Teaching the Law School Curriculum - Institute for Law Teaching ...

384 Torts
also are designed so the height of the flame can be controlled. The students are amazed by the huge flame that
results if the control is moved to the highest level.
Intentional torts are a treasure-trove of opportunities for skits. I use a variety of mini-skits to illustrate
the concepts of assault (threatening to stab a student with my “sword”), battery (shooting a student with my
“gun”) and transferred intent (threatening to shoot one student but missing that student and hitting another).
The students seem to enjoy the productions, and most of them readily volunteer to participate. I have also
gotten many favorable comments on the skits and props, the board notes, and the newspaper articles in my evaluations.
In addition, I am convinced that the class exercises help me. I feel the board notes help make my teaching
more precise, the newspaper articles help make my teaching more current, and the skits and props help make
my teaching more fun.
A Little Variety Goes a Long Way
Nancy Wright, Santa Clara University School of Law
Variety may or may not be the spice of life, but it is the spice of my Torts class. Although I teach most of my
class sessions in what I would call a “soft-Socratic” style, I depart from this rather conventional format once or
twice every two or three weeks to do something different. There are three primary reasons why I occasionally deviate
from my soft-Socratic norm.
First, I think it takes an extremely gifted teacher to keep law students engaged for a full semester (let alone an
academic year) using conventional Socratic teaching methods. I am not that talented in the classroom, so I feel
the need to vary my teaching as a way of keeping as many students engaged as I can. If they aren’t engaged, they
aren’t going to get much out of the class.
Second, students learn differently, and I want to reach as many students as I can. Most of the non-traditional
activities and exercises I do in class are designed to teach the same material I have already tried to teach (or will
teach) in more conventional fashion. Some students will learn the material better through conventional teaching;
others will find the material more accessible through a non-traditional activity or exercise. Most, I hope, will
learn the material through one approach and then have that learning reinforced by the other. (One of my own
law school professors, Barbara Babcock, used to say that “repetition is the soul of pedagogy.” I’m not sure it’s the
soul, but it’s certainly an important part.)
Third, I want the course to be fun (within the inherent limits imposed by law and law school). “Real” Socratic
teaching seems to assume that students learn best when they are afraid. Perhaps this is true for some students,
but I suspect most students learn better when they are enjoying the classroom experience. In every course I teach,
one of my implicit goals is for us to have fun. This is not always (or even often?) possible, but I have come to believe
that students (and their professor) are more likely to have fun if the course includes a variety of activities.
Here are three of the non-traditional activities I use.
Small-Group Exercises
I find that most students enjoy working together in small groups, so I use a number of small-group exercises.
In one class session I do an exercise designed to illuminate a potential problem with one common form of direct
evidence. My casebook (the popular Prosser, Wade and Schwartz book) introduces students to direct evidence,
circumstantial evidence, and res ipsa loquitor in a section devoted to proving negligence. Like the legal
system itself, I find that students generally assume direct evidence to be more reliable than circumstantial evidence.
Although I am agnostic in the classroom on this point, I want students to examine this assumption critically.
Thus, on the day when I am scheduled to teach this material, I make arrangements with my research assistant
(or some other person with whom I assume my 1Ls are unfamiliar) to wander into my classroom