Learning the Law
Learning the Law
I have taught law for twelve years. Most students I have met in this twelve-year journey are not interested in learning the law the traditional way (which entails poring through voluminous law reports and books at the library). Instead, most students are content with reading summaries of fundamental legal principles and key decided cases on the internet (or is it the Wild Wide Web?).
The shift from reading law reports and traditional legal texts to reading summaries on the internet denies law students the opportunity to discern and appreciate different judges’ cognitive, thought, and analytical processes. It denies them the chance to learn the interplay of ideology, culture, politics, syntax, logic and other factors embodied in applying the law to real-life situations. The shift from reading law reports and traditional legal texts to reading summaries on the internet denies law students the opportunity to compare majority, dissenting and concurring legal opinions (and the respective points of convergence and divergence). It denies law students the opportunity to appreciate the manifold social, economic and political contexts in which the law applies and why different judges often make vastly different decisions on any given issue.
Law students who read internet summaries instead of legal texts (focusing mainly on passing exams) join a law firm and discover, to their rude shock, that they only passed by a law school and thus did not learn any law. Worse still, such law students discover, to their utter dismay, that they cannot even write a simple email or a simple formal letter to an actual client. To their dismay and that of their employers, such law students discover they cannot provide a legal opinion to a client. After the horse has already bolted, such students discover that legal practice entails something beyond memory verse speaking (specifically, applying general principles and their exceptions to infinitely variable context-specific situations).
Due to the shift from reading law reports and traditional legal texts to reading summaries online, the legal industry receives a young man or woman with a law degree who cannot do the simplest legal tasks. The law firm is forced to waste enormous time and other resources re-training the graduate, raising serious questions about whether the graduate’s time in law school was worth anything.
© Muthomi Thiankolu