Most law teachers strive to train students in legal reasoning largely by modeling. While this learning by example is crucial to the law classroom, I seek to add to it a dimension of reflection and discussion about the method itself. I attempt to make the method itself visible to students as a process whose strengths and limitations they can consider, and whose character they can analyze. Particularly for students whose intellectual process does not naturally or immediately adapt to legal modes, such an ability to be conscious of the quality and nature of legal reasoning is crucial to their learning process.

In preparing for any given day's Contracts class, I reread with care the cases for that day's doctrinal discussion, and think through the major issues of substantive contracts law I wish to cover. Ideally, these issues become so clear and comfortable in my mind that I am able to immerse myself in an organic give-and-take with students, knowing that the issues I wish to address are so embedded in the material and so fresh in my mind that they will emerge in any discussion which is lively and provocative, regardless of what order they come in, or whether they are imposed by me.

I share openly with the class my awareness of the anxiety of, as well as my insistence on the need for, allowing oneself to think on the spot. I point out to them that legal analysis cannot be fully predicted, that it is not possible to have memorized the answers ahead of time, that the process demands the very difficult intellectual and emotional risk of letting one's mind play freely, of thinking and struggling in process, in public—before an audience of highly competitive and very able people. I try to make it OK to be wrong, to change your mind, to float a trial balloon.

A more recent focus of my strategy involves issues of values and ethics within the context of legal thought. Students in law school tend to complain that something about the process cuts them off both from their own sense of moral values and from provocative and rigorous discourse about general issues of values and ethics in social policy. Although I am far from satisfied with my present insight into this issue, I have attempted some solutions. I have tried to highlight the role of daily judgments made by judges about relevance of evidence or pleadings as both reflecting and implementing basic norms about what concerns are "permissible" in legal decision-making. I have done spontaneous mini-lectures about what role "gut feelings" or ethical hunches might play as catalysts for legal thought. And I try to teach students how to weave a deeper level of policy analysis into their legal thought about a case. Nevertheless, this remains one of the areas with which I struggle for greater skill and insight than I have yet developed.

I've said more than enough to suggest the tactics I use. What remains to say is the joy and personal reward I get from teaching. And the high degree of privilege I feel at being allowed to work with students as energetic, bright, committed, and disciplined as those who attend Boalt Law School at Berkeley.

Revised: 1993