Success as a lawyer is ultimately about trust
What you need to know:
- Your memory was the only success tool at hand, and it was used to the expense of emotional and relational intelligence.
- I see in most of today's students a much better person, brains and intelligence than I could have dreamed for when I was in campus.
- When it comes to legal education, there are four lies that can misdirect any desire for change.
Sheen’s amusing definition of modern education, as the flow of information from the notes of the professor to the notebook of the student without passing through the brain of either, is not unique to legal education.
There is a deeper problem in our educational system, which we peeped into in last week’s post.
Education has become an automated certificate or degree factory, where teachers and students never ask themselves the “whys” about what they do…they just simply do it.
Society does not immediately feel the effects of boring, perfunctory, repetitive educational models, especially when it comes to the more “brick and mortar” subjects. They take time to sink in, and the time has come.
Ruby, a brilliant third-year law student and moot court winner, narrated to me in rather dramatic terms the deep culture shock she underwent in her first year of university education.
She had attended a prestigious national secondary school in Kenya. At school, Ruby says, all we did was to cram. We had to memorise everything no matter how much you understood.
Your memory was the only success tool at hand, and it was used to the expense of emotional and relational intelligence.
“We were woken up before sunrise to sit CATs (Continuous Assessment Tests) again and again; it was the same CAT and we had to do it until we got the answers right. The questions did not matter” Ruby says.
“Suddenly, I arrived at law school and I felt I had made it. Little did I know the shock I would go through. I really suffered in first year until I adjusted. We had to read papers, articles and decisions before class.
I was on my 8-4-4 mode and I would memorize them. I got a culture shock when My lecturer asked me, not to recite them, but to explain them and relate them to each other. I was lost! I realised I did not know how to think; I was just a memory machine”.
Sadly, Ruby’s experience is not unique, it is not isolated. This is the experience of most 8-4-4 candidates nowadays. Only the exam matters, and you had better get the answers right because your future depends on them.
CAPACITY TO REFLECT
This has pushed schools into cheating, turning them into certificate machines, which is depressing for candidates and teachers. We are destroying education, and with it legal education.
Change requires imagination, innovation and a deep understanding of some key questions. When it comes to legal education, there are four lies that can misdirect any desire for change. First, that in the “old days” things were better, and now students know nothing, and are useless and corrupt.
This is an untruth spiced by oversimplification. When I was in campus the same was said of us by the older generation. Actually, the same has always been said by older generations.
This is the romantic fallacy of the “good old days”. Perhaps, before we did not have so much competition, so much information. We were not good enough, but we did not know it.
Today’s students are overloaded with social information. This may make them lose capacity to reflect, and they may become shallow and impulsive.
But this can be addressed by a good education system; one that is well-thought out, with a philosophy and rules that make sense and follow that philosophy.
Today’s students may actually be better. I see in most of them a much better person, brains and intelligence than I could have dreamed for when I was in campus.
BLURRED VIEW
Second, only crooks succeed as lawyers and make money. This is statistically wrong. I meet amazingly successful and honest lawyers every day.
They are clever, they have set up or joined successful law firms and can be trusted, which is why they are so expensive. Trust multiplies your earnings at least one hundredfold.
The lawyer’s duty is a sacred duty, a duty of trust. It is very much like the doctor’s duty, with the difference that if the doctor messes up, one dies; if the lawyer messes up, one goes bankrupt or goes to jail.
Really, when a person wants something good, he or she will look for a good lawyer. If this person wants something bad, then he or she will look for a crooked lawyer, for only a crook can make your “crookedness” look good or virtuous.
This blurred view of the legal profession is further distorted by the inordinate show some lawyers make of their wealth.
Also, by TV series such as Suits, the American television legal drama, which depicts Mike Ross, a college dropout, as a brilliant associate of a fictional law firm in New York, despite never having sat the Bar Exam, at least not under his name.
MORALLY WRONG
Third, that law and morality have nothing to do with each other. Ethics should not be part of the curriculum; it is not important; it is a waste of time.
If this were true then Hitler was not wrong, Stalin was a good leader, and Kim Jong-un is also a good ruler. They all passed crooked laws and acted legally.
Ethics is not taught at most law schools, and where it still remains, has been reduced to dressing rules, external forms of behaviour, and manners. Lo, we have confused ethics with manners.
Ivy League schools in the United States are now painstakingly trying to recover what they lost, the ethics curriculum. That law and morality have nothing to do with each other is very positivist view, which has caused much damage to society.
Martin Luther King already warned us, in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, when he wrote to the moderate US clergymen who, with their ambiguous and uncommitted position, had caused so much damage to the equality struggle:
“freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience. We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers… Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.”
Any honest professional badly needs that sensitivity to discern right from wrong and the just from the unjust, without placing himself blindly in the hands of any Parliament.
We may do so for short-term gain which will turn into bitter losses as time moves on. It is precisely ethics that makes or breaks the lawyer, his family, friends and relations, and at the core of ethics is trust.
A GOOD MOBILE PHONE
Fourth, that studying law is boring, repetitive and its success depends on how many laws one can memorise. This really depends on the imagination and innovation of the teacher, which blossoms in a good environment, in a good law school.
A good law school is like a mobile phone. The hardware, must be good in itself, including the curriculum, the lecturers, and the infrastructure.
Then, it needs the software, the apps that make it exciting, no matter how hard: the moot courts, invited professors and access to worldwide information networks
In the end, there must be some fun. This is the hidden curriculum, that makes students and lecturers fall in love with their careers, mission and the high ideals of justice, which many lawyers have shamefully forgotten.
Dr Franceschi is the dean of Strathmore Law School. [email protected]; Twitter: @lgfranceschi
