Aloha
 
What a great trick -- hide a substantive issue under Hotels!!
 
I've added a couple of variations below.
        Hunter
>
>>My questions are these. (1) Do others stress legal reasoning?
>
>I'm not sure that I stress legal reasoning, except that I like to get my
>students to question the "right" or "wrong" answer.  It seems to me that
>this is the most valuable thing to be taken from a legal environment class.
>My technique is to try to get them (in selected  instances) to argue for the
>efficacy of an opinion and result that is different from the one reached in
>the case abstract.
 
I stress reasoning with less emphasis on the "legal."  My class is more of
a management class in BL with an LE feel to it --
 
> (2) Should it
>>be stressed at the expense of law topics?
>
>If you mean rules of law, I think the answer is yes, to some extent.  I tell
>them the first day of class--you could memorize all the laws and they would
>be useless to you if you didn't know how to apply them to the facts that
>arise.  To order your business and personal behavior in compliance with the
>law, you must have some feel for "how" it is applied, not just memorize
>"what" it is.
>  . . . .
YES -- We have a finite number of hours of student time, both inside and
outside of class.  To the exent we fill up the hours with rules of law we
have less hours for other matters.  Besides a legal conclusion, I demand a
"management implications" discussin that follows the legal conclusion.  I
have open book exams and on each exam have "reference questions" where the
students have to look up rules that we have never been assigned or talked
about in class and give the page number and T/F answers.  They don't need
our class time to get all the esoteric rules, they are in our well written
textbooks.  The longer I teach the less central the substantive rules
become to what I "teach."
 
> (3) Do your students resist your
>>teaching of legal reasoning?
>
>Most students resist everything except the cue that class is over.  But
>those who don't take something valuable with them
 
My students not only don't resist my approach to 'reasoning' they sometimes
ask why they don't get more of it earlier in their education.  If there is
student resistance, my guess is it is because because of an emphasis on
'legal' reasoning which may cause the material to appear too esoteric to
students. I teach a resoning process for writing papers in my class using
reasoning, then I grade more on the use of the process than the conclusion.
 The students see that the process can improve their papers in other classes.
 
> (4) Is it better to teach legal reasoning
>>subtly, say, by example, or as merely incidental to the substantive stuff?
>
>Subtle?  I'm alwayes trying to find the pedagogical equivalent of a
>sledgehammer.
 
I agree, but only a mere sledgehammer?? -- that is a little low tech and
may not get attention -- can we make it pneumatic or use explosives.  I
have a mini-lecture on Bloom's taxonomy and explain the difference between
analysis and synthesis and then provide sample papers showing -- analysis
of facts - followed by analysis of law - followed by synthesis of law and
fact producing a conclusion - followed by management implications -- and
say "MAKE YOUR PAPERS LOOK LIKE THIS"