Curriculum
The term “lawyering” describes two related concepts. Lawyering, the profession, refers to the practices by which lawyers use law in the service of clients and society at large. Lawyering, the course, is the scholarly study of law in use.
The Lawyering Program follows a carefully developed method designed to give students the opportunity to experience, and to think critically about, particular kinds of lawyering work. The Lawyering method, which may be described as experiential learning and guided critique, is grounded in two integrated principles. First, as Charles Gragg has said in explaining Harvard Business School’s case method, wisdom can only be achieved through experience. (1) Second, as the work of cognitive scientists shows, learning to engage in a complex activity like the practice of law is a cooperative process.(2) Based on these insights, Lawyering asks students to work, at increasing levels of difficulty, through three steps: 1) systematic study of the components of a professional task; 2) cooperative engagement in that task; and 3) disciplined, collaborative critique of choices made in performing the task.
In each Lawyering Exercise, the following procedures are used in a collaborative interaction between student and faculty:
- Students read materials that provide conceptual tools for thinking about the kinds of legal work under focus.
- Students discuss the conceptual tools provided in the readings and, in most cases, use them in preliminary exercises.
- Students then work, with peers and with faculty in role as expert collaborators, to research, plan, and carry out a project that implicates the kinds of legal work that are the focus of the Exercise.
- Finally, and most importantly, students engage, in small groups with their peers and professors, in collaborative critique of how they used the conceptual tools they were given, what choices they made in the planning and implementation phases; and what effects their choices had.
The first broad goal of the Program is to deepen students’ understanding of law. One of the chief virtues of having students work in role and in a dynamic simulation is that the work positions them to experience the interplay of principle and instantiation. Clients stand for the interests that laws seek to balance; clients’ plights represent the situations lawmakers have tried to anticipate; their feelings of entitlement test the law’s fairness. In a process that intensifies the experience of examining hypotheticals in a Socratic classroom, students move back and forth from the particulars of the parties’ plights to the principles set forth in cases and statutes. The second broad goal is to teach students to think critically about all aspects of practice and to learn systematically from their practice experiences.
What follow are descriptions of the Exercises, presented in the order in which they are taught during the academic year.
(1) See CHARLES GRAGG, BECAUSE WISDOM CAN’T BE TOLD (1998).
(2) The Lawyering pedagogy is inspired by and draws upon the work of several key figures in the development of the theory and practice of learning, including cognitive psychologists Jerome Bruner and L.S. Vygotsky, and educator Paulo Freire. The work of Bruner and Vygotsky tells us that learning is a socially embedded activity, in which social (or cultural or professional) groups use tools (e.g., hammers or published opinions or computerized databases) for doing things, and that people learn best as more and less expert members of a group interact to solve problems. See JEROME BRUNER, TOWARD A THEORY OF INSTRUCTION 27 29 (1968), L.S. VYGOTSKY, MIND IN SOCIETY 79 91 (1978). Freire also emphasized collaborative learning. In his landmark work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he rejected the conventional “banking” model of education, in which students are passive receptacles into which teachers deposit or “bank” knowledge to be withdrawn later. Freire advocated instead a problem solving approach, pursuant to which students learn from one another as much as they learn from teachers. See PAULO FREIRE, PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED 51 67 (1970).