Freezing up

There's one part of law school that strikes terror into the hearts of every potential student: the Socratic method. The way that all professors teach law is by quizzing students on the previous night's reading, which is always a bunch of judicial opinions. Some professors can be quite demanding, especially if it becomes clear that the student did not do the reading. Most will keep asking questions until the student reaches the end of their knowledge. Some will let a lost student just flounder as a hundred classmates sit, the silence bearing down on his or her fragile psyche. So the first weeks of school are spent in fear of being called on.

But I found a trick to avoid the entire Socratic ordeal. I can participate on my own terms by volunteering answers when the professors ask questions. Then I avoid the pressure of being called on because I'm already participating in the discussion.

This week in contracts class I was scrambling to write down some notes on the case we'd just finished reviewing and wasn't paying attention to the introduction of the next one. So, of course, the professor called on me. All I heard was the end of his question, the part that went, "...what do you think, Mr. Leg?" (He gets my name wrong every time. I've stopped correcting him.) My chest tightened and my throat got dry. Thankfully, he uses PowerPoint, so I scanned the slide and took a shot at the answer, which was about determining damage calculations for certain contract breaches. I took a stab at it and was right. Of course, this professor doesn't just want the "right answer." No, he always pushes for more analysis until you're finally out of your depth. He's always gracious, but he doesn't mess around. So he asks what the justification for this kind of decision was, a big picture question outside the scope of a particular case. He wanted an underlying principle of contract law, but I wasn't sure exactly what he was driving at. I rambled on an idea for a minute and said, "Well, I'm just thinking out loud here."

"That's ok," he said. "You're good at it."

A compliment from a chaired professor! A guy who earned his J.D. from a top 20 school, who's been teaching contracts at the University of Iowa since the year I was born, who has written several textbooks on the subject and who studied at Oxford as a Fulbright scholar. I felt pretty good...