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Reviewed by:
  • What the Best Law Teachers Do by Michael Hunter Schwartz, Gerald F. Hess, and Sophie M. Sparrow
  • Courtney S. Huizar, Assistant Clinical Professor
Michael Hunter Schwartz, Gerald F. Hess, and Sophie M. Sparrow, What the Best Law Teachers Do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. 355 pp. Hardcover: $29.95. ISBN 978-0-674-04914-7.

Law professors do many things. We research and draft scholarship, we perform administrative duties for our schools, and we provide service to bar and legal education committees and groups. Perhaps our most important duty, however, is teaching. So what makes a law professor a great teacher? That is the question posed and answered by Michael Hunter Schwartz, Gerald F. Hess, and Sophie M. Sparrow in what the Best Law Teachers Do. Using the examples of 26 outstanding law professors, this book focuses on the personal qualities, relationship skills, and teaching methods that make a law teacher outstanding.

The authors chose to focus on law teachers mainly because their “goal was to create the first systematic rigorous study of law teaching” (p. 2). The authors state that they have written and read a good deal of “teaching and learning research from other fields,” but they also wanted “to contribute something new that would be credible to our colleagues [in the law teaching field]” (p. 2). Likewise, the authors note that other research has “identified many ways legal education and law teachers need to change,” but they hoped “to offer something different” (p. 2).

This specific focus on law teachers made sense to me. In my experience as both a student and a teacher, the law school classroom is different from the college classroom in several ways. Stated very broadly, the primary focus in law school is teaching students not only what the legal rules are, but also how to apply those rules to different sets of facts. Different types of law classes accomplish this in different ways. In “doctrinal” classes (“torts” or “constitutional law,” for example), professors often lecture on what the rules are while also employing the Socratic method of questioning with students. This approach pushes students to explore the nuances of the cases and rules they are studying and to think about how to apply those rules in a different context.

By contrast, in a legal writing class or a clinical class, professors may focus more on hands-on application. For example, they may require students to draft the types of documents they will use in their legal careers, such as legal briefs, contracts, or oral argument outlines.

Yet even though the intended audience for the book seems to be law teachers, the authors also acknowledge that its principles may have wider application. The authors note that the title of their book “echoes the title of its predecessor book, Ken Bain’s what the Best College Teachers Do (p. 2). Additionally, they believe that their book “reflect[s] not only what excellent law teachers do, but also what excellent teachers in other fields do” (p. 2). Finally, in their suggestions for using the book, they state, “All readers can learn from the words and actions of the teachers in this book” (p. 313).

The authors achieve their aims by focusing on a clear set of goals for analyzing excellent law teaching. Thus, in beginning the project, they strove to: “(1) identify outstanding law teachers in the United States, (2) synthesize the principles by which they teach, and (3) document those principles in a way that is useful to others” (p. 4). The authors also created a working definition of “exceptional learning,” which they describe as “includ[ing] both exceptional intellectual development and exceptional emotional development” (p. 17).

To reach these goals, the authors created a five-phase process. In the initial phase, they took nominations for outstanding law teachers from a wide variety of sources, including students, alumni, professors, and deans. They set up a website to facilitate nominations and submitted nomination requests to a number of listservs. Ultimately, they received more than 250 nominations. [End Page 182]

In the second “paring-down” phase, the authors obtained and reviewed additional evidence to select a small group of teachers to study. They...

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