“The students think I’m Kingsfield, until they get to know me.” It is Tuesday afternoon. A face bobs like the prow of a ship amid an ocean of papers: it is the face of Professor Ingrid Hillinger, and she is speaking. Against the wall sit boxes of past final exams. The spines of legal textbooks, many written by the professor herself, line the shelves. Professor Hillinger’s voice fills the room with a raspy authority.
“When I went to law school,” she continues, “my contracts professor was Timothy Sullivan. And he was Kingsfield. He came into every class in a three-piece suit and a Phi Beta Kappa key. He would only ask questions. He never answered a single question. I remember writing in my course evaluation, ‘I’ve never worked so hard, or learned so much, but does he have to be such a bastard?’”
The Professor Kingsfield she references is the fictional anti-hero of the classic law school film The Paper Chase, and he is everything she aspires not to be in the classroom. She loves her students, she says. “If students know it comes from a place of love, you can say anything, because they know you’re saying it to help them. You don’t need to love me, but you need to learn. I would like to think that is my Socratic method. There are lots of different ways you can establish a relationship with your class. It is hard, and it is scary. Especially for a new teacher. Especially for a woman. Especially for a woman of color. It’s all in the preparation.”
For every class, she spends five hours preparing her notes, reading back over her previous lectures. She scripts out questions, writes and rewrites the answers she will deliver in class. Afterwards she releases her class notes so students can see the map of each lecture, retrace the path they took together. Even after a lifetime of teaching, she still revises her notes until each lecture has a sequence, a twisting dialectic trajectory from ignorance to truth. There is a stripped-down quality to these lectures, a lean, terrifying efficiency like the leg of a sprinter or the turbine of a jet engine. Words are chosen carefully; questions are meant to be difficult and precise. When asked how she writes good questions she says: “I have no idea.”
It’s all instinct, she claims. “Some people are big planners. I can’t explain it.” Professor Hillinger teaches first-year Contracts, and when she started she reached out to her old professor—he of the Phi Beta Kappa key and three-piece suits—asking for his lecture notes. She was shocked: the notes for each day’s material fit on a single piece of paper and consisted of only two questions. His endless interrogatories, his refusal to provide answers, the students lost in a web of legal obscurity—all this had sprung from just two questions. The rest was a jazz solo, improvisation within a form. “Not me,” Hillinger says. “No way.” Professor Ingrid Hillinger
Reluctant to call her classroom technique “Socratic,” Hillinger is nonetheless committed to the method’s underlying goals. Her mission as a first-year, first-semester Contracts professor is to “help students think.” And the best way to get them to think is “question-answer, question-answer.” When she gets a bad answer, or no answer at all, she backs up and helps students along the path to the next insight, the next question. Many former students return to tell her they really had to think in her class (apparently something of a rarity in their law school years.) She understands herself not to be teaching knowledge, but rather an analytical approach—an approach, she notes, that cannot be taught using a lecture. With each question that students get comfortable answering, she turns up the difficulty dial, asking more sophisticated questions so that students “evolve” in their thinking over the semester.
Over the last half century, legal education has undergone a remarkable transformation, and the Socratic method of the ’50s has gone the way of the necktie and briefcase in law school classrooms.
Law school education in a nutshell is about learning to think. It was Edward “Bull” Warren of Harvard Law School who famously said that in his experience, a large proportion of students, fresh from the dolce far niente college years, “would rather walk two miles than think for three minutes.” Students in law schools have, it would seem, never really understood how to think. This was true in the late nineteenth century, the middle of the twentieth, and is true today. Teachers are not just working in an environment with more student anxiety and depression, more student debt and risk aversion, than ever before, they are also facing unprecedented levels of poor preparation in human cognition. Professor Hillinger blames inadequate kindergarten-to-college teaching for her students’ underdeveloped analytical ability. “Everyone is trained to spit back, but a question is different from a prompt.”
For nearly 150 years, the Socratic method has endured as the hallmark of American legal education. To the lawyer as to the man on the street, Socratic questioning is the rite of passage for all would-be attorneys during their first year of law school. Fictionalizations abound: Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase and Professor Perini in One-L have created a public image of the typical law school professor as someone who intimidates, prods, and even humiliates his students in a dramatic intellectual battle between professor and pupil.
