aren’t worth taking seriously.

For the record though, I wouldn’t characterize Section 3 as “a CLS curriculum,” although it does employ Crit methods of analysis.  Nor would I say that the section reads nothing but feminist legal theory and critical race theory (or that we only wish to read such), or that in general we’re ignorant of jurisprudential matters.   I feel absurd even typing this out. 

The second post is Field of Dreams, or The Legacy of CLS

Again, PW has apparently confused a first-shot manifesto with an academic critique of the curriculum, and he then mightily engages the individual shrubs in the forest. 

First off, I don’t think anyone is arguing that the Alternative Curriculum is revolutionary in the sense that it has already transformed American legal culture or practice (or society in general).  Please.  However Curriculum B is, relatively speaking, a revolutionary pedagogical approach for first year legal studies, incorporating, as it does, large amounts of legal philosophy and critiquing traditional lines of argumentation from a variety of perspectives.  In some ways the critique group is simply employing the tools that the Curriculum B has given us, asking just what it is we’re in, and what kind of alternative formulations can exist.  We’ve already seen some of our suggestions and ideas having a tangible effect.  For example, one of the prongs involves revisiting the Legal Justice reader and suggesting texts for next year – something that PW ought to have an interest in.  Personally, I’d like to hear PW’s assessment of American Legal Realism and the particular spin on it he thinks that Curriculum B imparts.

I agree with PW that praxis is the only way to effect change (duh).  However, because we must pass through the gates of law school in order to practice law, I do think an open-eyed assessment of law school is nothing to dismiss.  We spend three years in law school, learning not only doctrine, but how to frame discussions on legal issues.  Thus, I find statements like, “legal education has no role to play in praxis” to be profoundly naïve. 

It’s important to remember that the critique of Curriculum B is not the *only* thing we’re up to as students – thus it’s not a question of either “organizing the workers” (which I’m happy to report some of us are) or critiquing, questioning, and trying to improve the structure we find ourselves in.  It’s also important to remember that one need not agree lockstep with every single critique advanced by one’s fellows – there can be significant areas of reform which cross political and philosophical borders.

Section 3 Critique Website

Well, we're up and running at:

Section 3, Curriculum B, and lawschoolcanbdifferent.org

Anyone is welcome to use the discussion board, and we're eager to field questions.  We'll be adding to the website regularly.

Small Section 3 Tidbit

Another point that came up about Section 3 recently, one which a  peep suggested I mention on the blawg, so I will.  (From what I understand this isn’t all that common, but I can’t believe it’s confined to our section.)  Section 3 classes openly discuss argumentative strategies.  Instead of “learning to think like a lawyer” by osmosis, we’re openly drilled in arguments and counter-arguments – we discuss their limits and ramifications. 

As an example, one of our profs, Gary Peller, who teaches Bargain, Exchange, and Liability, quite overtly offers the following “three level view”: 

• The first level is “the rule,” i.e., straight up black letter law/the holding of the case (which is generally at least somewhat malleable of course). 
• The second level is “the rationale” for the rule, i.e., the various kinds of arguments you can marshal to push that black letter law one way or another, to expand or limit the holding, (econ, social policy, administrative issues, institutional competence, etc.).<>
• The third level is the deeper “world view” that each legal philosophy rests on, plus critiques of that philosophy.  An example would be the Classical Legal Thought/Lochner-era courts holding that pro-labor statutes violated “freedom to contract” as grounded in the basic view that the common law existed to act as a shield against the state by preserving the freedom and liberty of the individual.  (Think about how this arises from the history of common law in England and ties into the politics of the early 1900s/the threat of communism/fascism.)  We could also say that in this view, judges were thought to enforce neutral, baseline, background rules which are just the natural rules of the game.  Free and competent individuals can engage within this field.  The critique of this view would be a kind of Coasian analysis that there is no possibility of “neutrality” – that one interest or right will always be chosen or privileged over another.  By ruling that pro-labor statutes were unconstitutional, the courts were privileging ownership interests over labor interests, defining the “neutral baseline” in a way that favored a certain class.  It follows that common law rules are really policy judgments, or an exercise of state power (i.e, regulation) favoring a particular type of economic theory.  Thus the public/private act/omission distinction vanishes in a puff of smoke.  Check out Miller v. Schoene, 276 U.S. 272 (1928).

