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Teaching Judging in Law School, Part 4
The Judging seminar that I developed for the University of New Mexico School of Law with Law Professor Ted Occhialino concluded in April, 2005. This final installment of my series on the development and implementation of the course will discuss some of the last class sessions and provide an overview of how it all went, at least from my perspective as adjunct faculty.
The concluding sessions of the seminar provided an array of topics, presenters and formats. Since we have treated this project as a work in progress with the hope of offering an improved version next time, we wanted to experiment with a variety of approaches. The final sessions included a presentation by U.S. Magistrate Leslie Smith from New Mexico on the requirements and expectations of law clerks in the federal court system. Another U.S. Magistrate, Andrew J. Wistrich of Los Angeles, fortuitously read my first installment in this series and called to offer a presentation for a class scheduled, even more fortuitously, for a date on which he was already planning to be in New Mexico. Judge Wistrich’s presentation gave our class an advance look at an article he had co-authored, reporting on the results of a study into whether judges could really disregard evidence of which they had knowledge, but which they could not consider due to evidentiary constraints. As you might expect, for some kinds of evidence, judges found it difficult to disregard the information that they knew but were barred from considering.
Using an alternative format, the class was presented with a former and current family court judge who applied very different philosophies on family court. The current judge generally felt bound to resolve disputes according the law and rules of procedure to provide predictability and consistency. The retired judge preferred whenever possible to apply alternative dispute resolution techniques to bring the parties to agreement outside of formal proceedings. The students peppered them with reactions and questions to help explore the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.
For their course grade, students were each asked to write papers of about twenty pages in length considering some aspect of judging. The students chose a wide range of topics, including the surprisingly thin legal underpinnings for the widely accepted idea that state courts are not bound by rulings of their federal circuit courts on federal constitutional issues; the validity of recess appointments of federal judges; several papers on the interactions between judges and juries; and judicial selection in New Mexico, among other topics. Students’ grades were determined by a combination of the quality of their research and analysis in their papers and the extent of their contributions to class discussions.
As adjunct faculty for this seminar, my overall impression is that we achieved part of our objectives, and learned some valuable lessons for future offerings. For one thing, our efforts to recruit judges and others as guest speakers brought in the personal experiences and specialized expertise of these speakers far more effectively than any faculty presentation alone could have done. The students seemed very receptive to and even excited by the numerous presentations by leaders within the judiciary. By scheduling those presentations in proximity to more traditional caselaw analyses, we found that the judges’ descriptions of their philosophies and experiences enriched the class discussions.
On the “needs improvement” side, we found invaluable insights but less fruitful ground for class discussion than we had hoped in the textbook that we assigned, Keeton on Judging in the American Legal System (see Article II in this series). Next time we will probably concentrate on continuing to develop our own cases and readings. We also recognized some of our own materials that did not elicit the kinds of discussion we had wanted and would look elsewhere for materials on those topics.
For judicial branch educators who are lawyers and who have relationships with law schools in their communities, I strongly recommend considering developing such a seminar. We have a great deal to offer through such a class because of our familiarity with and contacts in the judiciary. We also may well be getting a jump on preparing judges of the future to undertake highly professional careers on the bench or as law clerks. And for ourselves, offering such a seminar gives us an opportunity, second only to that of performing as judges ourselves, to understand the perspectives and challenges of those in the judiciary whom we serve as educators. If you do undertake to develop such a course, be prepared for a major time commitment—even if you find as many willing judicial faculty to lead sessions as we fortunately did.
I look forward to reading the student evaluations of the seminar, which we are not allowed to see until we submit the grades—which we will not complete until after the deadline for this issue of NASJE News. But subject to hearing from the students formally, I am confident that our first venture into this class, while imperfect, has provided a good start for a promising addition to the UNM School of Law curriculum.
Paul Biderman has been director of the Rozier E. Sanchez
Judicial Education Center at the University of New Mexico School of Law since
the Center’s
inception in late 1991. He was NASJE president in 2001-02 and NASJE News editor
for three years prior to that. He is an attorney whose past service has included
a term as the state’s Secretary of Energy and Minerals, as well as years
working in the Attorney General’s Consumer Division, legal services programs,
and private law practice.
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1999-2012, National Association
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