Tonight I went to a Kaplan-BarBri free seminar on the first year law experience. I hate enabling Kaplan and its hard-sell marketing pitches, but it was free so I went. The event itself became sort of a hard-sell for the weeklong BarBri prep course. I'm not impressed by the pitch, but I might do it anyway because it's worth it to me to turn over any stones I can in order to succeed at this.
The guy who led it was interesting; I could see him being a good lecturer because he led a stimulating class session. But his assessment of the law school experience at times seemed a bit off in comparison to what I've gathered from other students. And I tried to ask him a question at the end that he just couldn't seem to understand (although I was tired so I suppose I may be responsible for a lack of coherence in the query).
He had raised the issue that for a lawyer, the goal is to take a fact and somehow make it support the client's position. Each side has the same fact to deal with so clearly the treatment won't be the same in most instances. He sort of suggested that the gist of law school was to learn how to handle facts in that way. But I was wondering if there's a third viewpoint - that of a third-party arbiter of justice. That party wouldn't need to wrap facts in such a way to be a proponent of a position: instead it would be guardian of a principle, to set groundwork so that certain types of fact patterns could fit uniform legal logic and be applied to many different cases. If the fact pattern of a case coincided with that of precedent, the precedent could be applied in the new case. His point seemed to suggest that precedent-applying, or even analysis with the purpose of being able to establish a coherent precedent, was not as important: manipulating facts to support arguments seemed to be. I think that's an important skill to learn in order to learn to be a good advocate, but I'm wondering if he overemphasized it as the crux of the law school experience?
Meanwhile I did finally hear an explanation of what the socratic method is: that the information comes from the student rather than being rotely distributed by the professor. So law professors structure their lectures so that the students are induced to reveal knowledge rather than simply receive what might have otherwise been spoonfed by the teacher.