The Faculty Lounge

Teaching the Breonna Taylor Grand Jury Announcement in Real Time

"Justice failed us today. It failed us in a way that's been failing us for generations."

-Kentucky State Rep. Charles Booker

The Breonna Taylor grand jury announcement started immediately before my criminal adjudication class this past Wednesday, and while I knew the announcement would be disappointing and painful, I also knew I couldn’t ignore it. Rather than moving forward with class as usual, I decided to livestream the announcement of the grand jury’s decision as well as the Kentucky State Attorney General’s press conference with my class.

I was shocked and angered: By the grand jury’s decision to indict only one of the LMPD officers, Brett Hankinson, with three counts of first degree wanton endangerment, not for killing Ms. Taylor or endangering her or her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, but for endangering their neighbors in surrounding apartments. By Daniel Cameron’s press conference, which made it plain that prosecutors presented exculpatory evidence to the grand jury, which prosecutors only ever seem to do for cops. By Cameron’s continuing defense of the officers and of law enforcement in general. By his suggestion that many of the ills in the execution of search warrants could somehow be remedied by the formation of a new task force, likely to be headed by police officers and to accomplish nothing. 

My students were just as angry, confused, and heartbroken as I was. I let my students ask whatever questions or express whatever thoughts they felt comfortable sharing. They had astute questions about the operation of the grand jury, about the types of evidence allowed, about the meaning of “wanton endangerment,” and about whether grand jury transcripts would be released. A student remarked that, for the first time, they were having to confront the fact that “the law” and “justice” are not one and the same. Another asked, “Why do we keep using the grand jury when it seems fundamentally broken?”

I was honored and grateful to be able to discuss the grand jury’s decision, in real time, with my students. I’ve recently adopted a more thematic and problem-centered approach to my criminal procedure teaching as advocated by Lanni and Steiker in A Thematic Approach to Teaching Criminal Adjudication, rather than the traditional, strictly chronological approach. The class is more flexible and more immediately relevant to my students by incorporating more supplemental readings and materials outside of our traditional casebook, reflecting more recent developments in the field. This adaptability made it easier for us as a class to depart from the syllabus altogether to focus on the Taylor case, yet another important chapter in the story of criminal law, procedure, and police violence that unfolded that day before us. 

With the upcoming fight over the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, Election Day only a few weeks away, and the COVID-19 pandemic wearing on, we as law professors should be mindful not just that our students may feel spread thin, but that their law school experience--oftentimes tons of reading and discussion of often fusty old cases and other materials--may feel completely disconnected from their everyday lives. All our students likely have strong feelings about much of the recent news. Using current events in the law school classroom gives students the opportunity to connect what they’re learning with the world around them in concrete fashion, and can help to illustrate the importance of what they’re studying in a much more immediate and relatable way. Students have so many important questions and observations about the current political and legal environment; giving them the opportunity to voice them provides important opportunities for them to learn from each other anad for us, as professors, to teach and learn from them, even if doing so pushes us outside our pedagogical comfort zones.

Rosenblum: Our Shared Duty Now: Law Professors Must Bring Racial Equity into Each Course

The following is a guest post by Professor Darren Rosenblum (Pace).

The killing of George Floyd this summer has exposed, for a far broader (largely white) population, the endemic nature of racism and the urgent need to fix the vast inequities it creates throughout our legal system, but especially in criminal law. Recent data reveals how people of color are twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than whites. As with allowing anti-Black police violence, our public health choices reflect deliberate decisions by governments and companies as to whose lives matter.

As legal educators, we cannot repair the world. But as Edward Hale said “I am only one, but I am one. I can't do everything, but I can do something. The something I ought to do, I can do.” The urgent nature of the crisis obligates us to do something, and it must be now.

We law professors have seen how these exclusions play out within our institutions and our profession: Black students don’t advance as other students do. They don’t participate as much in class and in school governance. They join a legal profession that reflects a profound structural racism. Many Black associates join firms, but only a tiny number make partner.

It is our duty to begin to rectify this shocking inequality. We law professors share this responsibility, individually and collectively, to make law schools deliberately inclusive places for our students to learn. We must do this to make our Black students feel welcome so that they learn and become full members of our profession. We must also do it for all our students to model for them what our profession should look like.

Just as we labor over our first year curricula with fine-toothed combs to get the balance just right, we must endeavor to realize greater inclusion in our institutions. Many important conversations have happened this summer to evaluate these challenges, and the conclusions have been clear: we must do much more to include racial equity in our schools and classrooms.

