Stare Decisis and the 1L Classroom: Can Legal Reasoning Be Taught Without Judicial Respect for Precedent?

(Excerpt) I began my career as a law professor in 1998 and, in every year but one, since then I have taught at least one first-year required law school course. I have taught Civil Procedure each of these years and some version of a required Constitutional Law course in about half of them. I want to say just a little bit about stare decisis and its importance in our legal system from the perspective of a law professor teaching first-year students. I have found that although teaching Civil Procedure involves a focus on a range of substantive issues including judicial jurisdiction and rules and systems for conflict resolution, the most important part of my job is not coverage of legal rules but the orientation of new law students for legal education and the legal profession just a few years beyond. Teaching first-year students is certainly about teaching the law—the “black letter” law of the foundational 1L courses. But this work also includes helping students to learn how to think like, and prepare to be, a lawyer beyond specific rules of personal jurisdiction or federalism. The essential features of this development include exposing students to the terminology and nomenclature of the law, and the role that lawyers and judges play in a broader legal system that is designed, in its idiosyncratic way, to achieve something resembling “justice.” As much as anything, I want my 1L students by the end of the semester to have a strong sense of how a lawyer can use the law and the legal system to effectively advocate on behalf of their client.