When one first publishes a book—well, no reason to try and leave out the first person on this one—when I first published a book, it certainly felt nice to see my name on the spine. They say one’s name is the most important word to each person, and something of the sort is surely true. “If I showed you a group picture of all of us, right now,” an effective Sunday School teacher once chirped, “every single one of you would first look for your own face.” Guilty. There is no interest like self-interest, I consistently counsel my students trying to understand the law… and I know, because I live it to be true. And, hey, I’ve lived around you, too, and you certainly haven’t convinced me otherwise. So, it’s all of us… or at least very nearly so.
Still, as I’ve prepared and tweaked—and then endlessly re-prepared and re-tweaked—my textbooks over the past decade, I’ve come to appreciate not only how much I do teach ‘Henderson on Policing’ or ‘Henderson on Criminal Law,’ say, but how that’s mostly a good thing. Because law necessarily evolves over generations without a single set of authors—let alone a single author—coherence suffers. And coherence is very helpful to learning.
I know this to be true—that coherence is helpful to learning—because I just asked both Gemini and ChatGPT, and they assure me it is the case in no uncertain terms. Coherence, explains Gemini “is important to learning because it builds connections between new and existing knowledge, which helps students understand and retain information more effectively. By providing a clear, consistent, and logical flow in the curriculum and instruction, coherence makes learning more relevant and builds a strong foundation for future learning. This ultimately leads to deeper understanding and improved problem-solving skills.” See, told you!
And from ChatpGPT: “Yes, coherence is definitely helpful to learning! In fact, it plays a crucial role in how well we understand, retain, and apply new information. When we take a coherent view of something, it means we are able to see the big picture and understand how the various pieces of information fit together.” The helpful little bot then went on to break coherence’s benefits into Making Connections, Improved Retention, Critical Thinking, Context and Meaning, Reducing Cognitive Load, and Long-Term Learning.
Now, I cite to generative AI somewhat tongue-in-cheek, to be sure. But we could also cite to humans for the same propositions. (And if this were a law review, I would dutifully track down all sorts of such citations. Because an author can’t know anything, but so long as someone else asserted it in print… good to go!) In any event, the place of coherence in learning is ‘common sense,’ really—our life experience teaches it to be so, as we all experience it both for good and bad, as through the cognitive heuristic of confirmation bias.
So, one thing a professor can bring to the classroom after decades of study is indeed a perspective on the material. By seeing the material through the professor’s lens, clarity can be achieved and discontinuities can be made clear. And the most clean way to do this is for the professor—again after sufficient years of study—to write the textbook; otherwise, class is unavoidably a clash of at least two different such perspectives.
Now, there are levels, to be sure. (Any mention of “levels” in my household immediately sparks Kramer imitations… may it be so in yours as well.) There are some professors—they shall remain as nameless as they are guilty—who teach a subject as if they are the only person to actually have understood it. Their teaching is thereby so entirely idiosyncratic that students are nearly as bad off as having never studied the subject at all. Such unfortunate students might do terrifically well on Professor Nowhereman’s final examination, but they would be laughed out of any well-educated boardroom or courtroom. That is not the sort of ‘coherence’ I’m trying to champion.
Instead, I’m thinking of the small moves we make, often increasingly over the years, that collectively have a big impact. When I was a young professor, I often thought it important to make sure my students realized there were at least X reasonably well represented positions on an issue in the lower courts. But as I gained some wisdom, I learned how confusing that is. Instead, I often keep that knowledge in my back pocket, confessing such duplicity only when a particularly erudite student prods it. Sure, a student someday practicing in the particular area will need to dig in, but when one is teaching survey courses like I do—Criminal Law (no conflicts there, in 51 different jurisdictions!), Criminal Procedure: Investigations, and Criminal Procedure: Adjudication—there is only so much information one can realistically hope to convey, perhaps especially to the ‘typical’ student who will never practice in the area.
Another example is when we teach that X lower court application is right, but that Y is wrong. (Of course we also teach that J and K are two reasonable interpretations of, say, existing Supreme Court or other precedent. And that Q and P are two longstanding viewpoints on the Court itself. I’m referring to the different situation when we confidently declare Y wrong.) Given the number of conflicting court decisions out there, I can see no way to effectively teach without doing this. But of course this is, once again, merely bringing to bear one’s own personal perspective, because it is the rare instance in which a lower court decision will be ‘wrong’ in a truly obvious—nearly mathematical—sense. After all, in a career of decades, most of us will experience some instance in which that ‘wrong’ lower court interpretation is declared ‘precisely right all along’ by the Supremes. And then we appropriately change our teaching tune. Or, at least I do—because I am not teaching Henderson’s Policing. I am teaching Henderson on Policing… and I am most definitely not Supreme. So, perspective for coherence is good. Teaching as if you are the decider is not.
At least that’s how I’ve come to see it. In moderation, it ought to be ‘Henderson on Policing,’ and if my students can leave my classroom understanding it so taught, they will be very well situated to practice in the field, just as will your slightly-differently-nudged crew. Indeed, both sets will be better off—and considerably so, I think—than a person taught without perspective bringing the coherence that shaves off some rough edges without doing harm.
So, while our textbooks might not be Littleton, Coke, or even Coke on Littleton (that one sounds quite the slog), we law profs of today remain, at least on the margins, systematizers. We get the challenge, and the great pleasure, of making sense of the slightly insensible, tweaking the law in a manner cohering to one’s own best perceptions.
Who says teaching isn’t a good gig?
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