May 31, 2008

In Pursuit of Happiness: Gunner Credits in Law School Classrooms

With the last day of classes for my (much-dreaded) 1L year having come and gone, I thought it appropriate to return to a topic I first addressed around the time I started law school, namely the tendency of certain self-entitled, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing law students to waste valuable classroom time waxing philosophic on tangentials of little or no consequence while enraged classmates seethe silently, vainly searching for dull razors with which to slit their own wrists. Well, maybe that last part about the razors is just me (and perhaps, it is not limited to the classroom), but let us not dwell on such trifles. The point is that, often, these so-called questions—most of which are actually statements—serve little pedagogical purpose and as such, are a serious source of inefficiency. What is to be done about this awfulness that permeates law school classrooms near and far?

Well, if there is anything I have learned in my time at The University of Chicago, it is that, on balance, markets are good, regulations are bad, and in some circumstances, it might be acceptable to sell babies. Thus, an administrative mandate that, for example, banned all raising of hands, would not be useful since it would prevent both value-added and deadweight comments from occurring. Luckily, we need not turn to the evils of God-less socialism just yet; there is a market-based solution to be had: gunner credits.

Potential Remedies

Taking a step back, it is instructive to look at potential remedies to the aforementioned problem. As I see it, there are three straightforward alternatives. First, professors could simply stop calling on repeat offenders known to add no value. Second, those who actually have something useful to contribute could step up, thus reducing the overall pollution in the stream.¹ Finally, we could simply give up and employ a mechanism for internalizing the costs of the externalities created by said problem.

Given my decidedly dour outlook on life, I have little faith in either the first or second solution being successful. As to the first, professors probably have few incentive to exert the effort to weed out and disenfranchise undesirable commentors, and even if they did, it is not clear that they would act upon those incentives. As to the second, a full year of evidence suggests that the value-added individuals are unlikely to step up to the degree necessary to counteract the deadweight. Not being by any means such a value-added individual (I have little to contribute in society in general, let alone law school in particular), I cannot speak to the exact reasons why those who can add value often chose not to. Perhaps it is simply because absent stronger incentives than amorphous concepts like the depth of classroom discussion, it is just easier to tune out and let the deadweight ramble on. And on. And on.

Internalizing the Costs of Banality: Gunner Credits

This leaves my preferred solution: the just give up remedy, or more specifically, gunner credits. First, how does it work? Simply put, I propose using a system akin to carbon credits (with all its concomitant problems, which I will ignore for the moment). Every person is allocated a certain number of volunteer (gunner) credits at the start of the year. Every time one chooses to volunteer (not when one is called on in the course of the Socratic method), one of these credits is expended. An open market allows students to buy or sell these credits. Theoretically, those who wish to volunteer a lot will then have to internalize the costs their actions impose on the classroom at large by assigning a dollar value to each asinine comment they wish to make. At the same time, those who have to suffer through the asinine comments will be compensated for having to tolerate the nonsense.

Of course, serious questions are raised by this proposal, not the least of which is what is the optimal level of credits to assign to each student. Also, this approach simply abandons the goal of learning: adding costs for people to speak creates further disincentives for value-added individuals, making it even more unlikely that they will choose to contribute. The gunner credit system will reduce the entire classroom experience to Socratic questions and asinine comments. Perversely, this result taken to the extreme might bring about the first solution: professors might solely employ the Socratic method and disallow volunteer comments because they know the only ones likely to occur are nonsensical.

Is this more desirable than the status quo? I do not know. But at the least, it would be an interesting experiment. And the happiness I derive from someone having to pay to pontificate foolishly might be well worth any loss in learning. I could make up some empirical data to back my claims, but I will leave that to another day.

^ ¹ This solution is identical to the one outlined in More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics by Steven Landsburg. Check it out; it's an interesting read.