Evidence by the Video Method

“Imagine,” says the law professor—and her students tune out. After all, they know what’s coming. Imagine is their clue. That word alerts them their professor is spinning a classroom hypothetical, challenging them to apply their legal learning to imagined “facts” from life. Yet students know the difference between the great wide world and their professor’s cloistered imagination. And they seem to resent carefully crafted hypotheticals and the professor’s hidden hand guiding them toward supposedly spontaneous moments of intellectual discovery. So they tune out. Video clips offer a better choice. Unlike classroom hypotheticals, they don’t seem contrived for pedagogical purposes. Whether fact or fiction, the scenarios they present did not spring from the teacher’s crafty imagination. And unlike casebook problems assigned in advance, video clips don’t divide the class into leaders and laggards, those prepared for class and those not. Everyone sees the clip together—and while some students will have a tighter grip on the relevant law, all students receive the relevant facts at once. What’s more, those facts aren’t flagged for importance. It’s hard for a teacher to spin out a hypothetical without dropping errant hints about which facts count most. As the filmmaker’s mission normally has nothing in common with the professor’s, critical facts may lie in the corner of the screen or in offhand dialogue muttered under the characters’ breath. And video clips—at least most of them—are simply fun. They break up class. They keep the professor from droning on. And they breathe life into the law’s arid abstractions.