UW Law School Professor Elizabeth Mertz’s newly published book The Language of Law School: Learning to 'Think Like a Lawyer’ (Oxford University Press) served as a major source of findings for an in-depth study by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching that is making headlines with its critique of legal education in the U.S. and Canada.

The Carnegie Foundation report, "Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law," has caught media attention with its reexamination of the concept of "thinking like a lawyer." Five scholars devoted two years of study, including intensive field work at 16 widely diverging law schools, to a reassessment of the way law schools develop legal understanding.

The report finds that traditional "Socratic method" teaching needs to be better integrated with the other dimensions of learning to be a legal professional. It advises the profession to design programs "so that students – and faculty – weave together disparate kinds of knowledge and skill."

The Carnegie report relies heavily on Mertz's study of law school classroom dynamics. Senior Carnegie Foundation scholar William M. Sullivan, one of the report’s authors, wrote to Mertz about her book, "Your findings enriched and emboldened our analysis and conclusions."

Mertz’s study involved taping and coding the entire first semester of Contracts classes in eight different law schools.  Funded by the American Bar Foundation and the Spencer Foundation, this research tracked the linguistic details of exchanges in first-year law school classrooms.   Although the law professors in this study used a variety of formats – ranging from lecturing to modified Socratic styles – they all conveyed a similar message.  Students were encouraged to replace a focus on social context and ethics with a new emphasis on legal contexts and layers of authority.  Socratic method teaching provides a format that is linguistically tailored for inculcating this message.  However, Mertz warns,  it can also close students’ minds to other forms of reasoning, and widen the gap between the legal profession and the public it serves.

Elizabeth Mertz, who holds both a J.D. and a doctorate in anthropology with a focus on language, is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation as well as a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

Submitted by on February 14, 2007

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