Institutions and Methods of the Law: Introductory Teaching Materials

These materials are primarily about lawmaking. The authors believe lawmaking is a greater part of lawyers' work than most lawyers, law teachers, and law students realize. This part of lawyer work, because it is done wholesale, turns out to be of the largest consequence to society. Further, the reality of lawyer lawmaking must be well understood before a lawyer can act with maximum effectiveness as advocate or counselor. Legal education gives little attention directly to the perspective, persistence, skills and knowledge lawyers need for the lawmaking role. Law students are expected to get these lessons as sidelights to the ordinary law school curriculum, just as, in the past, lessons in professional responsibility were expected to emerge spontaneously from other courses. Institutions and methods of law are effectively revealed only by illustrating their impacts with a specific law issue or problem. For the authors of a text, and for students, this creates a problem. How can students be brought to focus on an institution or a method rather than on the substantive law problem used as the example to create a context for discussion of the bigger theme of institution or method? A common approach is to seize upon one illustrative legal development- workers compensation, strict liability, and privacy are the classics-and then to show the various legal institutions and methods playing on that one problem. This is an opposite track. Except for seven cases at the start of Chapter 1, the readings have little substantive law continuity. The student focusing too intently on an illustrative law problem or issue will find his mind wrenched from that focus as he moves on to the next reading. The student eyeing process, method, and institution will find a flow and organization to the material. The selections do connect to one another if the reader is examining legal method. This solves the learning problem of substantive law issues blocking out the legal process lessons.