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2.25_Trial Advocacy and Public Defending with Distinguished Clinical Professor and Director of Trial Advocacy, J.C. Lore
19 Plays3 years ago
Internationally renowned expert on trial advocacy, Distinguished Clinical Professor and Director of Trial Advocacy J.C. Lore discusses his path to success with Co-Dean Kim Mutcherson.
Learn more about Distinguished Clinical Professor Lore.
The Power of Attorney is produced by Rutgers Law School. With two locations minutes from Philadelphia and New York City, Rutgers Law offers the prestige and reputation of a large, nationally-known university combined with a personal, small campus experience. Learn more by visiting law.rutgers.edu.
Series Producer and Editor: Kate Bianco
--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rutgerslaw/messageRecommended
Transcript
Introduction: Kim Mectreson and Jacy Lore
00:00:10
Speaker
Hi, my name is Kim Mectreson, co-dean of Rutgers Law School in Camden, and this is the power of attorney.
00:00:18
Speaker
Today, I get to have a conversation with my colleague, Jacy Lore, who is a stellar professor, as we'll talk about in our conversation, and also world-renowned for his trial advocacy skills. So, Jacy, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I really appreciate it. I'm glad to be here with you, so thanks for inviting me.
00:00:42
Speaker
Of course.
Jacy's Unplanned Journey to Law
00:00:44
Speaker
So I always like to start these conversations by asking people for their origin story. I'm always curious why it is you decided to go into law given that the world is full of other opportunities for careers. So what brought you to law? Well, I probably have a strange origin story in that I went to law school never really thinking I was going to practice law.
00:01:08
Speaker
I sort of reached the end of undergrad and, you know, I loved all kinds of different subject areas. I changed my major six or seven times. I was a history major, philosophy major, political science, economics, and I was trying to figure out what to do next. I was like, well, the law kind of has pieces of all these different things and I could go learn about those and then I'll have a
00:01:35
Speaker
credential in my back pocket in case I ever want it for the future. But that was why I went to law school, but I still never thought I was going to practice law.
Igniting Passion: Prosecutor's Office Internship
00:01:45
Speaker
After my first year of law school, I interned with a local prosecutor's office and started to sort of fall in love with the drama of courtroom and the human interaction of criminal cases. So I started to think, well, maybe I could practice law.
00:02:05
Speaker
And then when I went back for my second year and my third year of law school, I got the opportunity to work in our law school's legal clinic and working on behalf of vulnerable children. And it just ignited a fire. At that point I decided, you know, that was where I wanted my career to take me because going to work every day wasn't going to work.
00:02:32
Speaker
was just satisfying this passion that was burning inside me. And I thought, what better reason to go down a path than to follow that kind of energy and that kind of passion. Absolutely. Did you have any lawyers in your family? None in my family at all. And I had a couple of professors in the undergrad
00:02:55
Speaker
lawyers and sort of were the responsible for sort of putting the idea in my mind about going to law school.
00:03:05
Speaker
Yeah, interesting. You know, one of the things that has been a little bit of a theme with some of the folks that I've talked to here, you know, what you said about your college professors is, you know, one person saying something to you can totally shift your trajectory and move you in a particular direction, which is one of the things I think is so powerful about being an educator, but we'll get to that. We'll talk
Law School Clinic & Commitment to Law
00:03:28
Speaker
about that.
00:03:28
Speaker
So once you were in law school, particularly as somebody who didn't think that you were going to practice law and kind of fell into law school a little bit, what was your law school experience like? Well, I think I would be called what's commonly referred to as the clinic rat. So I had spent my last two years in law school in the clinic and in my law school, you were able to take clinic for credit both during your second year and your third year.
00:03:58
Speaker
That was really the focus of my law school education the last two years. And I was doing this at a really sort of exciting time in that there were some really serious issues going on in Chicago at the time. So it was right about the time that the governor was considering clearing death row because of all these issues associated with false confessions and
00:04:27
Speaker
So there was all of this energy around sort of these issues of fighting for these people who were on death row and many who were innocent. And, you know, that just, it was just, it was a really sort of exciting time to be in a law school legal clinic. And that really, I mean, is what I remember most about my last two years of law school.