I want to make a much more pointed intervention. While the conversations about racial equity should happen everywhere and in greater depth, here, I want to make a discrete challenge to my colleagues: each and every one of us – at my home institution and every other law school – should include one class in each course on racial equality issues.

 

 

Law Teaching During the Pandemic: What Profs Want Their Deans (and Other Administrators) to Know

Today I close out my 5-part series of blog posts reporting my very unscientific survey of law faculty experiences during the pandemic. I asked colleagues an open-ended question: Reflecting about your personal experience or about the experience of faculty generally during the pandemic, are there things you would like your law school dean/administration to know?

Representative responses after the fold.

80.5% of Law Professors Prefer In-Person Instruction

According to a National Student Survey (April Replication) by Simpson Scarborough (here), 70% of surveyed college students say that online education is "worse" than in-person instruction. The survey does not drill down on what respondents meant by "worse;" no doubt that those law profs teaching during this pandemic have plenty of anecdotal data about what "worse" has meant for our students.

In my unscientific survey of law professors' experiences teaching during the pandemic, I asked this question:

In terms of your personal preferences, how do you like teaching on-line sessions compared to teaching in the traditional, in-class environment?

Details after the fold.

Law Teaching During the Pandemic: What Profs Want Their Colleagues to Know

In my (unscientific) survey of law teaching during the pandemic (see here and here), I asked colleagues an open-ended question: Reflecting about your personal experience or about the experience of faculty generally during the pandemic, are there things you would like your faculty colleagues in general to know?

Representative responses after the fold.

Law Teaching During the Pandemic: Home Life and Access to Technology

As part of my (utterly unscientific) survey (described here), I asked law faculty to indicate whether several statements accurately described their situations. Of the 37 respondents, here are the percentages agreeing with each of the following statements:

I personally know someone who became sick from COVID-19.	60%
I faced increasing childcare or eldercare responsibilities.	45.7%
I faced food insecurity.	2.9%
I have a family member who is an essential worker.	20%
I have an immediate family member who has become unemployed or is worried about job security.	37.1%
I have more people living at home with me now than I usually do.	25.7%

The survey was administered from May 4 through May 11.  At different points in the pandemic, the results might vary. I had not asked my students the identical question when I surveyed them several weeks prior, so I cannot say how the faculty responses compare to student responses (see here). Anecdotally, though, it seems that faculty and students alike are facing many of the same concerns: increased family responsibilities and economic worries close to home.

Where faculty and student experience diverge seems to be on availability of home-based technology. I asked faculty respondents whether they had access to these items:

Reliable internet	97.3% yes
A reliable computing device (laptop, desktop, handheld device)	91.9% yes
A printer	78.4% yes
A quiet place at home for online teaching and course preparation	83.8% yes

Again anecdotally, because I did not pose the question to the students in the same way (I wasn't intending to do a comparative series of blog posts), many of my students this semester seemed to struggle with access to internet service, printers, and a quiet work space. What did surprise me in these survey results is the percentage of faculty (21.6%) without access to a printer. Based on the relative seniority of the faculty surveyed (see here) and my own stereotypes about students being more digitally intense than professors, I would have thought that more professors would have printers at home. It may be that professors are not as tied to paper as I thought, that they are tied to paper but do most of their printing at the office, or some other factor is at work.

What Law Faculty Want Students to Know

Shortly after the switch to online legal education, I surveyed the 99 students in my Corporations & Partnerships class about how they were doing generally and how they were experiencing online education. I included an open-ended question, "Is there anything you would like your professors generally to know?" Those results are here.

I recently surveyed an unrepresentative, unscientifically-selected group of U.S. law professors about their experiences of teaching in the pandemic. I solicited participants by emailing 61 local and national colleagues who I thought might be willing to respond. The colleagues taught at proverbial "T14" schools and schools of other ranks (measured by whatever conventional, if problematic, metric). I collected responses anonymously.

I received 37 responses from colleagues who taught in states on the West coast, East coast, and not-coasts. 36 respondents had recently finished teaching online during the Spring 2020 semester. One was scheduled to teach online this coming summer, but had not taught during the Spring 2020 semester.  Respondents' levels of experienced varied, perhaps skewed toward more senior faculty. Respondents included those with experience teaching 0-3 years (5.4%) and 35+ years (5.4%), with instructors having 25-35 years of teaching experience (29.7%) and 15-25 years of teaching experience (27%) well represented. Those with 3-7 years of teaching experience (10.8%) and 7-15 years of teaching experience (21.6%) rounded out the group.