Peller normally takes us through each level for every case/point of law we encounter.  Some discussions move faster than others, but there’s not a lot of ball hiding.  At times we practice applying those level two arguments (The court is the correct body to make this decision/This decision should be left to the legislature) in specific cases.  I’m not sure how much of this kind of overt analysis/discussion takes place in other sections/schools.    

**

As an aside, I’m hoping we get some other 3 peeps blawging about 3.  My take on what’s going on is just a single (and probably odd) perspective. 

Why you might consider Curriculum B

This is for Hanah (congrats!) and any other prospectives who might be reading – it’s an unorganized morning ramble, so please a) forgive the structure and b) write in with questions.  There’s a group of current Curriculum B/Section 3 students who are going to do some outreach to new/interested students – if you’d like to be on this list, please e-mail me at scoplaw@yahoo.com.

Well then.  Law School in general seems to be a somewhat dehumanizing experience.  While Curriculum B/Section 3 is still law school, in that it does not eradicate all of the concerns in the Kennedy article, it will probably give you a good shot of getting through the first year without losing your soul/mind. 

To qualify my statements, I’ve some difficulty contrasting B/3 to the standard first year curriculum as I’ve never been through the standard curriculum.  However, we do study the same controlling cases, and I do talk with people in the standard sections and occasionally debate points with them, so I can offer some kind of anecdotal contrast.  Please bear in mind that I’m a non-traditional student (early 30s) who comes from a humanities/lit background.  I didn’t have a strong poli-sci, legal philosophy, or American history background, but I’m more of a fox than a hedgehog and am politically engaged with a decent grasp of contemporary issues.

From my perspective, the most valuable thing that B/3 provides is philosophical and historical context which broadens our perspective on legal issues embodied in discrete cases.  Even if the interdisciplinary nature of the section is at times not what I ideally hope it could be, our readings/classes invite a different kind of debate/discussion among our section members than you see in the other sections, one which I think is of higher quality.  B/3 conversations often probe alternate legal formations – what could have been held in a case, and what the implications of that holding would have been.  This in turn leads to an examination of the pressures that drive individual holdings.  One of our professors once joked, “I just want to pause and make sure that you guys know there’s black letter law here – that the judges actually made a single holding on these cases.”  A lot of our conversation gets cut short on these issues (largely reasons of time) – but at least we have it. 

Frankly, I’ve seen several regular section students lost on “big picture” issues, holding the most incredibly dogmatic views on the law, as though the law were a) merely a set of rules to learn/apply, or b) a kind of hermetic, non-political entity.  I like to imagine that B/3 is a bit more critical, a bit more open-eyed than the other sections.

While Swanno, Scott, and I disagree on the political valence of the curriculum (there’s a lot of friendly disagreement in B/3), I’d say it’s leftist, though our few staunch conservatives/libertarians seem to do well enough, as do our deeply religious class members.  However, from my perspective, it’s not an openly radical left.  The professors (at least the ones who have been posed this question) are concerned that the B/3 will be populated by leftist types who have never really had their perspectives challenged – so they want to familiarize the students with counter arguments.  Often, instead of strongly presenting conservative/rightist thought, this challenge takes the form of a kind of broad philosophical, erm, gutting – every argument swirls away into the void of (moral) relativism, the difficulty of aggregating true preferences, the blurring of public/private, feasance/non-feasance, and unexpected consequences (of judicial decisions which then have to be corrected by the legislatures or by later judgments). 

On one hand this approach is important for personal growth and a balanced understanding of your own political and ethical stance.  On the other it’s grindingly paternalistic.  Many people find this approach frustrating – as though their value system is not being taken seriously, or is being torn apart.  I have a great deal of sympathy for that perspective.  I’m not sure if B is “worse” in this way than other curriculums – the challenge to your beliefs is overt and marshaled, giving it a certain kind of intensity, but that very challenge provides an opportunity for affirmation, resistance, and validation.  I suspect if you’re left leaning, you’ll at least have a sense of community afforded by fellow students with similar frustrations.  (As an aside, a lot of this is old hat for me – I’ve had my value system challenged repeatedly and often by learning in a rather caustic undergraduate environment and living in a very conservative region.  While I see the value in perspective-challenging for others, it seems largely a waste of time to me at points.  But that’s a personal frustration, one I think that many non-trads might experience anywhere.) 