00:04:47
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm one of those people who consistently says to students, do not graduate from law school without doing a clinic. And my clinic experience was so formative for me when I was in law school. And I still think about the work that I did. I still think about one of the clients that we represented. And this was decades ago.
00:05:07
Speaker
I wonder are there particular things that you remember about being a student in clinic, whether it was particular moments or particular people who you got to work with that still sort of resonate for you? There's a lot of them. It's hard to isolate just a couple of them, but probably two of the most powerful moments I think in my entire legal career happened in those
00:05:33
Speaker
moments in the clinic. The one was really the moment that made me pick with certainty the way that I wanted to go in my career. You know, I'd been representing a child for, gosh, over a year while I was in law school. And we, frankly, we'd been getting our butt kicked in court. And we hid, the state was trying to transfer this child up to adult court to try him.
00:06:01
Speaker
as an adult and we were doing his what they call transfer hearing or waiver hearing. So the kids have an opportunity to have a hearing in most jurisdictions before they're way up to adult court. And we were waiting and waiting and waiting and we had our experts ready and our witnesses ready and it kept getting delayed and delayed and the child was in custody and he was getting frustrated. And I remember it was spring break.
00:06:29
Speaker
And I'd given up my spring break this day to do this hearing. We were all ready to go. You know, we had our witnesses lined up, show up the court. And I met the child in detention earlier in the morning and he asked me, he goes, you know, are we going to go today? Is this going to happen? And I was like, I think so. You know, we're ready. I can't imagine the judge giving them another continuance, more time. And, you know, we walk into court and.
00:06:55
Speaker
the worst happens and the court grants them another continuance. And I'm just, you know, my heart sinks. And, you know, I just think this kid's gonna be, you know, livid. He's gonna be so upset. I'm afraid he's gonna act out in detention and get into more trouble. And I dread having to go up and visit him after court. I go up there and I, you know, I go into the small room and I'm waiting for this kid to just basically unleash on me and, you know, yell at me.
00:07:25
Speaker
scream at me and he turns to me and looks me in the eyes. And it was one of the most powerful moments of my entire life. And he just said, you know, JC, I just want to thank you for all that you're doing for me. I've never had anyone fight for me in my life. Wow. And that moment was the moment where I said, this is what I want to do.
00:07:50
Speaker
You know, I want to represent children. I want to represent these kids that generally don't have a voice, that don't have someone who will fight for them. You know, that was probably the most profound moment in my law school clinic career. I mean, there were so many others that took me in so many different directions, but that would be at the top.
00:08:07
Speaker
Yeah, that's extraordinary. And again, it sort of speaks to the power that one person can have in another person's life. You're probably someone that young person will never forget and has never forgotten. So you went through law school. You were a clinic rat. You were representing clients. You were basically playing lawyer and doing it well and had really identified what you wanted to do with your law degree. So when you graduated, where did you go first?
Early Career Choices and Public Defense
00:08:38
Speaker
Well, I got hired at the legal clinic where I was a student. It was a unique situation. I was going to go to the public defender's office and they offered me a job coming out of law school. And I decided to take it initially. And it was just initially a one-year position. And part of the motivation behind it was
00:09:02
Speaker
I was working on another really impactful case and we impact on me. And that was, I was representing a nine-year-old who was accused of first-degree murder. Oh, wow. And at that point, it was the youngest child who had ever been charged with first-degree murder. And I was heavily invested in that case. So I asked the public defender's office that I was going to accept the position item that I had, accept the position item that they would be willing to at least defer for a year.