Without making any claims about generalizability (the results decidedly are not generalizable), the responses are subjective snapshots of this particular time in American legal education.

Mirroring the question I had asked my students, I asked the (anonymous) faculty colleagues this open-ended question: "Reflecting about your personal experience or about the experience of faculty generally during the pandemic, are there things you would like your students in general to know?"  Representative responses appear after the fold.

SLU Law Journal Call for Papers: Special Issue on Teaching Law Online

From colleagues at SLU:

 

The Saint Louis University Law Journal is proud to announce the twenty-second installment of the Journal’s Teaching series, Teaching Law Online.

 

The Journal created the Teaching series in 2000 as a forum for scholars, judges, and practitioners to discuss key topics and methods of teaching legal subjects.  Since then, the Journal has published a teaching issue annually, such as Teaching Civil Procedure (47:1), Teaching Constitutional Law (49:3), Teaching Federal Courts (53:3), and our forthcoming issue, Teaching Property (64:3). 

 

Our Teaching Law Online issue, in line with our past issues, will include articles by prominent scholars and practitioners, sharing their thoughts on teaching legal subjects remotely, a topic that is especially relevant in the rapid transition to remote learning that has occurred this semester in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.  We hope to represent teachers with all levels of experience teaching legal subjects online, and we welcome submissions on any subject matter within the context of remote and online learning. 

 

Articles for our Teaching Series are usually between 3000–4000 words (approximately 12–15 double-spaced pages) long, although we regularly publish articles as long as 30 pages and as short as 10 pages.  Because the articles focus on the author’s own thoughts on teaching, only limited reference to outside sources is needed. We anticipate publishing this issue in the spring of 2021, and therefore ask that you submit your article for review via e-mail by August 1, 2020.  If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Michael McMahon, the Managing Editor of the Teaching Issue at Michael.mcmahon@slu.edu. 

Best Practices for Law Students Before, During, After Online Sessions

Over at the ABA's Before the Bar blog here, here and here, I have some tips for law students on how best to prepare for and digest material covered in online sessions. The posts have click-baity titles, but I am responsible only for the first title:

• I Don’t Care What You Wear to an Online Class (but Sitting at a Desk is a Good Choice
• 4 Keys to Staying Focused and Active During Online Courses
• 7 Things to Do After an Online Class Session Ends

 

What Our Students Want Us to Know

This semester, I'm teaching 99 students in Corporations & Partnerships. The shift to online teaching has not been without its hiccups. Last week, I send out a survey asking my students how they are doing generally and how they are experiencing online education.

I included in the survey an open-ended question: "Is there anything you would like your professors generally to know?"  I reprint representative responses below. No law professor in this time of crisis will be surprised by any of the substantive comments, but they ground my perspective as I look at the calendar that includes four more weeks of teaching.

• It's extremely nerve wracking knowing that I will likely be graduating into a recession with $150K+ in student loan debt, and now I don't even know if I will still have a job this summer.

• Mental health-wise, my anxiety has been pretty bad but I have been doing my best to complete my school work and push through. I just wanted to point this out as it might not be seen as an extreme circumstance, it still has slightly disrupted how I normally am able to study in a library or have separation of school and home. 

• I live with an individual that suffers from various mental disorders. This means there are times that I have to tend to them because they have unpredictable outbursts. This may factor into my learning or the final exam.

• I would say mostly that it is difficult to learn from home especially that my wife is home as well. We live in a one bedroom with our two pets so not much space for me to be alone. It is hard for me to get quiet time. 

• I have a very limited study space at home and no ideal place to take exams - only a very small kitchen table in a shared apartment.

• When being home, there is more distraction especially since my younger siblings have begun online schooling as well. Being closer to school years than my parents (and more technology savvy) I feel responsible for helping my younger siblings and finding it harder to put my studies first.

• Student anxiety is much higher than usual. Having to worry about your family and loved ones during all of this makes it that much harder to focus on school. It is tough.