There is more myth than truth in this; over the last half century, legal education has undergone a remarkable transformation, and the Socratic method of the ’50s has gone the way of the necktie and briefcase in law school classrooms. Students still participate, but the classroom experience today is a shadow of its former self. Instead of the traditional approach, incoming law students can expect anything from a watered-down version of Socratic-style questioning (what one professor calls “Socratic-Lite”) to on-call panels, group discussions, and even (heaven forbid) lecturing. But it hasn’t always been so; the history of legal education is a history of evolving understandings of the skills needed to be a good lawyer—an evolution which has mirrored changes in society as well.
Socrates on the Charles
The town of New Boston, New Hampshire, lies west of the Merrimack River. In 1830, the town’s population was 1,680. Around that time, the town had twenty-five sawmills, six grain mills, two clothing mills, two carding mills, two tanneries, a bark mill, and fourteen schoolhouses. It was in one of these schoolhouses that Christopher Columbus Langdell attended his first classes as a pupil. His studies later took him forty miles east to Phillips Exeter Academy, then finally south to Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he was to teach for much of the rest of his life until he died, in Cambridge, in 1906.
Langdell’s impact on American legal education cannot be overstated. From 1870 when he accepted an invitation from Harvard President Charles Eliot to take up a chair at the law school until his death, Langdell forged a path in the lecture hall which many other law school professors would follow him down. To appreciate what Langdell accomplished we must first understand how the law was taught before he arrived on the scene. President Eliot observed that by the 1860s the lecture had become “the principal means of instruction as the recitation was abandoned; but it was the unaided lecture in the least commendable forms.”
By the 1860s the lecture had become “the principal means of instruction as the recitation was abandoned; but it was the unaided lecture in the least commendable forms.”
Harvard President Charles Eliot
Picture this: a professor at the head of a dark auditorium, the smell of tobacco and the rustle of feet as students come in and out as their fancies suited them. The lectures themselves consisted principally of treatises professors had written on various branches of law (torts, contracts, equity). In content, such lectures varied little each year.
On occasion, a professor might refer a student to look up a particular case, but the student was free to ignore such a recommendation (and he very likely did just that). “The attitude of the student was purely receptive,” said President Eliot. “The student took no part in the exercise, he was merely listening and taking notes; and no pains were taken to make sure that he mastered, or even looked at, the cases referred to.”
Heaven help the student whose professor was an expert in a particular legal subject: in these situations, the professor’s lectures often “degenerated into a running commentary on his printed books.”
Into this fusty china shop of erudition stepped the pedagogical bull of Professor Langdell. Using an “inductive method” of teaching, Langdell was the first to require students to read original sources rather than treatises, to analyze real legal disputes rather than abstract propositions. He pushed them in class to come to their own views on questions of law, and to respond to hypotheticals and opposing views. But Langdell did more than throw questions at his students—like a Sevillian matador, he strategically exposed himself to attack from students by letting them challenge him in class, all while revising and correcting his judgements in real time. He was modeling a critical, independent, self-aware intellect—getting students to think for themselves by showing them how to do it.
Teachers teach what they know, and Langdell’s studies at Exeter had exposed him to John Locke’s views on education. Specifically, Locke had recommended that teachers allow students to grapple with original sources, move from particular facts to general propositions, and challenge the weaker students by putting them up against the more advanced. Langdell took from Locke a belief that what education imparted was not content, but a particular manner of thinking. This manner, Langdell came to believe, needed to be scientific above all else; his experiences in natural history class at Harvard College and his later encounters with case law—both as a student and as a working attorney—had taught him to read cases with scientific scrutiny. He traced the development of the common law through legal disputes just as Charles Darwin had tracked the evolution of life through a process of conflict and survival. The best arguments, like the fittest species, were those that survived.
So went the theory. In practice, Harvard’s old guard reared its head in protest. When Langdell proposed that Harvard switch to the case method, Professors Washburn, Holmes, and Parsons rushed to President Eliot to object. Their principal objection was that teaching exclusively through cases would prevent them from covering all the material. They failed to grasp—as some professors still do—that covering all the material is irrelevant to the case method: once you switch from teaching content to teaching process, it matters less how many cases you cover in a semester. Bending President Eliot’s arm (“You would not [agree] . . ., Mr. President, if you knew more of the subject.”), the cadre of law professors arranged so that Langdell could continue to use the method, while the others could stick with their preferred style of lecturing.
