One hundred and forty of the nation's top college graduates arrived at the Law School a month ago to find they were the guinea pigs in an experiment that professors say may change the way people think about law.
A quarter of the first-year class at the Law School was handed over this fall to four teachers who spent the summer planning a potentially revolutionary first-year program.
For the students, the experiment is a risky way to spend one-third of their Law School stay. But for the quartet of professors, the experiment is the first step towards an entirely new approach to legal education.
"That's the dream," says Morton J. Horwitz, Warren Professor of American Legal History. "I think people are going to think about law differently when we are done."
He is joined by Abram Chayes '43, Frankfurter Professor of Law; Frank I. Michelman, professor of Law and Todd D. Rakoff '67, assistant professor of Law as organizers of the new program.
And for the 140 subjects? "These kids are going to do fine," says Chayes. "There's no chance they are going to be scarred in any way."
It is difficult to find a student in the group--formally called Section One--who does not agree. In fact, a number of other first-year students wish they too were part of the randomly selected 140.
The subject of all this excitement is the traditional first-year curriculum, founded at the end of the last century and continued, despite increasing criticism, to the present day. In this experiment, the Law School is beginning to tamper with the once sacrosanct first-year program.
Wiping Out Tradition
"We're trying to get rid of the traditional course boundaries," says Horwitz, whose specialty is Torts. The group is doing this going in two directions at once: more coordination in the teaching of courses and the creation of new "integrated" disciplines.
(The fifth required first-year course, Criminal Law, is being taught in the traditional manner by Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz. The class is thought of as the experiment control group.)
As the coordination part of the "Grand Experiment," as the professors refer to it, all the first-year classes--Civil Procedure, Contracts, Property, and Torts--deal with the legal ramifications of acts and omissions.
For two weeks, the concept worked well, professors and students say. The topic "is dressed up differently in each field, so that you don't immediately see, unless someone directs your attention to it, that it is the same thing," says Chayes.
He adds that the coordination lasted only two weeks because "we couldn't scramble everything the first year."
In addition to the two-week program, the entire section meets every Friday afternoon in an hour-and-a-half Targets of Opportunity session. These meetings--one-third of them student-organized--can be compared to high-school assemblies with all 140 Section One students sitting in Langdell North Middle at the end of the week to discuss subjects of universal concern.
Two weeks ago, for example, the topic was legal precedent: does it dictate later rulings, or can it be manipulated? The question "is right at the head of the traditional view of law, but you never talk about it," says Chayes.
Thus far the coordinated two weeks and the Friday sessions are the extent of the experiment. On Monday begins the second phase, "bridge periods," which are scheduled to occur monthly.
In these one-week bridge periods, the four professors will lead an intensive study of one area of the law. None of the four normal classes will meet, and the week will end with the students splitting into groups of six or seven.
These small sections will work out an exercise planned by Michelman, who teaches Property: the students will pretend to be the managing partners of a civil rights law firm, deciding whether to use an economic argument in a particular case.
Students and the professors say that the first bridge period, covering economics and the law, will make or break the experiment, since it is the most radical element. "We can't really judge the experiment until after the first bridge session," says one student, who requested anonymity.
The 140 law students assigned to Section One found out in August that they were involved in an experiment. A letter from Chayes in the registration packet filled them in on the situation.
The level of apprehension was fairly low; no one went to the dean of students or the registrar and pleaded to be transferred. In fact, if anything, the original reaction was positive, since all five professors in the section have good reputations. "Anyone who has had them says they are great teachers," says Section One student Joseph A. Brandolino.
Because the teachers are all liberal and popular, some students wonder if it is their personalities instead of the content which are responsible for the early success of the section. "If there were no experiment, and we had the professors, we could still have a good section," says one student, who asked not to-be identified.
But not all students in the section are similarly delighted. "The professors--they're all Jewish, they're all slightly liberal, some more than others, and some people object to the liberal bent," says one student in the section. Chayes is sympathetic. "We're not a balanced ticket," he says. "If we'd been teaching regular courses we would have been scattered among the four sections."
"People like to complain about the section," adds another student. "They say, 'If this grand experiment doesn't really work, we are still responsible for all the material on the final exam.'"
In addition, there have been some grumblings about the extra work. "We have extra classes every Friday, we have extra reading, we have bridge periods," says Justin Johnson, a first-year student in Section One. "We're not getting off easy," adds Brandolino.
Nevertheless, the cooperation among the professors is a balancing factor. "Because it's integrated, they realize what is going on" with the workload, one Section One student explains.
It is this integration which is most appealing to the students. "I don't understand why the subjects we are taught are so separate," says one first-year student not in Section One, adding, "I wish they would integrate it."