Tips for Law Students Learning in the New Distance Formats

My Pace colleague Leslie Tenzer and I made a podcast with tips for law students as they transition to on-line classes.  It is available for free download here at Professor Tenzer's Law to Fact site.  I blogged some of those tips (here) under the title I Don't Care What You Wear to an Online Class (but Sitting at a Desk is a Good Choice). Each instructor will have a unique advice.  Most of mine is completely obvious. Yet in these unusual times, it is good to remind ourselves and our students that we already possess the tools we need to be successful.

It will take some adjustments and understanding (by students and faculty alike) until we get the hang of the new format.  We will, with patience and good humor.  Here are a few of my tips:

1.    Make a schedule. Block out times on your calendar for studying, attending classes (whether synchronous or asynchronous), reviewing material.  Otherwise, working and studying from home can be very difficult without the usual rhythms that propel us forward.

2.    Use Your Calendar. Whether you are fully digital, a paper-calendar type, or somewhere in between, put important school-related due dates, prompts, and reminders on your calendar.  Have a practice midterm due on a certain date? Write it down. Need to exchange drafts of a paper with a classmate on another date? Write it down. Professor’s office hours that you’d like to access? Write it down.  With new emails and reminders arriving every day, getting important deadlines and information down on the calendar can be a big help.

3.    Find a Space and Gather Your Materials. Bring to your online class everything you might need, i.e., casebook, statute book, highlighters, other materials.

4.    Sit at a Desk or Table.  I personally don’t care what you wear to an online class or where (or whether) you are sitting up or lying in bed.  But my students self-report that they feel more ready to learn when they are sitting at a desk or table.  Lounging in that recliner may feel great in the moment, but your actual physical posture and position may be working at cross-signals with your brain.  Ditto for taking a shower and getting dressed for class.  Highly recommended! No, this is not a recommendation to wear a ballgown or even business attire.  More that it helps keep you in “I’m in class” mode if you are wearing clothes similar to what you would ordinarily wear to class anyway.  Business casual on top, pajamas on the bottom?  I won’t ask and I won’t tell. 

Listen to the full podcast here. More soon over at the ABA Before the Bar blog for students.

 

Welcoming Collaboration from Business Orgs/Corps Profs

Nadia Ahmad (Barry) and I are both teaching from the new textbook by Lisa Fairfax (GW), Business Organizations: An Integrated Approach (Foundation Press 2020).  We are in the process of planning to pool resources to create video resources for students.  We welcome collaborators who would like to develop a library of materials that students could use (e.g., pre-recorded lectures of professors discussing cases, etc.).

If anyone else is teaching from Professor Fairfax's book and would like to join forces with Professor Ahmad and me, please contact me at bcrawford at law dot pace dot edu.  I'm happy to share whatever videos, etc. I already have and those I make going forward.

 

 

More Online Teaching Resources

To add to the current compilation of materials on how to move to remote teaching, I wanted to share the following SSRN links.

The first was posted this week by Prof Agnieszka McPeak (Duquesne) and is a straightforward, simple best practices guide to moving things online. Six pages, easy to read and great advice:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3553094

The second is a piece I wrote last year which is longer and focuses more on the costs and benefits of law schools moving to online teaching, but it also includes some practical observations on larger and smaller group teaching online:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3491427

Hopefully some of those struggling to get online quickly may make use of these pieces. I highly recommend Prof McPeak's thoughts.

 

Establishing Norms for #Law Student Participation in Remote Learning: Turn Cameras on and Mute That Mic

Like many law schools, my institution has decided to move all classes on-line, to the extent possible, at least until March 29. The Elisabeth Haub School of Law is located in Westchester County, New York. Governor Andrew Cuomo has deployed the National Guard and established a 1-mile "containment area" a few towns over in New Rochelle, New York.

These are unusual times.

Today is the first day that my colleagues and I started teaching on-line. My message, to myself and my colleagues, is to do what you can, with whatever technology you feel comfortable with, and strive for excellence but not perfection.  In other words, we are all going to make mistakes in the on-line classroom, in the same way we make mistakes in the traditional classroom. (I made quite a few in my class this morning.) Many of us are feeling overwhelmed as we figure out the technologies that enable us to teach on line. It seems that at every turn, there is another webinar or click-through to consult.

We will get through this, with patience and good cheer.  Our students want us to succeed; we want them to succeed.  We will not leave our students behind. This will be difficult, for sure. But we will support each other and continue to grow as individuals and as communities.

