WSU Professor Torts and Remedies Phil Merkel
Most people when they come to law school have no idea about the subject matter. They have very little idea about how the classes will go. So I know when I was a law student, I was sort of thrown into that mix without understanding what was going on. Most of my classmates didn’t understand either. So what we try to do is not hide the ball on the students. To tell them what we expect out of them, and then to really help them succeed. I think that’s the most important thing. We’re dedicated to student success, and so the faculty has committed generally to working with students on an individual basis.
We devote tremendous amounts of faculty time and resources to helping students learn. If you were to walk down the corridor at our law school on any given day, you would see that there are chairs outside the faculty offices and students are sitting there because they are going to be having appointments to meet with their faculty members to go over course material.
I am a professor, and I have been here about 22 years. I teach torts, and I teach remedies. I teach those two courses regularly every year.
A tort is a civil wrong other than a breach of contract for which the law provides a remedy. So the types of torts most people would be familiar with are…the one most people would be familiar with is the tortof negligence. So if somebody carelessly runs into your car, or if you carelessly run into somebody else’s car, you’ve committed a tort. But there are other types of tort as well. Products liability: you’re injured by a defective product. Defamation: where someone posts false information about you that hurts your reputation. That would be another example.
I’m in a unique position because I get students in my torts class—I teach torts in the first year. So I see students when they first walk in the door. And then I teach a class in the last semester of law school called remedies, which is a class that most students take in their last semester. The progression in terms of the students’ ability to reason, solve problems, their understanding of the law, their confidence level is incredibly different from the first year to that final year of law school. So it’s very gratifying for me to see the change that takes place in them. They start out as being students unfamiliar with the law, and when I get them in that last semester they’re ready to start practicing law and representing people, which is a great accomplishment on their part.
I would tell any student that was thinking about coming here that they ought to pick a law school where the students are comfortable with the administration, with the student body, and especially with the faculty. I always encourage students when they’re thinking of going to law school to actually go to a school, see if the admissions staff is going to be able to arrange for them to sit in with classes. Maybe to meet a professor beforehand. When students come to my class, for instance, as visitors I give them materials that we’re going to be covering that day and I have them sit in the class so that they ca follow along. Choosing the right school is really important. You should pick a school that you think is going to help you be successful. Because you can go to a terrific law school, but if the school is not going to help you succeed, you’re not going to be successful.
We have, I think, one of the most diverse student bodies in the country. It’s really gratifying for me as a professor to work with students, many of whom are going to be the first ones in their families to be lawyers. My grandparents were immigrants. I was the first person in my family to be a lawyer. I didn’t have any lawyers in my family background. So I really see a lot of students reproducing my experience. They’re often times from different ethnic backgrounds than I am, but they are the first ones in their families who are going to be lawyers and going to be embarking on great, successful careers as lawyers.
I can say without a doubt that from the perspective of climate first of all, Southern California is the best place to live in the United States. That really is from experience. From the perspective of a student who is interested in doing things outside of law school, there is just so much to do here. I’m a baseball fan, for example, and we have two professional sports teams that are fairly close by. We have tremendous cultural events that take place here—symphony, opera, great libraries, museums. It is just a wonderful area in which to live.
I would say that what we try to do with respect to the curriculum is to develop a curriculum that is going to be meaningful for students when they graduate from law school. So one of the big emphases we have is on preparing students for the practice of law. So many students will go immediately from law school into small firms. They’ll go into public defender offices. They’ll go into prosecutor offices where they’re going to have to begin actively practicing the day that they show up. So we have a curriculum that emphasizes professional skills training. One of the problems that have been identified in legal education, just generally, is that law schools don’t prepare students for what they do on an every day basis.
And hit the ground running when they get out of law school. So that when they go into court for their first motion, they’ll know where to stand and when to get up when the judge asks them a question, how to prepare basic documents that they’ll have to prepare as soon as they get out of law school. So it’s fair to say that we have a practice emphasis at this law school.