Today I have for you not an angry judge story, but an angry law professor story — the story of a brilliant but angry and aggressively Socratic lawprof brought low.
Though I didn’t witness it myself I spoke to several people I trust who saw it firsthand.
/1
For the record, despite what generations of both law profs and law students seem to have assumed, Prof Kingsfield in the Paper Chase is most assuredly a villain, whether he was intended to be or not.
I took a class with a Kingsfield-like prof, and his abuse was absolutely antithetical to learning.
/2 It was around 1992. The lawprof — let’s call him Tennessee Williams — taught civil procedure. He was a performative tyrant and probably the model for a fictional tyrannical lawprof in a famous book about how miserable law school is. Essential to his routine was the “Socratic method.”
/3 As law students and lawyers know the Socratic method involves asking probing questions to your subject until you eventually expose their ignorance or inability to explain or reconcile different ideas.
Bear in mind Socrates was so insufferable they made him kill himself.
/4 Anyway a big Socratic thing is “cold calling.” That is, on any given day of class, the lawprof might select YOU to ask about the cases or laws at issue. Inadequate preparation is grounds for the lawprof to humiliate you before your peers, the more floridly the better.
/5 Prof. Williams loved this part. Woe to the unprepared student. He was brilliant, accomplished, successful in many important appeals, and knew his subject better than anyone, but he chose to use that status as a scourge, to whip the indolent.
/6 So one day circa 1992 Prof. Williams calls on a young woman in class. She burst into tears. She explains that she rides the train an hour to get to school, and last night she left her books on the train, and she tried and tried to find someone nearby to borrow the book to do the reading,..
/7 ..but nobody was nearby, and it was snowing (for our story is in a place with awful weather), and the train was late coming into to school, and she ALWAYS prepares, and she is SO sorry. She collapses into a wet heap of misery.
Williams SCOWLS. He BROODS.
/8 Without acknowledging the young woman or her story, he shakes his head and calls on the young man next to her, who through this whole exchange has had his head down on his folded arms. MISTER STUDENT, intones Williams with great irritation. CAN YOU PLEASE ANSWER THE QUESTION SHE CANNOT?
/10 The class dissolves into laughter. Williams is infuriated and storms out. But his spell is broken. That class never feared him again. The young man never had to buy his own beer in the commons again.