To segue back to the “type” of class we are, mostly I think we’re people who crave a broad approach.  It’s also interesting to note the seemingly high percentage of artistic types among us.  We have several accomplished musicians, writers, actors, comics, etc.  We seem to be a bit older than average, certainly more Public Interest Law oriented than the other sections.  (Sometimes at PI events, it’s like a small B/3 party.)  Relatively speaking, we’re a pretty cohesive and friendly bunch – at least to the point where people from other sections comment on this often.  I think a few people made an effort early on to bridge any small cliques that might be forming in our section.  So while we have “groups” of people that largely associate with each other (largely based around study groups I think), there’s a kind of openness to the section – lots of note sharing, group excursions, dinner parties, open section parties, etc.  We’re certainly not a hippie commune, and there are people who are just flat out personally irked by other people in the section, but that’s pretty normal anywhere I think.  And we have a few complete tools – again, pretty normal.

We’re also a bit rebellious/pushy.  We leaned on the administration until we got our lone second semester Friday class switched to a Monday so that we’d have 3 day weekends.  Nothing like going out on Thursday and sleeping in on Friday.

I’m sure sectional character will vary from year to year.  But there’s no reason committed B/3ers from next year couldn’t cultivate a similarly helpful and mature atmosphere.   

Our year is trying to leave a legacy for future years by creating a stronger institutional memory for B/3, a B/3 alumni association, stronger avenues for feedback and student input for readings, class structure, etc.  It’s a work in progress you can join - something pretty unusual in legal education.

Now – to the outcome-oriented questions most prospective law students have:

Career:
I very much doubt B/3 will adversely impact your legal career.  It may well give you a huge leg up.  The school tracked alumni for 6 years and found they did at least as well as alumni from other sections (in terms of jobs, clerkships, etc.)   Employers don’t really care about your first year if you do very well in your second year classes.  I’m not sure how B/3 correlates with job satisfaction, but I’ve a sneaking suspicion it would be pretty high.  Anecdotal evidence:  the editorial board of the Law Review here is predominantly Section 3 alumni.  B/3s do well in mock trial, moot court, etc.  It’s not like you’re “missing” something by going the B/3 route. 

Workload:
I suspect it’s a bit higher than average, but completely manageable.  I do the majority of my reading (many do all the readings, I slide some of that time into reviewing notes/arguments a bit more than most) and, at the end of my first semester, am in the middle of my class.  I still have time to go out at least once a weekend.  I write a lot.  I blog.  I have side poetry projects I work on.  I bike at least every other day.  I’m maxed out, but I’m fine – getting plenty of sleep and exercise.  Granted, I don’t have a TV.  Also, I’m not dating anyone, if I were, I’d have to scale back here and there.

Bottom line: you’ll have enough time for your own life, but on average probably a bit less time than some of the other students here.  It largely depends on who you are and what you want.  If you’re gunning for all As, in any section, you’ll spend more time on your studies.  Personally, while the As and the tip-top-track route would be cool, it’s not worth the psychic damage that putting my life completely on hold for 3 years would cause. Then again, I’m sure there are some people here who could take that route on 4 hrs a day – I’m just not one of those. 

Study Materials:
While there aren’t specific commercial study materials for B/3, there are plenty of old outlines (freely shared – our year will be posting many for each class on the web) and (duh) the black letter law in the country is still the same.  For the Torts element in Bargain, Exchange, and Liability, I use Emanuel’s standard Torts.  (Which is not to suggest you can skip lectures or anything.  There’s no way in hell you could get the B.E.L. perspective from Emanuel’s, which is just an aid to current black letter law.)

Let me re-emphasize this – we study the same law, the same cases, just from a different perspective.  We might go through less squibs, but really, who wants a lot of case reading anyway?  I’d rather work off an outline and do some long term thinking than get squibbed to death hunting for black letter law in a casebook.

In sum:

Drawbacks – more reading, personally challenging on an ethical/political level, a bit of conversational isolation/confusion/prejudice from other sections.

Advantages – cautiously leftist, varied readings, more thinking/rhetoric, ethical/political self-examination required, broad perspective, self-selection resulting in relatively more community than other sections, B/3 as a flexible work-in-progress. 

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?

Required Reading

There's going to be some shaking, rattling, and rolling going on here over the next few weeks, largely centered on the oft-alluded to but little blawged about Section 3 discussion/characterization/critique.  I know a lot of blawgers have expressed frustration with their law school experience, especially those of you who are coming from the left, or, while centrist, entered law school with the idea that something about the legal system ought to be changed.

For those of you interested in the subject of law school reform, I'd like to begin by referring you to this piece by Duncan Kennedy which rather cogently identifies many of the problems in the contemporary law school experience.