DEAN ROSENBLATT RESPONDS
May 1, 2012 § 3 Comments
I posted here on April 12, 2012, about what, to me, was the startling discovery that Evidence is no longer a required course at either MCLaw or Ole Miss Law. The post prompted quite a response. Ole Miss Dean Richard Gershon submitted a brief reply here.
On April 24, 2012, I received this response from MCLaw Dean Jim Rosenblatt …
Judge Primeaux (Your Honor)
I appreciate the opportunity to provide follow-up information regarding your blog posting regarding the teaching of Evidence courses in Mississippi’s law schools.
At Mississippi College School of Law (MC Law), we share your commitment to prepare our students for the courtroom. We take the view that if a law student is confident in the courtroom, that student confidence will carry over to non-courtroom aspects of a legal practice.
I took some time to review the records of our MC Law graduates from May 2008 through May 2012. For this most recent 5-year period, 819 of our 833 graduates took Evidence (98.3% of our graduates). We offer 4 sections of Evidence each year to afford all our students an opportunity to fit this important course into their schedule.
During this period Evidence was not generally a required course in our catalog, but was a required prerequisite course in order to take Trial Practice—one of our most popular elective courses which we offer 8-9 times a year with a class size of 12-16 students. Each student in our Trial Practice course is required to demonstrate throughout the course an understanding of the elements of a trial and the evidentiary principles involved. At the end of the course each student serves as counsel for a full trial as a capstone experience. A thorough knowledge of evidence is essential to be successful in this course. In addition to our tenured faculty members who teach Evidence, we are fortunate to have Presiding Justice Jess Dickinson from the Mississippi Supreme Court and Judge Kenny Griffis from the Mississippi Court of Appeals who teach Evidence at MC Law (Justice Dickinson was voted by our students as Adjunct Professor of the Year, so he must be doing all right with his Evidence teaching).
Many of these law students go on to compete in one of the 26 regional and national trial or appellate moot court competitions in which our law school participates. In addition we offer school-based competitions in the trial arena such as our Opening Argument Competition (1L), Closing Argument Competition (1L), and Top Gun Competition (upper level) for our future litigators. The Mississippi bench and bar are tremendously supportive of these competitions and assist as coaches, advisers, practice round judges, or competition judges. I am grateful to you and your fellow members of the bench for your involvement in legal education.
Some years ago (before my time), our Faculty made the policy decision to mandate curriculum only for the first year. The exception to this policy was requiring Appellate Advocacy (taught in the fall semester of the second year), Professional Responsibility/Ethics (a course required by the standards of the American Bar Association), and a writing requirement course or seminar. Constitutional Law was formerly a required course in the first-year curriculum and kept that status when it was moved to the upper level.
Recently, we instituted a “Guided Curriculum” for our students who have a grade point average of less than a 2.5 at the end of the first year. Evidence is one of the five courses that these students are required to take in their upper level curriculum.
There is an additional factor that motivates our students to take Evidence in such large measure–the subject is tested on the bar examination. Evidence is routinely tested on the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE) and the Multistate Essay Exam (MEE) and is potentially testable on the Mississippi Essay Exam. This fact is not lost on our students, which is another reason for the robust enrollment rate for our Evidence courses.
I am confident that our policies, curricular offerings, and programs emphasize the importance of Evidence as a subject and that our students emerge from their legal education with a theoretical and practical understanding of this subject so crucial to the practice of law. I appreciate the opportunity you have afforded me to respond and thank you for allowing discussions such as this on your blog.
Please also allow me to share with you a resource that may be of benefit to you and your blog readers. We have created the Judicial Data Project–a data base on our Law Library web site at http://judicial.mc.edu/ that is available free of charge to members of the legal community or to the public. One can watch videos of oral arguments at our appellate courts, view briefs filed in the cases, and search the statistical data base using a whole host of parameters. For example, one could type in the name of a trial judge and see how many cases of that judge went up on appeal. One can also search by type of case, party name, attorney name, date, jurisdiction, and many other data items either singularly or by using a combination of these parameters to narrow a search. I would appreciate you examining this web site and sharing with your readers information about the Judicial Data Project and how it can be used by judges and practitioners.
I hope you are finding your copies of the Mississippi Rules Annotated to be of use to you on the bench. We are pleased to furnish complimentary copies to Mississippi judges.
I am grateful for your judicial service on behalf of the citizens of Mississippi. Warm regards.
Jim Rosenblatt
Dean and Professor of Law, Mississippi College School of Law (MC Law)
“Let Justice Roll”
The Better Chancery Practice Blog 
He said 98.3% took evidence. That would leave slightly less than 2% not so equipped. However, I share your thoughts on the vital importance of Evidence. It should be 100%.
Busted on my lack of arithmetic skills.
I appreciate Dean Rosenblatt’s thoughtful comments. Although they calm my concerns somewhat, I stand by my original position.
When a person graduates from law school, the school is offering the world its reassurance that the graduate is fully equipped to handle the legal problems of clients who pay that graduate for the service. As it stands now, I can not be certain that every graduate is so equipped; in fact, I can tell you based on Dean Rosenblatt’s figures, that, in my opinion, as many as 10% are not so equipped, because they have not taken Evidence, which I consider to be the quintessential course for a legal education.
I think it’s up to the law school to make sure that each and every graduate is so equipped, not up to the student.