Demanding, dramatic, messy, and mysterious, this new method became an immediate source of contention among faculty and students, many of whom were simply not up for the challenge. The case method was “seldom mentioned except to be criticized” by the legal community, and Langdell’s class enrollment quickly shrunk to a mere seven or eight students. But like a religious sect whose adherents break away from the main body to found their own new denomination, “Langdell’s freshmen” soon carried themselves with a swagger, believing they were the “best men” in the law school. In the early years of Langdell’s tenure at Harvard, the campus was divided between Langdellians and anti-Langdellians, the latter accusing the professor of encouraging students to question judicial authority (an accusation with uncanny similarity to the charge brought by Athenians against Socrates).
Demanding, dramatic, messy, and mysterious, [Harvard Professor Langdell’s] new case method became an immediate source of contention among faculty and students, many of whom were simply not up for the challenge.
Within a few years Langdell had found a disciple worthy of the title: James Barr Ames. Ames would carry the torch of Socratic questioning to the next generation of Harvard law students. Professors like to say that the only way to learn how to teach is to choose a favorite professor and model that professor’s style. Professor Ames did exactly that, imitating Langdell’s method while also making his own tweak: he spent more time on individual students, engaging them in much longer back-and-forth dialogues until even the most self-assured student crumbled under his own uncertainty.
Whereas Langdell had thrown out the occasional “very good” to a particular answer, Ames was less interested in whether an answer was wrong or right, and so rarely doled out compliments. Students who had come to the law seeking answers were left feeling more confused. As one first-year student from Ohio wrote to his parents in 1906, “the professors, each of whom are aggressive and sharp, and several of whom are considered ‘brilliant lights’ in Law, put the students through a sort of cross examination, in a way, to confuse them. No matter what the student says, the lecturer is always back at them with a lively retort.” Whether or not “you agreed with the decision of a case, or you didn’t . . . you were subjected, by the Socratic method, to a catechism that was sometimes quite embarrassing.”
It is worth noting that the academic culture of these early lecture halls had a higher tolerance for intellectual belittlement, but also a better sense of humor, than many classrooms do today. Students report that Ames’s classes often erupted in laughter during his lectures. Everything took place within a gentlemanly ‘code’ which allowed professors and students to throw barbs at one another during the day while laughing over cigars at Boston social clubs in the evening. These classroom interrogations were not mean spirited, though by today’s standards they may appear so. Students allowed Ames to occasionally embarrass them because, as one former student suggested, he “loved the battle of wits; but . . . never argued simply for the sake of victory.”
The gentlemanly code was also precisely that: for gentleman. A critique of this classroom style which took nearly a century to develop is that the method was created by men, for men, and that it therefore advantaged men. Many of Langdell’s colleagues believed that “mixed classrooms” of men and women would inhibit the use of the Socratic method. Langdell remained skeptical of such views, but his pursuit of “scholarly manliness” was in lock step with nineteenth century associations between competitive academic work and masculine virtues.
Still, an advantage of this classroom style was that it benefited the broadest possible range of students, from the weakest to the most brilliant. The weaker students watched as the professor engaged in Socratic dialogues between a kind of “Greek chorus” of fifteen or twenty of the best students in class. Students preferred this method because it allowed the stars to shine and the weaker students to avoid the spotlight. It also prevented the professor from having to take up class time with “foolish questions which the askers, had they stopped to think, could easily have answered themselves.”
By the turn of the twentieth century, the Socratic method was established and flourishing. Its principal advocate at Harvard Law School was Professor Edward H. Warren (better known by his affectionate moniker “Bull”).
By the turn of the twentieth century, the Socratic method was established and flourishing. Its principal advocate at Harvard Law School was Professor Edward H. Warren (better known by his affectionate moniker “Bull”), a former student of Dean Ames who would end up writing a strident defense of Socratic teaching in his 1942 book Spartan Education. It was Warren who described Ames’s classes as a “Greek chorus,” the hallmark of which was the utter befuddlement in which students were left at the end of each class. In what is becoming a common theme, Warren took what he liked from Ames’s Socratic method and created his own unique version characterized by an aggressive, intense, stimulating engagement of students in classroom discussion. Warren carried the old Socratic flame, but according to his own lights.
There are two reasons we should take Warren’s pedagogy seriously today. First, it is perhaps the most complete defense of the traditional “Socratic method” as it came to be taught in American law schools in the twentieth century. Second, Warren’s teaching methods are neither as Puritanical nor as dogmatic as we may believe them to have been, and understanding what Warren was attempting illustrates how the Socratic method is misunderstood.
