Regardless of what your feelings are about the practice of law and lawyers in our country, you must always be willing to admit one thing: a good lawyer can make a very powerful argument. Never has that been more apparent than in a recent exchange that was posted online between anonymous students at the Whittier Law School and Law Professor Patricia Leary.
A few months ago, one or more anonymous students wrote a note to their law professor, complaining that she had been spotted at least once on campus wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt. The letter said wearing the shirt was "inappropriate" and "highly offensive." Further, it said "we do not spend three years of our lives and tens of thousands of dollars to be subjected to indoctrination or personal opinions of our professors," and urged the professor to avoid "mindless actions" that might distract students at a law school where not everyone is passing the bar.
[Me rolling my eyes]
Professor Leary responded in a two-part piece with the opening:
I am accepting the invitation in your memo, and the opportunity created by its content, to teach you. I would prefer to do it through a conversation, or especially through a series of conversations. Because I don’t know who you are, this isn’t possible. And there is an even more important reason for putting this in writing for the entire law school community. The larger issues that underlie your anger are timely, and they touch the entire law school community and transcend it.
Inside Higher Ed was able to validate the authenticity of the exchange.
The professor is Patricia Leary, and she's been teaching at Whittier Law School since 1992. She's traveling right now and Inside Higher Ed was unable to reach her directly. But the law school confirmed that the letters were legit and she was the author. Whittier is known for its diversity: nonwhite students make up a majority of the law school's student body.
Professor Leary critiques the students’ complaint in two parts. Part one focuses on the premises in the complaint. Part two focuses on the writing and execution of the complaint. Here are some highlights from Professor Leary’s response:
On the students’ assertion that their tuition affords them the right to dictate the content of their education:
I do not subscribe to the “consumer model” of legal education. As a consequence, I believe in your entitlement to assert your needs and desires even more strongly than you do. You would be just as entitled to express yourself to us if the law school were entirely tuition free. This is because you are a student, not because you are a consumer. Besides, the natural and logical extension of your premise is that students on a full scholarship are not entitled to assert their needs and desires to the same extent as other students (or maybe even at all). So, as you can see, arguments premised on consumerism are not likely to influence me. On the contrary, such a premise causes me to believe that you have a diminished view of legal education and the source of our responsibility as legal education and the source of our responsibility as legal educators. This allows me to take any criticism from such a perspective less seriously than I otherwise would.
On the students’ premise that they are not “paying” for their professor’s opinion:
You are not paying me to pretend I don’t have one.
In the second part of her critique she goes after the writing of the complaint and this too is an education.
When you embed a statement in a dependent clause, you are signaling to the reader that it is of lesser importance (e.g. “While we can appreciate your sacred right to the freedom of speech, ...”). If this was intentional, it undermines your message. If it was not intentional, it obscures it.
Frame the issue precisely and then focus on it. Don’t overgeneralize. You begin by stating that the issue is my "inappropriate conduct," which sounds very general. Then you narrow the issue to "specifically" one event that occurred on a particular day last semester. Your use of hyperbolic rhetoric throughout the memo suggests that you really are angry about more than just a T-shirt. If it really is about just the T-shirt, then by overgeneralizing from a specific occurrence, your message is swamped by exaggeration. If it really is about other "conduct" on my part, I can't tell what that is. By the end of the memo you have lost focus completely, generalizing (in statements that are unexplained and inexplicable) about bar passage and about the faculty and administration of the entire law school.
I’m liking this school’s faculty! The full exchange can be found below the fold. Do yourself a favor and read it all. It’s worth it.