Thanks for all your feedback. The current draft is, I feel, somewhat incomplete and I plan on editing it sometime this week once I've thought some issues through and get a chance. As far as Langdell, that's a really interesting quote, but I don't want to discuss him too much because I don't think the current teaching method is the same as Langdell's. Most casebooks I've seen try to illuminate the tensions in the law that Langdell would seem to have denied existing. I think it's kind of strange that the method of teaching still used is still so similar to Langdell's despite the abandonment of his ideas, I don't know if that's just path dependency or if there are other reasons such as its utility in actually proving Langdell's theories wrong.
As far as uncertainty, I think the issue is not so much how to become comfortable with it but instead not to deny it. In both our professional and personal lives, there will always be uncertainty and to think otherwise is just self-delusion. Uncertainty IS uncomfortable. Trying to come up with behavioral therapy to make oneself associate it with happiness seems kind of silly to me, its basically an attempt to turn uncertainty into certainty. Anxiety sucks, but it could also be viewed as an opportunity to think realistically about one's concerns and priorities. Trying to hide the complexity and uncertainty of choices with formalism or merlot is just an escape from dealing with the problems; trying to use cognitive conditioning to be happy with uncertainty seems to me like a similar albeit stranger solution, maybe others view this differently.
-- DanielKetani - 05 Jun 2012 |