A guiding principle behind Warren’s pedagogy was, in his own words, to let students leave each class “unsatisfied.” A law professor’s role was not to provide substantial amounts of reliable information, but rather to train minds. A professor should never “make a fetish of the case method” and ought to feel comfortable lecturing, where the giving of information was absolutely necessary. But a professor must above all focus on the training of students “so that they may become accurate, clear, and terse in their statement of facts and issues, and sensible in their exercise of judgment.” This was all that can be expected of students in their first year of law school, Warren believed, and even this would be a considerable undertaking for any professor. Warren developed a winnowing intellectual process he called the “Yes” or “No” method by which students were asked a series of Yes-No questions to help them narrow the issue before them.
A final ingredient in Warren’s Socratic cocktail was character. Socratic dialogue is not merely about getting students to think, he said, it is about showing them how to behave. Law students may come to think too highly of themselves, and it is the professor’s responsibility to not “let the students get brains too close to the camera” for “brains are cheap in the marketplace.” Classrooms, particularly law classrooms, particularly law classrooms at elite schools like Harvard, attract men who are “unduly aggressive and are much more conscious of what is due to them from others than of what is due from them to others.” A law professor may, by means of the Socratic method, teach these students better manners. After all, “manners have a lot to do with attracting, and retaining, associates and clients.” In this sense, the Socratic method is a tool for putting the loquacious-but-weak students in their place, while elevating the silent-but-strong.
Nearly a century later, Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken would come to much the same conclusion about the equalizing power of the Socratic method: “everyone is responsible for a productive classroom discussion, and that includes those who raise their hands before they’ve even formulated a thought. We spend a lot of time in law school teaching our students how to talk, but we don’t spend enough time teaching them an equally important skill—how to be silent.” In a break from the Langdellian style of open-forum classroom discussions, “Bull” Warren recommended that law professors never let a student speak unless called upon, and that no student raise his hand unless the professor had asked for volunteers. This ensured that “in the course of the year each student shall have . . . as much chance to participate in the discussion as any other student.” In half a century, the Socratic method had transformed from a series of free-wheeling questions between teacher and student to a regimented, carefully controlled discussion led by the professor. It would take several decades for law schools to undo the classroom norms that Langdell, Ames, and Warren had collectively established.
Drinking the Hemlock
There is a chicken-and-egg quality to the story of how legal academia became disenchanted with the Socratic method. Was it the students who led the charge, fed up with feeling harassed and humiliated by their overbearing instructors? Or was it the professors themselves who, eager to get their students to like them, desperate to make tenure, and wary of open confrontation generally, retreated from the old ways? Regardless of who began it, a constellation of critiques emerged during the 1970s and ’80s, blaming the method for all sorts of ills. These critiques alleged that the Socratic method was hierarchical, replicating patriarchy and perpetuating a narrow, adversarial approach to law. The method was also said to sideline other (more effective) methods of teaching and devalue “non-traditional” ways of thinking about the law.
A constellation of critiques emerged during the 1970s and ’80s, blaming the method for all sorts of ills. These critiques alleged that the Socratic method was hierarchical, replicating patriarchy and perpetuating a narrow, adversarial approach to law.
One of the earliest attacks was delivered by the legal realist Jerome Frank, who lambasted the method as overly academic and library-focused, a fossil of Langdell’s legal science. Frank argued that legal work was more about solving the real problems of real clients than endlessly circling legal rules, principles, and theories in Socratic dialogue. “Law schools should once more get in intimate contact with what clients need and with what courts and lawyers actually do,” he wrote.
Since Frank, countless others have picked up on this theme, criticizing the Socratic method for its inability to teach cooperation and the proper representation of clients. These commentators argue that students trained by the Socratic method lack the skills needed to be truly effective lawyers. And because the method cannot effectively teach either legal rules or practical lawyering skills, the practice is “irrelevant[,] . . . . archaic and useless.” Practiced at its worst, critics said it encouraged incivility in and out of the classroom, exposed students to the ridicule of their peers, and even went so far as to traumatize students. These negative effects were said to be felt particularly by women and minorities.
In response to these critiques from inside and outside the academy, a new crop of law professors sought to keep stress levels low and entertainment value high. They turned a blind eye to absences and tardiness, encouraged students to share their personal views and experiences in class, while controlling the tone of the discussion. Handling their classes with kid gloves, professors were careful to make sure that students with unpopular or upsetting beliefs never felt wholly comfortable sharing them in these classrooms. Professors were also sure to let students know (sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly) where they stood on various legal and political positions. Meanwhile, the “Professor Kingsfields” soon found that whereas they had once been the moderates of the academy, they now stood on the extreme edge of the rigor spectrum. One professor at the time observed that “[m]odern sensibilities make it much harder for classes to accept the pressure. Students won’t tolerate it; a resentment develops. You feel it might lead to outright revolution.” By comparison, any non-Socratic professors naturally stuck out as generous, empathetic, and more interested in teaching.
