Take out your quills and inkwells

The other day in Evidence we were discussing a Rehnquist opinion that referenced two obscure cases dealing with the Smith Act. If you didn’t know what the Smith Act was, you would have no idea what Rehnquist was scrawling about. Way back in the 1990s, this would have required some minor effort by the standards of the day. But today when I ask, “What did the Smith Act deal with and what is Rehnquist saying in this paragraph?” and upwards of 100 students just stare at me quizzically, it’s a little disconcerting. “If you could take a short break from instant messaging and just ask the box in front of you, we could get on with this.” This happens all the time, and I still don’t get it.

So, I was thinking of banning laptops next semester when I teach Crim Pro to the 1Ls. It’s not that I entirely agree with the numerous professors—or entire schools—who complain that students don’t pay attention. It’s not as though law professors were enrapturing before students had laptops. Back in the twentieth century, if a professor was dull, we messaged each other and made grocery lists and even played games in class, all with a pen and paper.

But the way students use laptops makes learning harder and more time-intensive rather than more efficient. They walk into class with the textbook and the supplement to the textbook plus this six-pound appliance that is a blank slate. They haven’t taken any notes on what they read. They just sit there waiting to type every word, so they can then spend way, way, way too much time trying to figure out what it all means at some unspecified future time. Outlines are typically upwards of 90 single-spaced pages, making studying for finals more daunting than it ever should be. Watching them use their laptops this way is like watching someone try to change the channel by throwing the remote control at the buttons on the television from across the room.

I asked the upper-class students in Evidence what they thought. One student said manual note-taking is a necessary legal skill that needs to be practiced and another said banning laptops was ridiculously paternalistic. So, I thought about that and now I’m thinking I might ban laptops for the last two weeks of this semester.