Fear-Based Instruction Can be Harmful to Law Students (?!?)

TGIF! If you are thinking this is going to be about the Socratic method, you are wrong.  It’s about the apparent overuse of “cautionary tales” about the practice of law that has law students stressing “fear-based instruction”.  For most law students, this likely goes far down the list after the prospects of unemployment, plus-sized student loan payments and the zombie apocalypse.

“But professors who sprinkle their classroom lecture with cautionary tales about attorneys’ goofs should themselves take heed, says Abigail Patthoff, a legal research and writing scholar at Chapman University in California.  In a new paper forthcoming in the Utah Law Review, Ms. Patthoff warns that such classroom tactics, if deployed unwisely, can make life even more stressful for beleaguered law students, whom she says are already ‘among the most dissatisfied, demoralized, and depressed of graduate student populations.'”

Read: Fear-Based Instruction Can be Harmful to Law Students, Says Paper at the WSJ Law Blog

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