00:09:32
Speaker
So they did. And so I worked in the legal clinic for a year after law school worked really hard on that case. And then towards the end of the year, the law school asked me if I wanted to stay on and, you know, start sort of towards a teaching career at that point. And I, I decided I needed to go and sort of become my own lawyer and my own trial lawyer at that moment. You know, I was surrounded with
00:10:02
Speaker
lawyers who were experienced and had a certain way of doing things. And it was really, they were important mentors to me and some of the most important people in my entire career. But there was a part of me that knew I couldn't become my own type of trial lawyer unless I got out there on my own for a little bit. So I made a really difficult decision to leave my law school legal clinic and then go to the public defender's office
00:10:32
Speaker
Philadelphia, where I was a public defender there for several years.
Defending a Child: Systemic Issues
00:10:36
Speaker
I want to talk a little bit about this case with a nine year old, which is just extraordinary to me, right? I mean, it's obviously prosecutors have to make decisions about how they want to proceed when there's been a crime or when someone's been accused of a crime. But nine years old and first degree murder, I mean, it's just hard to fathom.
00:11:00
Speaker
Yeah, it was a really difficult case at the time. And there was, you know, it was around the time too, where there was sort of this tough on crime attitude of which prosecutors were prosecuting children who were younger and they were prosecuting them more aggressively. This really sort of unique case in that, you know, as a nine-year-old that was alleged to have
00:11:29
Speaker
killed his foster brother. And there were two foster brothers, or two brothers, both of whom wound up being accused of first degree murder. University of Chicago's legal clinic represented the 12-year-old, and our legal clinic in Northwestern represented the nine-year-old. And the only evidence that they had against this child was a confession that this child made when they called it a confession.
00:11:59
Speaker
that the child made after being in custody for, I think, six or eight hours as a nun. And he said, well, my brothers and I were playing Wrestle Maniac or wrestling in the basement and my brother at one point hit him with a belt. And, you know, instantly we were sort of shocked that that's what would be the justification for the first degree murder charge.
00:12:29
Speaker
it didn't seem like enough to us. So that sort of drew us to that case. And immediately, sort of the day after the case happened and we decided to represent the child, I went and personally started to do some investigation. And I went to this facility where the child who had died had had an unsupervised visit
00:12:59
Speaker
with the family who had abused him that he was taken away from. And the agency was not supposed to give the family unsupervised visits because the husband of the biological mom had stomped on the child's head when he was a younger child. And that's why the child had been one of the reasons why the child had been removed.
00:13:25
Speaker
The night before this young little boy died, he had an improper, unsupervised visit with both the mother and the husband who had severely abused this kid in the past. But for some reason, the prosecutor didn't want to hear that. And even though we kept sort of presenting this information and presenting this evidence, they didn't want to pursue it. And it kept just sort of blowing our minds that they didn't.
00:13:53
Speaker
Luckily, we never even had to get the trial. We filed a motion to suppress that one statement, which was all the evidence that they had, which was that strong evidence. And the judge granted our motion to suppress the statement because a child of that age can't make a knowing and voluntary statement. They can't knowingly and voluntarily waive Miranda rights, especially this child.
00:14:18
Speaker
So the judge wound up suppressing it. So we never got the trial, but even if we got the trial, we thought we had a really strong case. Wow. That's extraordinary. It makes me think about, I mean, obviously in the last several years, there's been a lot more conversation about, you know, coerced confessions or particularly from young people. And I wonder if you feel like there's been a shift
00:14:45
Speaker
in how police and prosecutors deal with young people.
Racial Disparities in Justice System
00:14:51
Speaker
I mean, have we gotten better about this? Do you think we would see a prosecutor's office with the kind of evidence that you're talking about, a prosecutor's office that would decide to charge a nine-year-old with first-degree murder anymore? I think I have to answer that in two parts. The first part we're definitely seeing is shifting.
00:15:09
Speaker
There was a pretty strong structure in place throughout most of the 20th century that treated children much different than adults in our system. Children, even when they did something that would be considered a crime if they were an adult, it would be treated within the family court confines where they were looking at rehabilitation and getting the child help. And in the 90s, things went the exact opposite way.
00:15:38
Speaker
And there was this tough on crime mentality. There was this sociologist out of Princeton who said, you know, there's this huge group of super predators coming to take off child super predators to sort of take over our streets. And, you know, all this, you know, horrific stuff that these politicians lax on to and made things.