But how to foster community if I can't see my students and my students can't see each other?  There are technologies that enable us to easily have the equivalent of a massive on-line conference call.  But what if students won't turn on their cameras?  I had more than one colleague say that fewer than half of their students turned their cameras on.  What if students have on their cameras, but I can see their messy beds, partially eaten meals and ... less than professional aspects of their lives?

Every instructor must decide what message to convey to students about virtual "presence." Mine is this:

I recognize students may not have reliable internet access, or may have internet problems at any particular moment. Not all students will have cameras or microphones on their laptops, especially if they have older machines.  I get it (I've been there!).  For these reasons, I'll make sure that students can participate in the on-line session by phone.  All students also will have access to a recording of the session. It's not ideal; it's not the experience any of us signed up for. But we will make sure that the students' learning is not set back.

That being said, I believe it is reasonable to ask students will use the phone option as a back-up measure, not all the time, unless they can let me know.  Students who are physically and technologically able to attend the synchronous class in its regularly scheduled time-slot should do so. 

 

In my class, I consider it part of my student's professional obligation to turn on their cameras, mute their microphones, and remain present for the entire time. Instructors certainly need to be understanding if someone needs to step away from their computer, just as we would be in a traditional class. But the expectation is that the instructors should be able to see the students and vice versa, as a matter of creating and building community. Very few people like to see themselves on camera (I know I don’t). By turning on the camera, we are showing up for each other and saying, “I’m a part of this. We’ll get through this together.”

 

We will! We will not leave anyone behind.

 

P.S. To my students, I don't care if you have made your bed.  I care about your education. Show up in whatever way you can.  We'll work it out (but you might want to check out the "virtual background" function in Zoom....)

Tips for Teaching Law Classes Online in the Event of a COVID-19 Shut Down of Law Schools

I've been teaching Federal Income Tax and Wills,Trusts & Estates in mixed live/online formats since 2009. I put together a short video for colleagues with thoughts about how to teach law classes in distance formats, whether synchronous or asynchronous, if the public health situation requires us to do so. The video does not address technology issues (i.e., what format is best for any one particular class), but rather offers thoughts on big picture issues/concerns when moving a traditional law class on line. A few of the tips are idiosyncratic to my school (i.e., who to ask for help supporting a particular program), but most of the tips are applicable across the legal academy.

To summaries, my tips are these:

1. If you are teaching synchronously, try to do so in your regularly scheduled class time, so as not to create scheduling conflicts for students. If you are teaching asynchronously, try to get your recordings/assignments up before the class otherwise would meet live, or, as a default, no later than 24 hours after a regularly scheduled class would have met.
2. Keep our eyes on the goal of delivering the best educational experience we can, within the constraints we are have, including time and training.  Don't feel like you have to radically re-organize your course. 
3. Instructor availability to students matters especially in the distance format -- make sure to schedule virtual office hours.  Consistency is important.  Don't suddenly add new assignments and requirements just because the class unexpectedly must be taught in a distance format. Make sure to stay in regular contact with students.
4. Random additional nuggets of wisdom I've acquired in teaching online for 11 years:

• • Employ visuals, especially if teaching a class asynchronously.  I don't like to see myself on screen, but it's not about me.  The student feedback is that they feel more connected when they can see their instructor.
  • Provide students a roadmap when teaching online, whether in the format of an outline that can be downloaded, or a list on the screen that students can reference during the online session.
  • Record in small chunks.  Don't do what I did for years, and make the mistake of recording sessions that lasted 1 hour 50 minutes. Break the session into 20-minute segments. If you have to rerecord, you'll be glad to have to re-do one segment only. Also, if you don't refer to super-current events, you may end up building a library of recordings that you can use in future semesters.
  • Develop appropriate mechanisms for attendance and accountability. Obviously, if large numbers of students are sick, very strict attendance policies will need to be relaxed, but you'll want to be able to monitor student progress.
  • Build in lots of opportunities for feedback to students. I do this through quizzes (that do not count toward a student's grade) to provide students with the opportunity to apply the material from the distance class session.
  • Much of what we do in live classes can be done via distance sessions -- group work, working with a partner, self-assessment, etc. With a little creative thinking, we can do those things slightly differently (and equally successfully) online.
  • The students want their professors to be successful instructors just as much as we want them to to be successful learners. We're all in this together and will work together to deliver the best education we can under the circumstances.  Perfection isn't required.

The video (about 24 minutes) is available below for anyone who is interested.

