A Distinctive Approach to Teaching: Personalizing the Precedents
By Frances Presma
Personalizing the Precedents
It brings things alive in a way that is hard to do from just having read the case. It makes it real - suddenly it involves real people, and real events, and not just abstractions.
- Donald Gardner, 65
GGiving face and voice to the people behind the precedents powerfully increases the documentaries' efficacy as teaching tools, Dwyer says. "You see there are two sides to every story. You care more about the case when you know the people. And you learn the law more because you want to know what happens to them."
Metzloff agrees, adding that it is important for students to appreciate the impact of being involved in a Supreme Court case.
"The parties get put into the national limelight, and not everyone wants to do that–Dr. Gore did not want to give any interviews, and feels that to some extent he was pilloried in the press as just being out to make a lot of money. His view going in was that his car was defective, and he wasn' t told about it. When you hear his story, you can really ask the question, ‘How would you feel if you had bought this car, and this had happened to you? What would you do about it?'
"I don't know if [the litigants] are all transformed, but they are all affected by it. It's a life experience, and it's something that's special. For some, it's kind of a curiosity, for some it's a burden, and for some it's transformative."
Marla Zimmerman '06, who spent a summer working on the project, says that she'll never forget the way their involvement in the cases affected the participants she met, such as Lindsay Earls, the young Oklahoma woman at the center of the high school drug testing case.
"It was clear that the case took up a lot of time and energy. [They] start believing in the cause, and losing can be crushing. When you are reading a case, it's really easy to forget that it involves real people experiencing real things that could happen to anybody. Now I read the facts of a case, I wonder why they brought the suit–what made them so upset to do it? A lot of the time the facts that are in the opinion don't tell you the whole story."
Metzloff calls it a privilege to have traveled the country meeting with the principal players in recent major cases.
"I do think they are sort of special–they have a courage, or a stubbornness that is something that I don't have. I can't think of a single case where I've said, ‘I'm going to get a lawyer, I'm going to fight.' Each of these people has a sense of what's right–whether you agree with it or not–that they hold with a passion and a commitment that is so strong. That's really impressive. Because each of them has paid in their own way for heading up the cause they've led."
Metzloff says that he and his crew–Wood, videographer Todd Shoemaker, and a number of student researchers–take seriously their responsibility to be fair to the litigants and all attorneys, giving equal voice to each side of every case. Most crucial is staying true to the facts.
"We are constantly editing with the record in mind. We've read the opinion, we know what the Supreme Court focused on, and know where the story has to end up. The Court considers and discusses the arguments that the lawyers have made, so we read the briefs, we read the lower court opinions, and we keep in mind what the case is legally about."
Virginia v. Black won high praise from the alumni who attended its reunion premiere.
Fantastic," was the assessment of Eric Isaacson '85. “It's so easy to come to a case with your perceptions and attitudes–this helps get you to see it fully.
Metzloff–and everyone involved with the project–is excited about the versatility of the documentaries, which so far have won a number of awards; apart from their obvious relevance for law students in a wide range of classes, they are easily accessible to undergraduates, practitioners through continuing education programs, even high school students.
"Every high school kid in the country learns about the Supreme Court, and this is a wonderful way for teachers to engage students about important topics. We try very hard not to make them technical, because the legal issues in these cases don't have to be overwhelming. Law is about how the Constitution should apply to real world problems. These documentaries should be available to anybody who wants to think seriously about issues such as the First Amendment or the separation of church and state."