Book Review: From Expectation to Experience
by
Ronald Benton Brown

Yoda, the Jedi master, repeatedly admonished young Luke Skywalker that fear leads to anger, anger leads to hatred, and hatred leads to the Dark Side. James Boyd White echoes that warning in his book From Expectation to Experience (University of Michigan Press, 1999). Professor White explains the teaching cycle as follows: Hope leads to expectation; expectation leads to disappointment; disappointment leads to acceptance; and acceptance leads to new hopes for the next class. Thus, the cycle continues. Unstated is the warning against straying from this path. If the teacher allows disappointment to produce anger rather than acceptance, that anger will lead to the Dark Side. Too many law teachers have gone over to the Dark Side. They are the curmudgeons of legal education. They are consumed by their disappointments and their anger. No class is ever good enough. Their negative spiral, like a black hole in space, threatens to destroy their students.

Professor White, in contrast, understands The Force. Like Yoda, he offers to teach the way, but followers must be willing to undergo the rigors of discovery. The lessons may be difficult to understand and, sometimes, difficult to accept. Things may not be what they seem. The lessons are not connected in linear format, but one would hardly expect that in the teachings of a philosophical master. It is not enough to understand the separate points because they are just evidence of The Force. We must learn to accept The Force itself and go with it.

Professor White hopes this book will make law professors look beyond their students' immediate goals of passing the bar and getting that first lawyer job. He wants law professors to help their students achieve meaningful lives, beginning with finding meaning in their professional lives. That is the path to students' satisfaction. Helping them along the path is what provides satisfaction to their teachers. The students need to see the possibilities of a rich professional life in various venues, a life that is based on civic responsibility and action. They must learn that being a lawyer cannot be reduced to a mere trade or commercial venture. It is a learned profession, a discipline of thought and argument, involving the use of legal materials. Traditional legal education falls far short of Prof. White's hopes for it.

He challenges the reader to accept the limits of the traditional case method, particularly when used after the first year, and try for more. He challenges the reader to consider other possibilities modeled on a liberal arts curriculum. Neither doctrine nor policy should be eliminated, but both should be put into the proper context. He asks us to consider the negative impact of the law school's traditional hierarchical rewards system and the limited impact and value of traditional legal scholarship.

For White, the use of language is at the center of lawyering and legal education. At a minimum, law students must be trained to communicate effectively and to understand the limits of even the best writing. But language is more than that to lawyers. It also structures how lawyers think about ideas, concepts, and problems. White illustrates that by examining how lawyers deal with religion, corporations, and abortion. In these lessons, he reveals the limitations of language and traditional lawyer thinking.

White favors using literature as a tool for teaching real lawyering. From literature, students gain insights into people and cultures. From the vicarious experiences, students are prepared for the problems they may encounter in the profession. Achieving fluency in the language of law is one of the most important goals of legal education. Likewise, the study of humanities better equips students to experience a meaningful life in the law because it increases the chances they will understand what is going on, be able to take a productive part in it, achieve satisfying results, and appreciate those results.

When I first began reading this book, my hopes for enlightenment were high. Here were lessons from a master to whom I could immediately relate. Later I got bogged down in the details of the illustrations. That was a frustration, a disappointment. But when I later thought about what I had read, I realized that what I had learned was worth the effort. I had achieved acceptance! Now I have hopes that I can utilize some of these thoughts in teaching and writing and in areas beyond the law school. Perhaps Prof. White will be disappointed to realize how little this reader understood, but it seems certain that he can deal with that disappointment, accept it, and begin the next project with high hopes. May The Force be with you, Professor White. And may it be with other law teachers, including me.