Popular Culture In University Teaching

From the Chronicle of Higher Education's Tweed Blog, professors who use popular culture in their teaching.

Socrates

Ah, the Socratic Method, pedagogical tool beloved of law students. NOT. Angus Kennedy examines some new books devoted to the life and legacy of Socrates here, who is supposed to have annoyed those around him with that device so much that they told him to begone permanently. Well, he did some other things that annoyed his neighbors too. Notes Mr. Kennedy, "In Plato’s Meno, Socrates offends a man called Anytus by suggesting that even great men such as Themistocles and Thucydides were not capable of teaching their sons to be good. Anytus warns him to be careful, that he is ‘too ready to speak evil of men’. It was Anytus who brought the prosecution against Socrates in 399 BC, on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth, which led to Socrates’ execution."

Matriculate At Lost U: Low Tuition, Lots of Relevance, High Fun Factor

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus Blog has this piece about Lost University, a project of the folks over at ABC's Lost, which links the show's content to, well, the real world. Real class materials include Bluray discs of the show, and you won't get any spoilers. Rats. First semester offerings include a course on time travel by a physics prof at USC, philosophy from other USC profs, and hieroglyphics from a UCLA professor.

Here's more from the Los Angeles Times.

Nicholas Warner, who teaches the physics course, told the Chronicle,
“There used to be huge disconnect (sic) between watching television shows and academic investigation. Anything that provides channels to follow up questions is a wonderful thing.”

Now, Professor Warner is right--building bridges between the two cultures is indeed a wonderful thing. But I think academics have been building those bridges for a while now. College courses (and graduate school courses) integrating popular culture and everything else, including law, have been around for a while now, as have books about tv shows and films in which academics study the impact of popular culture (think about all those books about the meaning of Star Trek). I think the "disconnect" vanished into a black hole some time ago. What's different about this enterprise (ha!) is that it's a joint project between the show and academia.

The Use of Law and Literature

Katie Rose Guest Pryal, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has published "Law, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Copia: A Response to Skeptics." Here is the abstract.

Recently, the law and literature (L&L) enterprise has been "reassessed" by a variety of scholars, whose opinions fall loosely into two camps. Some assert that L&L serves a necessary function in legal scholarship and education and should be preserved. Others, such as Jane B. Baron, see L&L as a flawed enterprise that is probably worth preserving, but not in its current incarnation, and not without recognizing its theoretical and practical limitations. In this essay I focus on the purposes and consequences of L&L for legal pedagogy. In order to discover the benefits of L&L, we must ask whether L&L is appropriate for legal education, and why. What I propose is that studying literary texts - fictional, dramatic, cinematic, or poetic works, of the high or low variety - in relation to and alongside of law, can benefit some of our students very much. Baron asserts that L&L discredits law as a field of study by claiming that we can only learn about human nature, compassion, empathy, or other humanistic quality crucial to competent lawyering or judging, by reading literature. This claim treats law "as a largely empty domain composed mainly of rules, a barren realm of technocratic doctrinal manipulation." Although Baron does not say so explicitly, she has expressed a pedagogical concern. The argument she critiques sets up an antagonistic dichotomy: it claims that we learn different and better things by studying literature than by studying law. Proponents of the dichotomy seek to prove that studying L&L is appropriate in legal education. I argue here that the best approach to L&L is an expansive and generous one, an approach that does not rely upon the denigration of law to prove the appropriateness of literature to legal studies. In discussing the benefits of L&L to legal pedagogy, I suggest that L&L, and indeed other interdisciplinary areas, are useful to and appropriate for legal pedagogy because they provide a variety of heuristics, or learning tools. These heuristics enable our various law students to find paths to legal knowledge that works best for them. This concept of multifarious methods derives from the rhetorical copia, as outlined in particular by Erasmus in the sixteenth century. In Part I, I build upon Baron's critiques of current trends in L&L as a framework to review the antagonistic dichotomy of L&L discourse that privileges literature on one hand and denigrates law and traditional legal studies on the other. In Part II, I reframe this dichotomy in a way that is constructive, returning value to traditional legal texts. In Part III, I use the theory of rhetorical copia to show that L&L is best thought of as one of many methods available to legal pedagogy, a strong supplement to traditional doctrinal and skills courses.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Teaching Law and Literature: Various Approaches Across the Curriculum

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has published Literary Evidence and Legal Aesthetics, in Teaching Literature and Law (Austin Sara, Matthew Anderson & Cathrine Frank eds., NY: MLA, 2010)(MLA Approaches To Teaching Series). Here is the abstract.

This short essay considers the different ways in which law professors and English professors teach courses in Law and Literature -- particularly the differences in the course materials and the analytic approaches used in understanding those materials. Courses taught on law faculties generally include fewer readings drawn from case law and legal theory. On the other hand, courses taught in English departments are more likely to emphasize similarities between the legal readings and works of fiction or drama. I discuss some of the disciplinary habits that make it difficult for faculty members in each area to come to terms with materials taken from another discipline, but I end by arguing that these barriers are not insurmountable and can even be addressed, to some extent, by focusing on analytical habits already available in the home discipline.

Download the essay from SSRN here.