00:15:58
Speaker
a lot tougher on children made it easier to prosecute children in adult court, you know, made it, you know, just more of a culture shift towards treating children more harshly. And now we've spent the last 15 years swinging back. And we have now would a, you know, would a prosecutor office, you know, do something like that again? The answer is maybe, because there's a lot of differences from
00:16:25
Speaker
jurisdiction to jurisdiction and prosecutor to prosecutor. And a lot of those decisions come from the culture that's set from the top of the office. We have a top of the office that is looking at cases critically, sort of understanding the trends that are going on in the research of what children can do and
00:16:52
Speaker
do and why they do the certain things that they do, they're going to be more, you know, open minded than those types of things. But others are still entrenched in sort of that old way of thinking. So it depends is the answer in your second.
00:17:06
Speaker
Yeah. And I think, you know, a piece of the puzzle that we haven't put into the hopper here is the rice issue, right? That one of the reasons why it was sort of easy for prosecutors to latch on to this idea of, you know, being really tough on crime and the super predator idea was because that was, you know, using black hands as this really fearsome force that was going to be
00:17:34
Speaker
menacing white people in particular. So that was always a component of it. And I would assume that as somebody who was doing work with kids in juvenile facilities or people who had been charged with crimes as juveniles, that race component was something that you had to deal with as well. Absolutely. And I mean, it smacked you on the face every day.
00:17:58
Speaker
walked into a courthouse and you walked into a courthouse and the overwhelming percentage of people were people of color. And it was, you know, it's a problem, not just in cities, but in every rural part of, you know, every state, people of color are overrepresented in our criminal justice system, in our juvenile justice system.
00:18:27
Speaker
You know, a lot of that is because of how we police. We police in a way that we are, the police are in those communities, you know, that are in those communities policing in a way in which they're disproportionately arresting people of color. I mean, just as much crime or, you know, is happening in other parts of the city and state or on college campuses, but the police aren't standing up there doing sting up.
00:18:55
Speaker
Right. You know, so it's smatching the face every day and some of the toughest things that I would see in a courtroom were when I would see a child, a young African-American child get sentenced in a case and then sort of the white child with almost identical sort of charges and background that you should be considering for sentencing would get a much lighter sentence.
00:19:23
Speaker
I mean, I didn't need a research study, I would see it almost every day play out in court. So yeah, it plays a huge role in our juvenile justice system, the criminal justice system still. I mean, we're making improvements, but there's still so far.
00:19:39
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So let me switch gears and move us forward to when you came to Rutgers.
Founding of Children's Justice Clinic
00:19:47
Speaker
So you came to Rutgers in 2006 and you came as the co-director of our Children's Justice Clinic. So tell folks what our Children's Justice Clinic does. Well, the Children's Justice Clinic is
00:20:02
Speaker
a place in which we get to both as clinical professors and as law students to represent some of the most vulnerable members in our community. So in 2006, Professor Simpkins and I created this new clinic at Rutgers Law School to take sort of this holistic approach to representing children in our juvenile justice system.
00:20:29
Speaker
What I mean by that is we would start our representation with a child who was in our juvenile justice system or about to go into our juvenile justice system, but we had the resources and the ability to sort of also work on other issues that might be impacting that child's life so that that child would have a better chance at success once we were able to resolve this legal issue and other legal issues because usually
00:20:59
Speaker
When a child enters the juvenile justice system, it's not just that incident that's impacting this child's life. There might be education issues, there might be housing issues, there might be immigration issues. And what was wonderful about the Children's Justice Clinic is that we had the flexibility to really give this more broad effort to working with this child and of course taking the students along
00:21:27
Speaker
on this journey and really the students leading this journey to play this support role. So, you know, I got to guide countless students through this process of learning how to represent clients, but then also learning how to represent some of our most vulnerable.
