JoeGo.

• Author: Bazelon, Emily
• Position: Yale Law School professor Joseph Goldstein

My first class at Yale Law School took place in a small room on the fourth floor of M entryway. In the opening moments, seventeen of us, a "small group" seminar in the law school tradition, squeezed into our places around a crowded table.

Professor Goldstein walked in. Stooped, with his bow tie and unmistakable curly white hair, he blinked at us from behind large-frame glasses. We waited, as students do on the first day of school, for revelation.

We were waiting for Professor Goldstein to say, "The law is about this," or at least, "This class is about this." He didn't that day, or on any that followed. He was not a teacher who gave us the easy comfort of spelling out what we were to think, or even how we should begin figuring that out. Our first reading assignment was not an excerpt from a casebook, like other small groups' were, but the entire Supreme Court opinion in Clinton v. Jones.(1) When we asked where in the opinion we should focus our attention, Professor Goldstein quietly refused to answer. Nor did he answer when we asked for guidance in sorting through the Court's tangled decisions on affirmative action, the subject of our major writing assignment--which was not a lawyer's brief or memo, as other small group seminars were, but rather a mock Supreme Court opinion.

Sometimes Professor Goldstein's method frustrated us. But I think it also offered a kind of revelation, though not the kind of roadmap to success in law school and life ever after that we thought we were looking for. Professor Goldstein taught us that guidance can come from a touch as much as from a push. He directed his classroom with oblique comments. Sometimes we could barely hear him. These may not seem like the attributes of a great teacher, but they generated tremendous capacity for dissent and debate. Professor Goldstein's form of indirect direction yielded for my small group the freedom to try out new ideas, however half-baked, and to argue, however raucously. We talked over each other and to each other. Since Professor Goldstein did not answer our questions, we answered them ourselves.

It strikes me now that given Professor Goldstein's deep knowledge of the concepts we discussed, it must have taken enormous self-restraint for him to listen to us blunder rather than leap in to correct us. I remember one discussion in which we dismissed the doctrine of stare decisis, and another in which a few of us happily tossed out the Constitution's "case or controversy"...