Don’t Let Technology Cheapen Your Law School Experience

Professor Aaron N. Taylor is an Assistant Professor of Law at Saint Louis University School of Law. He also provides important information to law students and lawyers alike @TheEdLawProf. Professor Taylor is a must follow for law students and all of us interested in legal education. 

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I attended law school in the age of the desktop computer.  Laptops were still novel, wireless internet was virtually unheard of, and phones were not that smart.  Classroom distractions took primitive forms—a discreetly placed magazine, a surreptitiously passed note, a whispered conversation, or good ol’ daydreaming.  These distractions were simplistic responses to the innately human urge to just get away (oftentimes from a boring lecture)

Technology, however, has changed the nature of classroom distractions.  Today, students have the power of the World Wide Web at their fingertips, and that has created the potential for unending disengagement.  

Moreover, the pervasive and accepted nature of laptops in the classroom has rendered the dime-store deception of my day unnecessary.  Magazines no longer have to be hidden.  Notes no longer have to be passed.  Conversations no longer have to be whispered.  Engaging in these pastimes requires little more than looking at the laptop screen.  Far as the professor knows, those are notes you are typing, not a hilarious tweet about #lawschoolproblems.  And why daydream when there are so many more interesting options? 

A handful of studies have measured the effects of laptops on classroom learning, and while the conclusions are mixed, it seems that most of them suggest that laptops do more harm than good.  That conclusion seems to be the accepted wisdom among professors, and in recent years, there has been an uptick in law professors who have banned laptops in their classes. 

I take a libertarian approach to the issue.  My students are adults, and almost all of them paid thousands of dollars to occupy the seats in which they sit.  Thus, I allow them to essentially choose the type of educational experience they want to receive.  But with free will comes responsibility—and risks.  I am not vain enough to believe that everything shared in my class, by me or by students, is thought-provoking or profound in some way.  But I am immensely confident that a semester of engagement in my class will foster heightened knowledge of the subject matter and, more importantly, contribute to my students’ long-term academic and professional development.  Unfortunately, classroom distractions can militate against that development.

There is nothing wrong with episodic disengagement.  But don’t let the allure of technology convert what should be episodic into harmful engrossment.  Every moment you spend updating your Facebook status in class is one less opportunity for you to get your money’s worth out of your law school experience.  The more moments like those you have, the less valuable your law school experience will be.

The author is a professor at Saint Louis University School of Law.  You can follow him on Twitter at @TheEdLawProf.