In her 1977 article titled “The Socratic Method – More Harm Than Good,” Suzanne Dallimore argued that the method had outlived its use. While she conceded that it was still effective in teaching students how to “think like a lawyer,” it did little else. The Socratic method had been reduced to a student’s recitation of the facts, a brief comment by the professor, and some student analysis on whether the court was right or wrong.
Dallimore identified three central problems with the Socratic method: first, “there can be no Socratic method without a Socrates,” such that in the hands of an under-prepared professor, “the method breaks down.” Second, the over-use of the Socratic method tends to encourage laziness on the part of both students and professors. Third, the Socratic method is based on a “public humiliation” model, the theory behind which is “that once the student is permanently scarred, he will not forget whence the scars came and will be more careful and well-reasoned in his future responses.” What was needed, Dallimore said, was a greater emphasis on practical skills. In a critique which would become increasingly common over the years, Dallimore argued that the Socratic method was irrelevant to the demands of the legal profession.
Subordination, hierarchy, manipulation, alienation, and boredom: these were among the many consequences of the Socratic method. As one scholar wrote, the Socratic method was responsible for teaching new lawyers that “manipulating vulnerable people is an acceptable form of professional behavior.” And as Jenny Morgan wrote for the Journal of Legal Education in 1989, the competition for a teacher’s attention prevented any kind of classroom cooperation. There are many more skills besides “adversarial interchange” involved in being an attorney; indeed, a great deal of legal work is cooperative rather than confrontational.
Morgan and others imagined law school classrooms where student questions and comments were encouraged, where dialogue occurred not only between professor and student but among students, and where student and teacher were both engaged in a shared learning exercise. What was called for was a de-centering of the professor within the classroom: “In America . . . there appears to be competition for the professor’s attention. An oft-repeated complaint is ‘the professor never calls on me.’ . . . One reason for the competition is that in the Socratic style the vast majority of the questions come from the professor rather than the students.”
The problem of gender became central to these critiques as well, for not only was the Socratic style seen as discouraging cooperation, but its competitive form was viewed as excluding women’s voices in particular. Boys, it was said, had been trained to assertively take the floor and have “an apparent ability to sustain a monologue in the absence of overt support,” while “[girls had] a preference for shared storytelling”—a preference which meant they would be alienated from the kinds of answers expected of them in a Socratic class. The scholar Carole Edelsky conducted a revealing linguistic analysis of informal university committee meetings in which she found that men dominated whenever there was a “singly developed floor.” Women tended to participate much more in “collaborative venture[s] where several people seemed to be either operating on the same wavelength or engaging in a free-for-all.” Not only did men participate less in these environments overall, but they participated even less than the women.
At a deeper level, the Socratic method was antithetical to how women understood and related to the world around them. As feminist scholar Susan H. Williams wrote in the Stanford Law Review in 1993: “[T]he structure of exchange—in which the teacher unilaterally controls the direction of inquiry—rests on the assumption that there is a fact-of-the-matter to be discovered and the teacher knows that fact while the student may or may not. This structure suggests that learning is unidirectional: knowledge flows from the teacher to the student and not the reverse.” As the legal academy became more aware of its own pedagogy and its potential impact on the diverse range of students now attending US law schools, the one-size-fits-all approach of the Socratic method came to seem outdated, stifling, and (at its worst) sexist.
As the legal academy became more aware of its own pedagogy and its potential impact on the diverse range of students now attending US law schools, the one-size-fits-all approach of the Socratic method came to seem outdated, stifling, and (at its worst) sexist.
One increasingly popular alternative was the small-group discussion: students could be broken into groups of two or more to hold discussions among themselves before sharing their findings with the whole class. Another new technique was the “panel,” whereby a small number of students were specially asked to prepare the reading for the coming week and to be ready to lead the class discussion on that topic. These approaches were part of a larger attempt to “reframe” the Socratic method—to make it more applicable to the realities of legal practice.
