By the end of their legal education, any student that has managed to graduate from an accredited law school will have reached some understanding of what a Socratic exchange with a professor is supposed to accomplish.  This tutorial is aimed at minimizing the trauma and confusion a student experiences at the beginning of their legal education and speeding the student's transition from thinking like an ordinary member of the public to "thinking like a lawyer."

  The Socratic method is more likely to succeed in its objective of teaching students to think critically about the texts they read in law school if students who participate in it have a rudimentary grasp of how the process is expected to work and what the professor is trying to accomplish.  Students using the First Day of Law School Tutorial are not told the history of the Socratic method in US legal education,[1] or given any of the theoretical justifications for or critiques of the Socratic method.[2]  It permits them instead to become familiar with some of the cadences of a Socratic dialog in a law school class by working through simulated professor-student exchanges.  By clicking on the "hint" thought bubbles, a student can get some idea of what the professor thinks but leaves unsaid in the public forum of a classroom.  By comparing the professor's spoken responses with the professor's unspoken thoughts, a student should be able to piece together what it is that the professor is trying to communicate.

  The First Day of Law School Tutorial exploits potential of the Internet for interactive communications in order to reproduce some of the interactivity that is the heart of the Socratic method.  Unlike the many print publications that do a perfectly adequate job of teaching students how to brief a case, it is unclear whether a traditional print publication could communicate enough information about the Socratic method to ease the concerns of prospective law school students before their first day in a law school class.

  The First Day of Law School Tutorial was made possible with the financial support of the Hillcrest Foundation.  I had the idea of using interactive computer instruction to help students learn about the Socratic method before their first day of law school, but did not feel qualified to write one of the tutorials myself because I have never taught first year law students.  I am grateful to my colleagues Roy Anderson, Bill Bridge, Bill Dorsaneo, Julie Forrester, Darren Hutchinson and Vicki Palacios for agreeing to work with me on this project which took much more time to complete than any of us would ever have imagined.   The project was only defined in general terms at the outset, and so I am particularly grateful to my colleagues for agreeing to embark with me on a project that went through several metamorphoses before it was finally completed.  

My faculty colleagues join me in expressing our gratitude to Charlie Sungchul Shin and Clarissa Hodges, the two law students who provided the labor that made the tutorials actually take shape.  Charlie found time to do all the Web site design and development while working on a SJD dissertation on banking and financial law, and Clarissa provided invaluable editorial assistance while working as an editor on the SMU Law Review as a 3L JD student.

Jane K. Winn
Professor
SMU Dedman School of Law
Dallas TX 75275-0116
jwinn@mail.smu.edu
www.smu.edu/~jwinn
www.virtual-langdell.com