Cheryl Kettler, Associate Professor of Fundamentals of Lawyering, talks about how the Fundamentals of Lawyering Program creatively designs legal problems in 1L classrooms to be interesting, in-depth, and creative. Watch the video below or read the full Q&A to learn more.
How does the Fundamentals of Lawyering Program approach problem design?
The GW Law Fundamentals of Lawyering Program approaches problems to give people an introduction to what it's really like to practice law. We select problems that are first adapted to the level of our students' experience when we start off, where some of the work is done for you. We progressively have the students do more of that work. Our goal when setting up those problems is to replicate what it will be like in practice so that when people graduate they feel practice ready and they are practice ready.
What can students expect from problem design in your class?
We have tried to make the problems reflect what it's like to be in practice. For example, students have to do some of the fact analysis. Instead of relying exclusively on documents or hypotheticals that have been written out in advance, our problems involve looking at websites and discerning what might be relevant from those websites. Sometimes the links take you to other sources. So we create a series of websites that people can follow in order to do the fact development. We also pick issues that are likely to be things that students learn about in their first year of law school but sometimes with an interesting twist. And that is one of the things that draws people in and makes it an exciting exercise.
What's an example of a problem in a Fundamentals of Lawyering class?
One of the problems that we worked on this past year is one that took place in Hawaii. So we had a cultural aspect to it. All of the names were native Hawaiian names and people had to learn how to make those pronunciations and it was a unique area of law. It dealt with the liability a medical center had when it had a patient who was helped by a service animal and while in the care of the clinic the service animal was injured. In most states, that would not give rise to the type of claim that it would in Hawaii. In Hawaii an animal can be treated as a member of the family. As a result, we ended up having the involvement of a charity that supported providing animals to people who suffered a disability and we also had the medical clinic and we had the individual who was deprived of her animal for some period of time. The complications, the additional factors, I think made it more interesting for people. The fact that it was going to be different from what they might experience in the most related class—torts class—made it something that was unique, gave it a new dimension to talk about when interviewing for jobs.
Why is it important for law school problems to be realistic?
In most classes in law school, the first introduction that you get is to the law itself. So you tend to read about real cases and you also hear about hypotheticals. This is really the opportunity for students to answer questions where there is no answer. There are answers in a lot of other classes, but in the fundamentals of lawyering you have to answer where there is no specific authority that gives you the yes or the no.
