Never miss class. Borrowing your roommate’s notes won’t suffice. Listening to a tape recording of the class does not even approach live attendance and engagement. A near flawless attendance record is essential Here’s why. Actively attending every class leads to actively learning the law. “Learn” is an active verb. You can’t learn at the level you need in law school without activity. In law school, that activity is dialectic.
The teaching methods used in most first year law school classes are based upon what law professors refer to as the “Socratic method.” Perhaps you read some Socratic dialogues when you studied philosophy in college. In these Socratic dialogues, Plato, himself a great teacher, wrote instructive texts about philosophical concepts by presenting a series of conversations in which his teacher, Socrates, engaged the minds of some of the other citizens of Athens in pursuit of general philosophical fundamental truths. Socrates used a cross-examination process, in which he would pose a series of questions to his conversation partners; the inquiries resulted in a chain of questions and answers that usually led the other person to a contradiction of his original idea.
As frustrating as this was to Socrates’ friends, it seemed to be an extraordinarily effective tool for the great philosopher to lead his associates to higher levels of understanding. His objective was not confusion. His objective was to engage these conversants in active learning sessions—and thereby to actually teach them without writing the answers on the blackboard (or the stone tablet) in front of them.
Likewise, the objectives of law professors who employ this vexing but fruitful method of engagement are not frustration and confusion. Why does it seem like those are their objectives from time to time? Simply because those are often the intellectual plateaus which most students (like Socrates’ interlocutors) encounter on the path to comprehension. Through an active classroom dialectic process, law students are able to form universal definitions and arrive at general principles of law by accepting the lead of experts (law professors) along a path of propositions derived through discussion of individual cases. That path leads the discerning student to generalizations and clarity. That same path leads the passive student to confusion.
Students who are underprepared or who fail to actively engage in the dialectic process walk out of class asking, “What was she talking about?” and “Why doesn’t she ever answer any of our questions?” “How are we supposed to learn anything,” they inquire, “if all she does is ask questions?” Other students will gather in the common area and complain to each other, “Professor O'Donnell just doesn’t know how to teach. Now, I had a professor at BA's R Us College who knew how to teach—after we read a chapter, she’d come into class and outline the whole chapter on the board, then go over it with us, then ask us, ‘Do you have any questions.’ We always did, and she’d always answer them. Professor O'Donnell could take a lesson from her.”
Simply put, when you miss a class (or show up unprepared) you miss what you're paying tuition for. You're missing the active part of law school and settling for the passive part. Practice now for the professional practice. Practice always showing up. From the first day of law school you don't have long to develop this habit.