00:21:44
Speaker
Yeah. One of the things that you just said that I really, that I really want to highlight is, you know, talking about the flexibility that you had because this was happening within a clinical setting in a law school. And I think that sometimes people might think, oh, well, you know, you get stuck with student lawyers because you can't get a real lawyer and can't get, you know, the best lawyer out there. But you're sort of saying that there's actually that there are benefits.
00:22:10
Speaker
frankly, to getting your representation from a clinic. Can you just expand on that a little bit more and help people understand why the representation that comes from our clinical students and from clinical students from other law schools can really be, you know, some of the best lawyering you can get out there. And there's two major things that contribute to that. One is law school legal clinics aren't restricted from sort of going beyond
00:22:36
Speaker
that one area of representation. So if you're represented by the public defender, you're going to get great representation in the criminal case, but they don't have the authority or the ability to go out and do other things outside of that area. So that's the first part of the great representation that clients can get through a legal clinic. The second thing is,
00:23:04
Speaker
Law students put in a tremendous amount of time and effort that most government agencies just don't have the time and the resources to put in. Law students will put in 20 hours, 30 hours, but we want an individual case. When I was a public defender, if I
00:23:25
Speaker
If I put in 20 hours on an individual case in the week, I would be able to represent about one-twentieth of the people I probably represent that. I can't do that. It provides this in-depth representation and it provides this ability to go beyond just this narrow scope of one area.
00:23:47
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that's something that even when people know that law schools have these clinics, they don't quite understand, particularly when you're in communities that are struggling communities, that are majority-minority communities, that are communities that are over-policed, right, which is true of where we are in Camden, New Jersey, that having that resource of clinics from a law school can be incredibly important to the community in lots of ways.
Focus on Trial Advocacy Training
00:24:16
Speaker
So let me switch again because I want to talk about eventually you sort of moved out of the Children's Justice Clinic and have become basically the trial advocacy guru of Rutgers Law School, which is very exciting for us because you're going literally all over the world, right? I mean, you've been to Kenya, to Tanzania, to
00:24:41
Speaker
China, to Ireland, just all these different places to do trial advocacy work and trial advocacy training. So first, can you talk a little bit about, you know, what does it mean to be a person who's training people in trial advocacy, whether it's working with students at the law school or working with lawyers in another country? You know, it goes back to something I said earlier, right at the beginning of the podcast, and that was
00:25:11
Speaker
sort of following my passion. And I've been very lucky in my career that every, you know, so often a new opportunity presents itself. It just, you know, either reignites that passion for me or just sort of turns up the flames even higher. And, you know, teaching was one of those things or is one of those things. And for me, you know, I started teaching when I was practicing.
00:25:41
Speaker
And I was, you know, I just, I got so energized by those opportunities. And I just, you know, after practicing and being a trial lawyer for many years, you know, I decided that, you know, the next stage in my career was, okay, I want to get this next generation ready for
00:26:02
Speaker
being a trial lawyer. I spent 16 years giving it a whole bunch and all I had during those 16 years and now the thing that was just getting me excited and passionate was getting that next generation ready to get to the front lines and do the work that has to be done to make our system work. So teaching has been just a wonderful
00:26:28
Speaker
you know, part of my career and then, you know, getting that opportunity then to travel around the world and train people all over the world was sort of that next thing that sort of ignited that passion or turned that passion up to another level because I'd spent, you know, eight or nine years just doing a lot of domestic training, which of course is also wonderful and meaningful.
00:26:54
Speaker
you know, I derive a lot of personal professional satisfaction out of it, but then sort of then having this opportunity to sort of work globally and work on systems around the world was just, it was just the opportunity to follow my passion and continue to follow.
00:27:13
Speaker
Yeah. So two things that I want to talk about now. So one is the ability to engage in settlement negotiations is a huge part of being a lawyer these days, right? Because so many cases end up settling. So first I'm going to ask you to make the case for why people still need to learn how to be good at trial.
00:27:36
Speaker
And then the second thing is, you know, sometimes what you'll hear people say is, well, I just, you know, I don't have the personality for it or it's just, you know, I don't have the skill for it. I can't stand up in front of people. I can't talk. I can't, you know, sort of do these kinds of things. And so my second question for you is, you know, do you think that great trial lawyers are born or can great trial lawyers be made?