The Great Mass Online Teaching Experiment

For many years, I've been fascinated by the possibilities of online teaching. Things like MOOCs and flipped classrooms seem to offer real opportunities to teach in new and better ways. All the same, I've been busy with other things, and actually making the leap to offering online instruction never quite made the list.

Then came Covid-19. My students are sequestered in apartments all across China, and the Peking University School of Transnational Law campus in Shenzhen is empty. I've chosen not to return to China after the spring festival, but have been hunkered down in Chiang Mai, Thailand, waiting for the situation to gain some clarity. The clarity that has gradually emerged is that we aren't going to be teaching face-to-face for at least a while, and we're taking all our classes online.

In going online, we're joining all kinds of schools all over China. I've got a cousin who has retired from K12 teaching in Canada and is running the international section of a large school on the east coast. They've taken all high school classes online, along with most similar schools. Teachers report that students locked down in house arrest tend to be highly prepared. At an expat event in Chiang Mai, I met two kindergarten teachers from an international school in another part of China. Although the ministry of education doesn't support online teaching for kids that young, in response to parental demands they have been teaching children as young as three years old online. While hugs are hard to deliver, they can record sing-a-long songs or record readings of English books and lessons, and comment on the responses the children's parents sent back to them. Possibly hundreds of millions of students have been shifted to online instruction in China, something that has not happened at that scale in the traditional educational environment anywhere before.

My students, fortunately, are a lot more self-sufficient and able than three-year-olds. It's been a challenge to move everything online, but it seems to be working. Here are some quick thoughts. As my experience deepens, I might be back with more thoughts.

Platforms. There seem to be a lot of good platforms out there. We are using Zoom, in both its webinar (better for classes over 100 in size) and meeting (better for smaller classes) sizes. I find Zoom pretty easy to use, although with each class I find some features and shortcuts I hadn't noticed before that make it still easier. I am able to call on students by name, put them on camera, share their video with everyone, and in general carry on pretty much as we do in a regular classroom. Our budgets tend to be pretty limited, and we aren't using some of the complementary software that enables things like seamlessly moving to pre-recorded snippets. So far, that seems to be ok.

Bandwidth. As you would expect, bandwidth is an issue, both for the students and the teachers. This week in order to renew my Thai visa I took a side trip to Luang Prabang in Laos, where the internet just isn't robust enough for online teaching. To deal with that, I went asynchronous for one class, recording a lecture before I came over. Students are also differently positioned, and some students experience issues with audio quality or dropped connections. To ameliorate, we are recording all classes, and students can download and listen to any difficult portions at their leisure. I find 20 megabits per second connections more than adequate and five megabits per second too low for full functionality. (Type internet speed test into Google to get a test that will tell you your connection speed).

Disadvantages. Some of the issues involved in moving online are obvious, but others less so. For example, in our situation, library reserve - which I use heavily - is not available. In some courses, we have copies of the basic text or core readings for everyone available in the library. That doesn't work when students are scattered. For example, in my Law and Innovation class we have enough copies of the Susskind's The Future of the Professions to go around when we are all in Shenzhen, as well as enough copies of Thomas Morgan's PR book to go around when we cover specific ethical issues in the legal profession. We have no way of getting to those to students all over China. That requires adjustments in the course materials as a small subset of my students can buy whatever book I mention and others are financially constrained, so simply telling them to go to Amazon or JD is not a good solution. In some cases, the only solution has been for me to write substitute materials, which has been a huge time commitment.

You can't see the classroom as you talk in the same way you see them in a live classroom, so the skills you've developed in reading those cues aren't on point. 

There are lead time and set up issues. I use PowerPoint slides, and I've found it helpful to the students to circulate those before class so they can refer to them in a separate window. That requires having them locked down a day or so ahead of time. Online meeting links also need to be generated and circulated. I've also been designating a list of on-call students, something I don't always do in person, so that the students can be sure their cameras and microphones are ready to go. 

One thing I've not sorted out is assessment in my Civ Pro class. I typically give an exam with multiple choice and essay components. I'm not sure how I am going to do that if we are not back on campus by exam time. There are software solutions that will lock student's computers down, but we don't have them. For self-assessment, I'm using the same online quizzes on TWEN that I've used for years.

Advantages. Some of the advantages have been surprising as well. Zoom allows students to ask questions anonymously in the Q&A. This allows students to put things out there without losing face or seeming stupid, and it actually generates way more student commentary and questions than I get in a live class. I get so many comments in my Civ Pro class that keeping the flow of class moving ahead has become a bit of an issue.

