How Lawyers (Come to) See the World: A Narrative Theory of Legal Pedagogy
2010; Loyola Marymount University; Volume: 56; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0147-9857
Autores Tópico(s)Law in Society and Culture
ResumoThe following article is the first in a series to be published over the next three issues of the Review. Each of the articles engages the recent Carnegie Report on legal education from a different angle. In the first article, I spin together two strands generally related to education, one being the popular notion that education should serve democratic ends, the other being the more particular observation that American legal education suffers from a dearth of imagination. I anchor the discussion by examining some of the recurring criticisms lodged against legal education (e.g., those raised in the Carnegie Report) and attend in particular to the casebook method of instruction and identifies a paucity of narrative in that method as a serious deficiency. But this deficiency is not one unique to legal education; in fact, it arises not from law schools per se but from their primary object of study: the appellate opinion. By studying appellate opinions—which by design already squeeze narratives beyond recognition—to extract rules, law students are trained to read (and think) in a narrowly instrumental way. This pedagogical defect is demonstrated through a close reading of cases and several casebooks and concludes with a practical (and relatively simple) suggestion for ameliorating this problem and speculates how the solution will not only improve legal education but also strengthen democratic
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