"They relate the different things in the courses," says Brandolino. "It makes it easier to understand the material."
This integration also allows the students to see the interplay among the professors--the academic and personal differences that are often hidden from public view.
Professors in the section say this display is intellectually healthy. "It's not just speaking from the throne," says Chayes.
And students seem to be unanimously enthusiastic about this aspect of the section--the authority of the professor in the classroom, particularly with respect to antagonistic points of view, has been a recurring subject of student concern at the Law School.
Another positive factor is the professors' enthusiasm, students say. "Because it is an experiment, they are taking more time to make it run smoothly," says one student. "I think they make an extra effort to be accessible to the students," adds another.
Nonetheless, students add, they have never lived through first-year before, and have nothing to compare the experiment to.
After this week, Section One will have regular classes with bridge sessions one week each month.
But even the normal part of the schedule is different than regular Law School procedure. The professors discuss each other's classes and sit in on each other's sessions--concepts unheard of at the Law School.
Just how novel is this experimental section? Only one quarter of the year is actually devoted to integrated bridge period classes. "Who do you think we admit here?" Rakoff asks hypothetically. "They all got 700 on their LSATs. They can fill in 25 percent."
Despite the innovations, the year is a transitional one. Further changes are planned for the future, and professors hint that this year's experiment will seem downright conservative by comparison.
But the professors say a critical juncture is fast approaching for the program. In the next two years, a decision is going to have to be made, whether to commit the section entirely to the integrated classes. "We've taken as much time as we can [for bridge periods] and still maintain the traditional boundaries," says Horwitz. "If we're going to be integrated, we're going to have to go all the way."
Or, says Chayes, the integrated section could be put on hold while the coordinated section of the first two weeks is expanded. In either case, this year's experimental program is merely a first step.
But a first step to what? It is unclear, even to the four professors, what form their finished product will take. And it is also unclear how much of this product will be applicable to law schools around the country.
"It's much more likely that people will pick up pieces than the whole," says Chayes. In particular, the bridge sections could be easily transplanted to a foreign setting, with a complete package including reading material and lecture outlines. The bulk of the coordinated case method classes would be more difficult to copy at another school, the professors add.
The single greatest limiting factor, though, is finding four professors as compatible as Chayes. Horwitz, Michelman, and Rakoff. Cooperation is obviously essential, and the months of preparation might not pull every group of professors together as it did the Harvard four. "We were not intimate friends," says Chayes. "We were good colleagues... One of the great surprises is how much fun it's been working with each other."
The fact that the experiment is being conducted this year, and not three or four years ago, indicates the difficulties facing any development of the new system. The ideas that materialized this fall are not new, but it was only this year that four professors committed themselves to the project.
"The main roadblock was making up our minds to devote two years of our lives to this," said Chayes, adding, "Maybe if it really sings, four other people will say, 'Maybe we will try it.'"
Despite the excitement of the moment, the professors are aware that their colleagues are not all so enthusiastic. And enthusiasm, they add, is a prerequisite. "It's not the kind of thing you push someone into," says Rakoff.
The Harvard Law faculty is postponing judgment on the experiment until after a thorough evaluation planned for the spring. "It's proceeding just the way a new educational approach should proceed, on a pilot project basis," Law School Dean James Vorenberg '49 said last week.
It is interesting that although all four professors are fairly liberal, the experiment was not a politically divided issue on the Law faculty. When the plans were presented at a faculty meeting last spring, reaction was for the most part positive, says Secretary to the Faculty Stephen M. Bernardi '52. At worst, he adds, some faculty members said to themselves, "If a group of colleagues wants to try something new, they should be free to do that."
On a theoretical level, the experiment is trying to break out of the doctrinal rut identified by the Michelman Committee last year. That committee studied legal education at Harvard for three years and issued a wide-ranging critical report in spring, 1982, writing that "Most-Committee members find that the more critical hypotheses about the first year...are plausible and troubling enough to warrant further exploration."
One of the problems is that first-year students learn only-doctrine, without theory on the one hand and clinical hands-on training on the other. The experiment is thus moving in both directions, injecting theory of the law into classes and adding clinical training to the agenda.
The professors feel the experimental section will make students better lawyers. If everything works as planned, the students should go into their second year with as much doctrine, more knowledge, and more enthusiasm than the students in the other three first-year sections.
The four professors are optimistic, and they are not afraid to speculate on the total abolition of the traditional first-year categories. "There are some real problems with throwing them away," says Rakoff. For one, every current lawyer and judge was trained the old way. "It's like bringing people into a religion and teaching them new rituals. Will they be able to relate?"
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