Another advantage that I hadn't thought about in advance is that making the classroom non-physical opens up the world of guest panelists and speakers. I'm busy trying to pull in thought leaders and people with on-point experience to take a few minutes in both my Civ Pro and Law and Innovation classes. For example, in Law and Innovation, which has a large PR component, I'm bringing in a lawyer from Kentucky to talk about the devastation that was visited on the local community around Butcher's Hollow (yes, that Butcher's Hollow) when a corrupt local lawyer entered into a bribery deal with a social security judge to have his clients all approved as disabled. The upshot was that the Social Security Administration cut off benefits for all the clients of the corrupt lawyer, most of whom were in fact disabled, and who were neither aware of nor involved in the fraud, leaving many of them in perilous straits. I'm hoping that having live in the classroom someone who was involved in cleaning up a tragic situation caused by lawyer dishonesty will make the real-life consequences of lawyer misconduct more palpable. (By the way - feel free to volunteer to be a guest speaker).

My students, I think, are enjoying having all classes recorded and available for download. Setting aside technical problems, if they drift or lose focus for a moment, they can replay the section that did not quite make sense. If it does not make sense because I did not make sense, they can bring it up in online office hours. (Having every word recorded and distributed might be an issue for those of you with aspirations to sit on the Supreme Court or even just good reputations to protect, and if that's the case you can choose not to enable the recording feature.)

One obvious benefit of teaching online is that you can become a digital nomad and be someplace new and different. The attached photo is from my temporary office at a riverside cafe a few days ago.

As this goes forward, and I am only four classes in, I may post more. Comments on online teaching techniques are welcome. Comments reflecting your personal conspiracy theories on the origins and dispersion of the virus that causes Covid-19 will be deleted.

Miranda basics & the interrogation of James Holmes

Last week’s post dove into the controversial story of the West Memphis Three, focusing on how the interrogation of Jesse Misskelley offers a strong tool in the criminal procedure classroom for teaching the Fourteenth Amendment’s voluntariness doctrine. This week, in the final post of our series, we return to July 20, 2012, to the interrogation of James Holmes—just hours after he opened fire on a movie theater audience in Aurora, Colorado.

The West Memphis Three & Fourteenth Amendment Voluntariness

Last week’s post told the story of two New York rappers whose separate traffic stops demonstrate how officers rely on the automobile exception to the Fourth Amendment’s search warrant requirement. Today we shift gears—and Amendments—to enter the interrogation room in order to discuss how the internationally-known story of the West Memphis Three makes for an incredibly powerful tool for teaching students the Fourteenth Amendment’s voluntariness doctrine.

TF Mafia & the Automobile Exception

Last week’s post considered how just a slice of the investigation into Steven Avery—widely known from the true-crime documentary series, Making a Murderer—makes a compelling tool for teaching students the basics of search warrants. This week, we shift gears to explore the tale of two New York rappers whose stories both setup and explain how the automobile exception works in modern practice.

Steven Avery & Search Warrants

Last week’s post discussed how the initial investigation into Aaron Hernandez presents a compelling opportunity for students to learn the Fourth Amendment’s plain view doctrine. This week, we explore just a slice of the investigation that led to the arrest of Steven Avery—widely known from the true-crime documentary series, Making a Murderer.

In summer 1985, Steven Avery was twenty-two years old and a resident of Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Avery worked at his family’s salvage yard, Avery Salvage, which his family had operated since 1965. On July 29, 1985, a fellow Manitowoc resident named Penny Ann Beernsten was jogging along Lake Michigan when she was brutally attacked and raped. During the investigation that followed, Beernsten described her attacker as a white male, approximately 5′6′′, stocky, with brown eyes and long sandy hair, and dressed in a black leather jacket. Manitowoc County Deputy Sheriff Judy Dvorak overhead Beernsten’s description and commented, “[that] sounds like Steven Avery.”

Avery was ultimately arrested, charged, and convicted for the forcible rape of Penny Beernsten. He was sentenced to serve thirty-two years in prison. After eighteen years of that sentence, DNA testing revealed evidence that both exonerated Avery from the rape charge and implicated a man named Gregory Allen, a suspect in similar rape investigations at the time of Avery’s arrest. Avery was released from prison on September 11, 2003. Thirteen months later, he filed a lawsuit for 36 million dollars in damages as compensation for his wrongful imprisonment.