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”
DEAN GERSHON RESPONDS
April 17, 2012 § 5 Comments
I posted here about the disappearance of Evidence from the subjects required to graduate from law school, and sent an email to law school deans at Ole Miss and MC, inviting any reply.
Dean Richard Gershon of the Ole Miss School of Law sent this …
Judge,
Thank you for your email, and your blog post. I will share it with our faculty.
One thing you should know is that 90% of the law students at the University of Mississippi School of Law take Evidence, even though it is not required. Also, we are adding a required skills curriculum starting with our 2012 entering class. This program will be taught by lawyers and judges. It will take place the first two weeks of spring semester all three years. The first year they will take contract drafting and negotiation. The second and third year, they will choose from a selection of courses, many of which will have elements of trail tactics and evidence.
The truth is, I didn’t learn evidence in evidence class in law school. I learned it in trial advocacy class. That is where it made sense, because I was applying it.
All best wishes,
Richard
I. Richard Gershon, Dean and Professor of Law, University of Mississippi School of Law
If I receive a response from Dean Rosenblatt of MCLaw, I will publish it.
DISMISSED FOR LACK OF EVIDENCE
April 12, 2012 § 12 Comments
Evidence is no longer a required course of study at either of the law schools in Mississippi.
That may be old news to you, but I heard of it for the first time only last week. You can click on either or both law school links over there on the right and check for yourself. You’ll have to do a lot of digging to find the info; I recommend you go straight to the school catalogs in .pdf format.
I am sure the academicians have a good reason for this development. I’m guessing – I haven’t “interviewed” any deans or anyone else – that it has something to do with the bar exam, and not law school itself, being what they consider the real certification of skills.
Still, when I think of subjects at the core of being a lawyer, evidence certainly ranks right up there in the top few. A good grasp of the law of evidence requires one to bring to bear the very analytical legal skills that distinguish the legal profession from other fields of endeavor.
Moreover, the law of evidence informs much of what a lawyer does in the everyday practice of law, regardless whether that lawyer ever personally sets foot in the court room. A lawyer’s advice about the drafting of a contract is shaped by the distinct possibility that it may have to be in evidence at trial some day. Advice to clients about how to make a proper paper trail and document activities is based on evidentiary considerations. When a client asks advice about what his or her liability might be if sued, the lawyer has to evaluate the evidence, taking into account what may or may not be admissible in evidence.
As I see it, law school has three primary functions: (1) to teach the law; (2) to teach how to find the law when one is not sure what the applicable law might be; (3) and to analyze the problem like a lawyer so as to bring (1) and (2) to bear.
Of the many areas of study that might be required, I nominate evidence as one that may be unparalleled in its ability to teach law students how to think like a lawyer. Now, I am not an academician. I am a mere trial court judge toiling away in an obscure corner of Mississippi, so my opinion, I am sure, carries little weight on this subject. But based on 33 years of practicing law and 5 years on the bench, I have to say from a purely nuts-and-bolts standpoint that a solid grasp of evidence would be in my top 3 of essential subjects to have if you expect to succeed as a lawyer (FYI, I nominate contracts, civil procedure and evidence).
And yet, by making evidence an elective, the subject has been assigned the same academic weight as other elective courses, which include Venture Capital, Law and Literature, and Legislation at MC; and Gaming Law, Bioethics, and Legal History of Slavery at OM. Not to say that any of those courses are not worthy of being included in a proper curriculum, but are they as essential to the core function of a lawyer as is Evidence?
It seems that the function of law schools has shifted from my era, when we were admitted to practice by diploma privilege after completing a rigorous, mostly required curriculum, to the current, when completion of law school is merely the gateway to admission to the bar exam, and it is up to the students to select (with a few exceptions) what he or she prefers to study.
In 1980, or thereabouts, Mississippi abolished “reading for the bar,” under which an aspiring lawyer would study the law on his or her own under the tutelage and supervision of a lawyer in good standing. After the prescribed period of study, with a certificate of the tutorial lawyer in hand, one applied to take the bar exam. Wisely, under that system, the experienced lawyer directed his tutee’s attention to the things that mattered, which included a hefty dose of Wigmore.
Now one must pay a law school – handsomely – for the same experience, sans the same dose of practicality.
I shiver at the thought of lawyers setting foot in my court room who have no grasp of the nuances of the best evidence rule, parol evidence, hearsay, or even how to get a document into evidence. I shiver for myself and for their poor clients. Some point out that the MRE is so much easier to understand and apply than the old mix of statutes and case law. True. But having a set of rules and understanding them enough to use them properly and effectively are entirely different things. Rules only take you so far. There are cases interpreting those rules that one must learn about. And the rules are neither crystal clear nor do they address everything one needs to know. Cite me a rule, for example, on what objection applies in any given situation. Or tell me how MRE 803(3) pertaining to wills applies in a will contest? Or when does past recollection recorded apply instead of refreshed recollection, and vice versa? Some elucidation is required for even the most astute student.
But, you say, prospective lawyers still have to pass evidence on the bar exam. Yes, but I would be more comfortable knowing that the student who was certified by the law school as being ready to take the bar exam had actually studied and passed evidence courses rather than merely mastered enough of an outline to pass the bar exam.
In the UK there is a two-tiered system: solicitors, who sit in their offices, advise clients, draft wills and other papers, do property work; and barristers, who are certified to have the skills to do litigation.
Maybe we could adopt a similar dichotomy here. I propose that our two-tiered system would be divided along the lines of who has not studied evidence and who has. Those who have not, we could call “shopkeepers” or “legal retailers.” And those who have studied evidence we would call “Lawyers.”
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