> FYI it's worth, the nonsense that I dispense to my
> students these days largely consists in trying to
> convey to them things like, the standard under which
> the court views the facts on a motion to dismiss for
> failure to state a claim is not the same as the
> standard under which the court views the facts on a
> motion for summary judgment. Or I try to get across
> the elements of RICO or mail fraud, or what you have
> to do to make out a sexual harassment claim. Someday I
> may get to teach a legal theory class and then I could
> poison their little minds with my pompous, complacent,
> turgid, cloudy apologetics from the present order, if
> I thought the classroom was the proper place to
> propagandize the pupils in the professor's philosophy,
> but that day is not at present on the horizon.
I think teaching Civil Procedure is a great vehicle through which to get one's students to think critically about the American legal system. (For the uninitiated, Civil Procedure is the law school class that addresses the ground rules for resolving civil disputes in the courts. It addresses topics like what the proper standard is for dismissing a lawsuit, or for a party in a lawsuit to join two parties together and sue them both at once, etc.).
After all, the rules students learn in civil procedure are ostensibly neutral, but in practice they're exploited by attorneys for deep-pocketed clients in order to make it more difficult for less wealthy entities to successfully sue them.
The example that really resonated with me when I took civil procedure was when our professor explained "discovery dumping" to us. (Discovery dumping is when one party in a lawsuit asks the other party for information and the other party responds by interpreting the information request in the broadest possible terms and "dumps" thousands of irrelevant documents on the moving party -- so that the moving party ends up looking for a needle in haystack. This can make it impossible for the moving party to pursue the lawsuit if the moving party lacks the resources to dig through all the shit that's been given to them).
Then you have the old insurance defense trick of filing every damn motion that can be filed just to waste the plaintiff's attorney's time, and money -- and, more importantly, dragging the litigation on so that the actual injured plaintiff (who has probably lost his job and has mounting medical bills) feels increasingly pressured to take a shitty settlement.
Most law students are under the impression that good facts and some tenacious lawyering is all it takes for justice to prevail. A well-taught Civil Procedure course will disabuse them of that silly little notion.
-WD
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