Coverage and Class Time: A Guest Post by Kevin Lapp

A comment by Frederick Moss to a prior post raised the important question of coverage in an Evidencecourse. Even for those with the luxury of 4 credit hours each week, theresimply isn’t enough class time to cover the material and accomplish all thatmight be accomplished in a law school course.  I’m happy to entertain thoughts on whatcontent gets bumped when the clock is running out – burdens of proof; trialmechanics; the best evidence rule; authentication; scientific evidence.Personally, I haven’t yet found room for a one-hour lesson on the limits ofeyewitness testimony, which I would love to add to my course.

But coverage is not justa content issue. As the push for more practical training continues (a push Iendorse), there is no reason for doctrinal courses to ignore practice skills. Indeed,in these leaner times, doctrinal courses may be the best place to insertpractical training into the curriculum. And in my mind, the Evidence course isa perfect place for law school to include lawyering skills alongside thelearning of fundamental doctrine. I’m trying to incorporate some skillsmini-exercises throughout my course (such as in-role oral arguments in class,and short writing assignments akin to motions in limine), but making time forthose requires bumping topics that I already decided couldn’t get bumped. 

One solution to thisproblem is what Burt Neuborne was doing with his Evidence class at NYU when Iwas there as a Lawyering professor: NYU offered a 5-credit Evidence course alternativeto a limited number of students, and that extra credit hour each week wasdevoted to skills exercises that put the rules in motion. I’d love to teachsuch a course here at Loyola.

But not everyone willhave such an opportunity to add a skills credit hour, and even where it couldbe offered, it couldn’t be offered to 100 students at once. A solution I amputting into use this year is to flip the classroom on occasion.

A flippedclassroom is one where the traditional “lecture in class; problems as homework”structure is flipped. Instead, students watch a video of a lecture as homework,freeing up classroom time for a fuller exploration of problems and interactiveexercises. The issue right now is what lecture material makes the best sensefor this treatment. Some of the material on trial mechanics that I cover in myfirst 2 classes, like 611, 614 and 615, as well as some basic introductorymaterial to units on character and expert witnesses, is going to be the firstplace I experiment with flipping the classroom.

I don’t aim to make 55minute lectures. The plan is to have a series of 10-20 minute lectures thatdeliver more straight-forward material. The videos wouldn’t completely replacethe coverage of that material in class, but hopefully will limit the classtime spenton dry, informative lecturing. It may not free up an entire hour or two to letme add a class on eyewitness testimony, but it will certainly allow for abetter use of our limited classroom time, be it by getting a little deeper intothe material or including a skills exercise here and there. Having my studentsleave with a better handle on the rules, and a first-hand sense of what itmeans to argue Evidence issues as a lawyer, will certainly be worth theawkwardness of videotaping myself giving a lecture to no one.