Chapter 3: The Bogs of Prestige

[After my first year of law school, I transferred to Northwestern University in Chicago (not Evanston).]

Five minutes into a Civil Procedure II class in Booth Hall, Professor Harry Reese looked down at his grade book and called out, "Mr. Jacobsen!"   Reese was a slim, straight-backed man, probably about 60 then, who invariably wore solid black ties with his black suits.  When I admitted my identify, he drew my attention to the Supreme Court's Dairy Queen case, a famous puzzler featured prominently in our textbook, and asked me to identify all of the various causes of action alleged by the plaintiffs, which was easy since the case listed them.  He wrote them on the blackboard and then asked me to classify them as legal (that is, derived ultimately from the common law developed in the courts of the King's Bench, which entitle a party to money damages and trial by jury) or equitable (derived ultimately from the maxims of medieval ecclesiastical courts; no money damages, no jury).  I had to admit I had no clue how to classify them.

But I was wrong.  I did know.  Or, rather, I knew how to arrive at the right answer.  Professor Reese didn't have to tell me.  Instead he asked me more questions, easier ones, ones I could answer.  Building on my responses he asked more questions, until by the end of 45 minutes I had correctly categorized all of the various causes of action.  I remember giggling with nerves throughout the hour, and remember even more distinctly how my inane giggling increased my nervousness, but I was deeply impressed with Reese's skill.

That was the famous Socratic method, and Reese was the first and only professor I met with the pedagogical chops to use it.  Maybe you don't, strictly speaking, need to possess the intellect of Socrates to be proficient in the Socratic method, but you do have to be intelligent and articulate; be able to listen closely to what the student is saying; be able to intuit what the student isn't saying; be patient; and be genuinely interested in the student's intellectual development.  In my experience, very few law professors get past the first requirement.

That doesn't mean other professors didn't engage in what they probably told themselves was Socratic dialogue with their students.  I'm pretty sure that's what my "clear as mud" Contracts teacher back at UNM thought he was doing.  In the hands of every professor other than Harry Reese, though, all that I ever observed was really the opposite of the Socratic method.  It deserves a reversed name: the Citarcos method.  Reese started with my "I don't know" and led me to knowledge.  In the Citarcos method, the exchange begins with the student reciting what he or she knows about a case and ends with a series of abject "I don't knows" to the professor's bullying questions.

So far as I'm concerned, the Citarcos method is a professor's confession of psychopathology.  It's a way to reveal one's need to bully and belittle those who make themselves vulnerable by seeking to learn.  In my day, Northwestern had several professors suffering from the ailment.  One of them taught first-year classes consisting of 100 students—half the incoming class, called a "section"—and required all students to be ready to be called on every class meeting.  If they weren't prepared, they were supposed to come to the front of class and sign a register of shame in front of everybody.  If called on, they were subjected to a pounding series of questions that never led anywhere but to pleas of ignorance.  This particular professor taught only first-year students, which I figured was because his predatory style depended on the students being too intimidated—or depressed—to respond in kind.

I've heard a few half-hearted defenses of this teaching style, which have this in common: they're bullshit. …

This is not to say that the Citarcos method is without purpose.  The traditional way of looking at it is as a form of hazing, with the difference being that law students aren't hazed by upperclassmen, but by their professors.  But I think a little more than that is going on.  The bullying has, at bottom, a psychological rather than pedagogical purpose.  Andrew Garcia expressed it vividly when he described the way he trained newbies: after first getting in their faces he "gave them back their self-respect a little at a time."  Garcia was a Marine Corps drill sergeant.  The Parris Island technique of disassembling and reassembling a recruit's personality goes a long way toward explaining the traditional mode of law school instruction.  It replaces the newcomer's prior identity by making membership in the new group the central fact of the student's self-conception.  It tells the student: You're no longer the person you used to be.  Now you're a lawyer.  That makes you different from others in ways they can't fully appreciate unless they're lawyers, too, and have gone through the same initiation rites.

That's a powerful message.  It makes the student feel a part of something big and important.  It also has everything to do with the dissolving sense of self experienced by so many first-year students.  That isn't just the consequence of the professorial bullying but its purpose, even if most of the professors themselves don't fully understand that.  (Most of them, I think, just see themselves as doing to others what was previously done to them.)