Experience-Based Teaching Methods in Legal Counseling

Authors

Thomas L. Shaffer, Notre Dame Law School
Robert T. Grismer

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1970

Publication Information

19 Clev. St. L. Rev. 448 (1970).

Abstract

Lawyers spend more time in their offices, in person-to-person encounters counseling troubled individuals, than in any other single area. The alternative to this is litigation, an expensive, inefficient, dis-functional process. Lawyers are counselors, in the most Sartrean sense of the word; whether they intend to be or not.

The presence of the counseling element in most of what lawyers do is subtle, which is probably why we have tended to overlook it. "The more we transform our ways of walking and talking, the better professional people we're going to be," one of our students said, ". . . better able to capitalize on our dealings with other people." His point is something law professors should bring into the arena of conscious decision on curriculum and course content. Here, we generalize on an approach to the subject we have taken in third-year legal counseling seminars taught with affective (encounter group) teaching methods.

Comments

Reprinted with permission of the Cleveland State Law Review.

Recommended Citation

Thomas L. Shaffer & Robert T. Grismer, Experience-Based Teaching Methods in Legal Counseling, 19 Clev. St. L. Rev. 448 (1970)..
Available at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/82