The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

Yale Law School
. Students in these classes monitored between
2 and 7 class meetings in each course (averaging around 4 meetings), tracking aspects of
student turns. This study introduced some new approaches not found in the earlier Yale
observational effort: here volunteered turns were distinguished from called-on turns, and
responses were characterized as “response,” “question,” or “comment.” Student monitors
also noted the attendance for each class session coded and calculated participation as a
ratio of students actually present each day, where possible. (There are arguments for and
against using overall class enrollment rather than daily attendance for ratios, but certainly
the approach adopted required additional work and showed a very thoughtful effort. It
also has the benefit of yielding data on gendered patterns of attendance for the classes that
were monitored.)
73. Id., 36. If a strict rule for delineating female- versus male-dominated participa-
tion is used, categorizing even classes in which one group exceeds the other by a ratio of
only 1.007, for example, then the distribution of gender domination looks fairly even (with
12 classes dominated by men and 11 dominated by women.) However, if we remove classes
in which the ratio of male-female total turns is essentially even (any classes in which the
ratio ranges from .97 to 1.03), then the distribution shifts considerably, because all of those
classes are ones in which women’s relative participation exceeds men’s by a very small
margin. With this alteration, we arrive at a distribution in which 12 classes are dominated
by men, 6 by women, and 5 are essentially even. As noted in the report, imbalances in fa-
vor of men tend to exceed those in favor of women.
74. Id.
75. Id., 97.
76. Id. Of the 6 classes in which female students clearly dominated, only 1 was taught
by a female professor. (Women dominated in 5 of the 18 classes taught by male professors
and 1 of the 5 classes taught by female professors. Male students dominated in 2 of the
remaining classes taught by women, and participation was roughly even in the other 2
female-taught classes. This leaves a distribution in which 2 of 5 classes taught by women
and 3 of 18 classes taught by men had roughly even participation in terms of gender.) The
report commendably called for further research, pointing to areas that need further ex-
amination based on this initial investigation.
77. Id., 37. Monitors kept track of whether classes were “strict Socratic,” which was
defined as involving no notice to students who were called on; Socratic method with “on-
call” notice to participants in advance; volunteers called on when hands were raised; and
“free-form discussion, no one is called on.” Id., 98.
78. Neufeld, “Costs of an Outdated Pedagogy?,” 522. As noted earlier, the students
also conducted a set of surveys and collected data on grade and honors distributions by
gender. In addition, they collected information on extracurricular activities, use of avail-
able mental health care, and employment, as well as conducting eight single-sex focus
groups to aid in formulating and supplementing the survey results.
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79. There were no statistically significant differences between the male and female
coders. Id. The class monitors tracked turns in terms of gender of speakers, class atten-
dance, whether the turn was volunteered or not, and the individual identities of speakers
(which allowed for a variety of calculations regarding repeat speakers).
80. Id., 531.
81. Id., 533.
82. Id. The Harvard report suggests that some of this disparity may be attributable
to the fact that there tends to be higher overall participation in classes taught by women.
83. Id., 533. This finding fits well with others pointing to men’s greater propensity
to volunteer. It also suggests that women may fare better in classes where they are
called on.
84. K. Wilson and Levin, “The Sex-Based Disparity in Class Participation.” This was
the first student-run observational effort to consider the issue of volunteered turns. As an
anthropologist who is also participating in the research in this area, I have watched with
great interest a process by which student-run observational work appears to have built on
itself over the years, with each new study incorporating and improving on innovations from
prior efforts (as well as from other sources). At a time when there is a great deal of discus-
sion of how best to encourage empirical work in the legal academy, I think we should take
note of this kind of process; it is tempting for trained social scientists to express only skep-
ticism about efforts by legal professionals in this regard, but absent formal graduate social
science training for everyone involved, it might be important to view the public discus-
sion itself as a forum for genuine interdisciplinary communication and advancement. On
concerns over empirical work published in law reviews, some quite understandable, see
Epstein and King, “The Rules of Inference”; on attempts to build productive interdiscipli-
nary discussion about the intersection of social science and law, see Erlanger et al., “Fore-
word”; Macaulay, “The New versus the Old Legal Realism”; and other articles in the