As Janie R. Abrams suggests in “Reframing the Socratic Method,” the method is like a dinosaur surrounded on all sides by innovations in teaching, a holdout from a bygone era. “The current approach to legal education” writes Abrams, “is to add innovation, such as enrichment and skills opportunities, while simultaneously retaining the hallmarks of traditional legal education—the large, lecture-style doctrinal course taught using the Socratic method and the casebook rooted in appellate cases.” Abrams proposes that the Socratic method be changed to make it more client-focused, research-focused, and “skills-sensitization” focused. Cases should be taught, not with the priorities of the court in mind, but with the interests of the clients and attorneys as the focal point. Such an approach also “softens the teacher-student hierarchy by positioning the client as the point of inquiry, invites diverse participation, and is more transferable to other law courses and experiences because it exposes students to the full breadth of law practice.”
In the twenty-first century, scholars have pulled back from many of these critiques, questioning whether law schools should have thrown the Socratic method out with the traditionalist bathwater. Was there something irreplaceably valuable in the Socratic method, after all? Had Langdell been onto something? It was perhaps hard to admit, but even feminists like Susan Williams conceded that the Socratic method had some pedagogical value insofar as it “was not intended simply to elicit information already in the student’s possession.” Unlike many other techniques, the Socratic style allowed professors to “ask the kind of question which requires the student, in attempting to answer it, to create knowledge she did not have the moment before you asked the question.” A Socratic question “causes the student to think and feel about the information in her possession in a new way and then to articulate it.” Done the right way, said Williams, “the Socratic method is fully consistent with a feminist epistemology.”
“It would be ironic and wonderful if the Socratic method, a tool that has been used for so long to shore up an edifice of privilege and oppression, could also be used, in new hands and with a new heart, to build a better future.”
Feminist scholar Susan H. Williams
Have law schools come full circle? From Langdell, Ames, and Warren, to a wholesale rejection of the method and all it was said to stand for, are we now back again, humbled by the knowledge that Socratic style questioning has something precious to offer, something vital to the practice of law? And if we are seeing a rebirth of Socratic style teaching, have professors learned enough to avoid the mistakes of the past? Can we, as Dean Heather Gerken terms it, teach “Socrates with a heart”? Williams captures our current predicament when she writes that “it would be ironic and wonderful if the Socratic method, a tool that has been used for so long to shore up an edifice of privilege and oppression, could also be used, in new hands and with a new heart, to build a better future.”
“Socrates with a Heart”
Professor Jeffrey Cohen is a pull-up-a-chair kind of guy. In his mid-forties with a salt-and-pepper beard, he’s the kind of approachable professor who buys his students scratch-lottery tickets on the last day of class as a veiled ironic joke about grades and jobs. He shoots from the hip and has the attitude of a guy who generally doesn’t take himself too seriously. Ask him a good question, though, and he takes long, thoughtful pauses. Talk to him long enough and he will end up getting frustrated with his own inability to formulate an adequate answer. Even this self-effacing habit, though, is endearing, for his answers are insightful, often profound, and never inadequate. He is as far from the three-piece-suit variety of law professor as you can possibly imagine.
“We’re certainly moving away from the old-style Socratic method,” Cohen says, adding that it has been “diluted over the years in response to the student evaluation culture of law schools.”
He does not want his students to think of him as unpleasant, but he does not see himself as a gentle nurturer in the classroom either. “My goal is Socratic Lite,” he says. He rejects the view that Socratic style necessarily “prefers” certain types of people on the grounds that law school performance ultimately comes down to a written exam.
“Some people are really great at writing and terrible at talking,” Cohen says. “Students who are good at Socratic method may not be good in class, and the quiet [student] who is terrified of Socratic writes a beautiful exam.”
There is a generalized shrugging of shoulders among professors when asked what alternatives to the Socratic method there might be. Most professors naturally defend their own approach as embodying the perfect balance between Socratic questioning and encouraging free expression. Few are willing to defend a return to the old methods, however, and almost all have incorporated various accommodations to ensure students stay engaged while never feeling humiliated or pressured to speak.
Professor Kent Greenfield teaches first year Constitutional Law, as well as upper-level seminars on the First Amendment and the Supreme Court. In his first-year lectures, Greenfield tends to wear a knowing smile beneath his goatee. He uses few notes in class, rarely lectures, and spends most of his time in front of (rather than behind) a podium, his arms crossed and his head tilted to one side as he listens to students. He is a gentle questioner and will occasionally press students to consider the consequences of their views when he feels they are able to.
