This is my first full week of classes. In general, I’m not impressed with the method of instruction in Law School, so far. I have read that almost all law schools follow the same basic method, though, so I’m not complaining about CU, my school.

In every other “technical” subject I’ve taken, whether in college or in professional training, you start by learning general rules that give you a rough handle on the subject, and a framework to make further learning easier, and then you proceed to more detailed study of the exceptions and subtleties that make it all interesting.

Law School, on the other hand, does it backwards, immersing you in the subtleties and exceptions and expecting you, over time, to develop a sense of the general rules.

Professors claim that this is because the law is always changing, and that it is more important to teach you how to think like a lawyer. But that could be said of every subject. The law actually changes less than most fields. The human brain learns better when it has a rough conceptual framework from which to start. I may change my mind, later, but so far law school appears to involve a great deal of wasted effort.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Blather. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.