Academics, or: ON PIECES OF CAKE

By Yale Blogger 2015 in LLM GUIDE Student Blog: Yale LLM 2015-2016 on Jan 11, 2016

Besides some rather general thoughts on Yale Law School’s affinity to meerkats, extensive skim reading, and obsessive originality, my blog has been largely silent on the issue of academics. Winter break gives me the opportunity to change this. So what about classes?

Judging from my first term, YLS easily raises up to its reputation. Whatever courses you will end up choosing, they will be MEERCAT-y, reading-intense, and ORIGINAL. Even if your professor happens not to be a gifted entertainer (some are), you will have enough quick-witted classmates to keep you busy and avoid even the slightest signs of boredom.

Given the vast variety of courses and interests, these are the only overall remarks that I can make. Everything else depends on the courses and professors that you select. So be sure to choose wisely. In this regard I can give you some very un-original, i.e. un-Yale-like advice:

First and foremost: Use your shopping period. It will be even more intense than the rest of the term. Trying out as many classes as possible is, nonetheless, worth the investment. If you follow this recommendation, you will not only end up with interesting classes. You will also acquire the three Yale-virtues (meerkatiness, skim-reading, originality) in a matter of (ten) days. Last but not least, the rest of the term will – somewhat – more resemble a piece of cake.

Don’t get me wrong: This increased piece-of-cakeness of your semester will, by no means, result in a 100% resemblance. How large the final resemblance will be (resemblance base rate + resemblance-bonus of a wisely used shopping week), is uncertain and much contested. Some more centrist-minded LLM-colleagues might be claiming a 50% resemblance of a YLS term and a piece of cake. Others will claim a >90% resemblance. These people will be particularly unpopular with the opposite extremists (those claiming a < 10 % resemblance). This conflict will peak during reading period and FINALS, when some ninety-percenters will keep annoying the ten-percenters by constantly asking whether anyone would like to go out and have a beer with them.

Even if the highly disputed cake-resemblance-ratio of a YLS term could be determined, it would remain unclear what exactly this measure means. What precisely do we know, when we’re told that “the cake-resemblance-ratio of the fall term was 35”? Is the cake-resemblance-ratio an absolute measure or does it change over persons and courses? Could the proposition p (“The cake-resemblance-ratio was 35”) and p’ (“The cake-resemblance-ratio was 85”) both be true at the same time?

These important questions bring me to one of my most interesting and challenging courses: “Law and Cognition” with Professor Kahan. As the above paragraphs demonstrate, I have no particular expertise with numbers, statistics, probabilities, and their meaning. The class aimed at changing this (has it failed?) by confronting us with a vast array of studies from cognitive science, social psychology and behavioral economics all of which reported insights that – to a smaller or larger extent – are relevant for scholars, judges, lawyers and legal thinking in general. Developing an at least tentative sense for the quality and normative significance of empirical research was no piece of cake, but definitely one of the richest (maybe it was a very large piece of a very heavy cake?) experiences that I have made during my first term at Yale.

This brings me to my second piece of advice: Challenge yourself! Take classes that do not precisely fit your prior interests and expertise. Take strange classes whose names seem as out-of-worldly and irrelephant as possible.

This is what Yale Law School has always been famous for and does best.

(By now it should be clear to the readers of this blog that I mean this as an extreme form of praise.)

If you do take black-letter-courses in your area of interest (I took one), don’t hesitate to take the four-hour courses that give you a solid introduction and actual knowledge of an entire area of US-American law. The US legal system and teaching style are particular, original, and vast enough as not to create any unnecessary overlap with your prior knowledge of the respective legal field. If you want to do comparative work, I would recommend doing it as a research fellow or once you’re back at your place.

This is, of course, only the opinion of somebody who devotes two paragraphs to piece-of-cake-ratios.