Greenfield defends the relevance of the Socratic style to the professional work of lawyers on the grounds that “being able to articulate legal thoughts, legal doctrines, ask interesting questions, manipulate cases in ways to predict outcomes that are slightly different, arguing in a predictive way—all that is at the core of what we do as lawyers.” The greatest threats to the Socratic method are more external than internal, he says. A few major changes are coming to the teaching of law. The first is that technology, particularly artificial intelligence, will become so powerful and available that asking students in real time what they think about something will no longer help them build any skills. Students could simply have voice input into an AI program and generate instantaneous responses.
The second major threat Greenfield sees to the Socratic method is cultural and political. While he feels BC Law has been largely unaffected by these trends, Greenfield says his impression is that many US law schools have become politically fractious and divisive. In such environments, professors may become less eager to lead free-flowing conversations about current issues in the law. In response, some professors may retreat into the traditional Socratic method (“just the facts, man”), while others may resort to lecturing. Greenfield says he feels part of a generation of mid-career law professors who “cut [their] teeth when we could have free-ranging conversations that didn’t end up on Twitter.” Professors used to be able to teach without feeling like public figures but are now scrutinized to a much greater degree. While Langdell and Ames were by no means teaching in private, today a Socratic dialogue gone awry has the potential of reaching a much broader audience.
BC Law Professor Kent Greenfield defends the relevance of the Socratic style to the professional work of lawyers on the grounds that “being able to articulate legal thoughts, legal doctrines, ask interesting questions, manipulate cases in ways to predict outcomes that are slightly different, arguing in a predictive way—all that is at the core of what we do as lawyers.”
Then there is Professor Michael Cassidy, the tall Irishman with a shock of white hair and browline glasses. A veteran prosecutor, a member of the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers, and a professor of everything from Evidence to Professional Responsibility, he is the friendly giant of BC Law. His love for questions extends beyond the classroom, and much of a twenty-minute meeting with him is taken up in answering personal questions about one’s life, family, and future. Cassidy’s view is that every professor needs to find their own stride in the classroom. His teaching has changed over his career, but it also varies day to day. In seminars, he dispenses with the Socratic method and simply engages the class in a free-form discussion. Nobody is asked to recite the facts of a case.
“I read the body language,” says Cassidy. “I read the eye rolls. I’ll say, ‘Aiden, what’s your response to what Layla just said.’ Part of that involves cold calling, but cold calling based on verbal and physical cues.”
Cassidy tries to get students interacting more with each other. He calls this “getting the conversation going sideways.” At bottom, Cassidy feels that effective teaching is all about being true to yourself.
“Stop trying to be somebody that you’re not,” he says. “Everyone is different, has different backgrounds. Students can see when someone is acting, when they’re behaving the way they think a law school professor should behave.”
Finally, there is the Tsar of Torts, Alfred Yen. If thinking about the teaching of law were an artform, Professor Yen would be its great systematizer, the champion of method over madness, Bach rather than Debussy. Methodical, meticulous, and profound, Yen gives the impression of someone who has arrived at his teaching techniques through careful study, a scientific trial and error in the classroom over many years of teaching.
Initially, says Yen, he was not methodologically conscious of what he did in the classroom. Still, to hear him explain his pedagogy is to be reminded of the edict of “Bull” Warren to “let students go away, unsatisfied.” Yen explains: “I try to get the student to actively think about that which the student has read,” Yen says, “in the hopes that the discussion will cause the student to go, ‘huh, I don’t know the answer to that,’ and then engage in a discussion about whether that question has an answer.” Much of this work involves helping the student to make these mental maneuvers themselves, and self-reliance is key. Yen compares the study of law to learning how to navigate a vast city: “Someone learns more about the streets of Paris by having to navigate one’s way through the streets of Paris than by being shown a map.”
Socratic style questioning, insists Yen, should never be “an exercise in sadism.” He describes teaching as a mixture of intuition and planning, knowing when to lecture and when to ask questions. While Yen has arrived at what he calls “modified Socratic method”—a mixture of daily PowerPoint slides giving a recap of the previous class with more traditional Socratic dialogues—he also imagines the many ways he could teach differently. “I’ve often thought it would be interesting to just have students ask the questions,” he says. He feels that common criticisms of law school teaching are “a little bit overblown.”
