Law School Discussion

Quote from: jarhead on September 13, 2008, 07:08:45 PM

i hated conlaw  ...that is all

to jarhead - where you been, fam?

Legal Practice

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By NOAH FELDMAN
Published: September 13, 2008

To teach constitutional law, you need a vision about where our country has been and where we need to go in the future. You must be able to confront our darkest moments — slavery, segregation, forced sterilization — while preserving your optimism about the moments when we have expanded rights and liberties and lived up to our aspirations.

Students push you to defend what you believe, and you had better be ready to acknowledge your contradictions, and even your mistakes. As a law professor, your goal is not to lecture, but to elicit from students their deepest intuitions about their own values, and to show them how to frame arguments for what they believe. And you must know the law. The students are smart and engaged, and they don’t miss a trick. There’s no room for vagueness or imprecision.

Constitutional law demands that you understand the delicate balance between the president, Congress and the Supreme Court. Most presidents, regardless of party, want to maximize their own authority, but the teacher of constitutional law knows that when presidents overstep, the court slaps them back.

Individual rights loom large in our Constitution. As a professor, you know that presidents should resist restricting liberty. However, you also know that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and Franklin D. Roosevelt interned Japanese-Americans. Best of all, with your 20/20 hindsight and your bully pulpit, you can righteously stand in judgment of mistakes made by presidents in our national experiment.

What a teacher of constitutional law never has to do is put theory into practice — which is probably why even the best of us can be astonishingly idealistic. The only president to come from full-time employment in our profession, Woodrow Wilson, tried to make over the world in the image of our constitutional democracy. Our part-timer, Bill Clinton, was ready to make compromises to get the job done.

— NOAH FELDMAN, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard

More practice tests doesn't help you at all if you can't comprehend what you're doing wrong.  The difference between a C- student and A+ students isn't that they "put it down on paper better" and it's not organization.  The C- student tries to memorize the answer; the A+ student has the critical thinking ability to apply the answer and understands the rule within the context of normative theories and public policy.  Part of it may be communicating the ideas, but a gap that wide (particularly if you're a student at a low-ranked school) indicates that the C- student isn't "getting" the point.