The first year of law school is about teaching people habits of mind which may or may not be applied later in their careers. What’s more, the criticism that law schools are overly academic at the expense of hands-on training may once have been valid, but with the proliferation of clinics across the country, he feels that such criticisms are no longer fairly laid at the feet of law schools. “Do we help people do large public offerings? No.” he says, adding that “it’s school, not life. It’s not meant to give you everything that you will have learned in your career.” He feels that while the first year of law school is largely about understanding the various dichotomies of law—risk and reward, rights and responsibilities, rules and facts—the next level of understanding in law (as in any discipline) is to see that eventually the dichotomies break down. It is in this space that Yen enjoys exerting his mental energies during each class.
“I think some students are better able to live with that complexity and uncertainty,” he says. “But this also bumps up against what can be taught in a few years of school, rather than a whole career.”
Current BC Law students, when asked, demonstrate remarkable support for the Socratic method. A survey conducted by this author in the fall semester of 2023 suggests that while a small minority of students dislike the Socratic method as it is currently practiced, a majority of students feel it adds real value to their education.
Over seventy percent of [BC Law] students surveyed [in 2023] said they felt the Socratic method was moderately-to-very-important to their law school education. In terms of their comfort level in class, less than one quarter of students said they were uncomfortable speaking when called on.
Over seventy percent of students surveyed said they felt the Socratic method was moderately-to-very-important to their law school education. In terms of their comfort level in class, less than one quarter of students said they were uncomfortable speaking when called on. If there was one area where the data suggested room for improvement it was in the frequency with which students are called on. As in the days of Langdell and Ames, a small group of students appear to take up all the air space, speaking multiple times per day. A smaller group of students speak rarely or not at all—something which professors could remedy by using a more egalitarian and consistent approach to cold calls.
Students expressed a wide range of opinions on the utility of Socratic-style questioning. Some felt it was merely a scare tactic to get students to study (“Cold calls feel like a way to ensure that students ‘do their homework’ … The fear of humiliation forces students to do the reading and come prepared for class.”) while others said a “law school does a disservice to students by not utilizing the Socratic method.” Concerns about anxiety focused on the “cold call” nature of Socratic, rather than the questioning of students per se. As one student said, “cold calls just make me anxious. I’m more likely to share my thoughts by voluntarily raising my hand or in office hours. I think the answers from people that voluntarily raise hands tend to be more informative/insightful than a recitation of facts on a cold call.”
Gender and racial differences still appear to play a role in classroom experiences of the Socratic method. One student observed that “men disproportionately dominate the conversation and speak a lot more than women. They are more likely to answer questions when they are less sure of their answers. I also notice that people of color tend to speak less in class.” Still other students saw no value to the method: “I think it’s really useless; the questions that are asked most of the time don’t lead into conversation. It doesn’t really encourage student thought.” Others noted that whether the Socratic method was useful depended largely on the skill of the professor.
Still, such sentiments formed the minority of student responses. Most described the method as “invaluable,” “absolutely essential,” and “the most effective learning tool I’ve ever had in my academic career.” Most noted that while students should always be given accommodations to reduce their anxiety, such as the ability to “opt out” of cold calls, the Socratic method was a method unparalleled in its ability to train students for the work of being a lawyer.
“Lawyering is ultimately a field which requires its professionals to speak confidently and intelligently on behalf of their clients, and to engage in back-and-forth discussion,” wrote one student. “Training in the Socratic method is an imperfect solution to a necessary pedagogical need.”
Where, then, do these perspectives on the teaching of law bring us? Is the teaching of law even a single thing which can be discussed, let alone improved and perfected? Or rather, are lawyers doomed to repeat these debates, as each new generation of students comes to the law expecting truth and being sent away only with questions? This is, after all, a thinking profession. In an address to students at Brown University, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. said that “the law is the calling of thinkers . . . a man may live greatly in the law as elsewhere.”
In the end, it is ultimately the job of the student to navigate this web on her own, to build her own set of professional attitudes, habits, and values. A law student has more freedom over her legal education than she may believe, or that the Socratic method may (at first glance) appear to bestow. The Socratic method is not just about the relationship between teacher and student, or even between student and student. As Donald Marshall has noted, a third relationship exists: the relationship between the group and all its members. Each class, as any professor can tell you, develops a life of its own, what Marshall calls “a spirit of inquiry, an ethic of civility and mutual support, a standard of professional behavior.” The products of this dialogue belong to the group: students think that what they are doing is talking, but what they are really doing is creating. A dialectal conversation, then, is more than a battle between adversaries; it is the process through which ideas are born and truth is perceived, though always through a glass, darkly.