00:27:57
Speaker
Well, two great questions. So the first question is an important question about how we think about teaching advocacy skills in the current climate. And you make a good point that, you know, more and more cases, especially on the civil side are settling. But there's a couple of things to keep in mind, even though that trend is happening. And the first thing is, there are still
00:28:25
Speaker
tons and tons of trials that go on in courtrooms around America every single day. So, you know, if you walked over to the Philadelphia courtrooms, you know, you might see a hundred, 200 trials a day going on. You know, if you go into our courts, our family courts and our criminal courts around the country, trials are happening every day, immigration court, workers comp courts. There's trials that are happening
00:28:55
Speaker
still in huge numbers. So it's not the trials have gone away. It's just certain types of cases aren't going to trial as much because of the costs associated with those. And those are generally the bigger civil cases that aren't going to trial. So certainly trials are still happening and they're happening a lot around the country. And that's also where a lot of our record students are going into those positions. They're going into public defender offices, prosecutor offices,
00:29:24
Speaker
They're becoming, you know, small firm, you know, practitioners in which they have to do a lot of different trial work. And so a lot of our students are using these skills, you know, really right out of, right out of law school. But even if you are in a situation in which you're not trying a lot of cases, but you're still in litigation, if you don't know how to try the case, it's going to impact
00:29:53
Speaker
a lot of things about how you prepare your case and how you negotiate a case. The worst scenarios that you have is when there's two lawyers who are negotiating a case and one side of it is scared to death to go to trial. They don't know how or they don't have the skills. Well, when that happens, what's going to happen to our system? We're probably not going to get the right outcome.
00:30:17
Speaker
We're not going to get the right compromise. Our system functions best. I tell the students this all the time. Our system works best when we have great ethical, professional advocacy on both sides, because then we get the right result. So that's why trial skills remain important, will always remain important, even if there is a decrease in sort of the actual number of cases that go to trial.
00:30:45
Speaker
To your second question, is there a personality, you know, that sort of helps drive the great trial lawyers? It is something that could help you in becoming a great trial lawyer if you were the person who, you know, is comfortable from the beginning, sort of standing up in front of, you know, people and talking and maybe have a little bit of theatrics in you and you can connect to a jury and
00:31:10
Speaker
Sure, are those things that can help you to become an even better trial lawyer? But I tell every student this, that what makes a good to great trial lawyer is preparation. And everybody can prepare. And so nobody should stay away from trial work if they just think, well, I don't think I have the skill set.
00:31:37
Speaker
Because you know how to prepare. You know how to work hard. You know how to understand problems. You know how to resolve problems. Well, take that skill and prepare or try. And then you can get the fundamental skills on how to try a case.
00:31:55
Speaker
And if you put those two things together, almost anybody can be a good trial lawyer. And are there certain things that will elevate certain people to being a slightly better trial lawyer that's sort of natural or innate? You know, sure, but not ever to a point where it should exclude other people from being trial lawyers because they can be just as effective and get just as good of outcomes being who they are with free preparation. Absolutely.
00:32:24
Speaker
And I would think also preparation and practice, right? Because sometimes you convince yourself that you're not gonna be good at something, but that's the whole reason why people practice and you become better at it and you become skilled at it and it becomes more of a natural fit for you. So if somebody is coming into law school,
00:32:43
Speaker
and knows or thinks that they want to, you know, be someone who's in court or they know that they're going to be practicing, as you said, you know, criminal law or family law, you know, one of these areas where being in court regularly is a part of the experience.
Advice for Aspiring Trial Lawyers
00:33:00
Speaker
What should they be doing in law school so that when they come out, they'll be as prepared as they can be as a new lawyer to do that kind of work? So what I think is to confirm that that's really what you want to do.
00:33:14
Speaker
And so I mean, there's courses and internships and externship opportunities that will give you the feeling for what it's like to be a trial lawyer.
00:33:25
Speaker
And what happens a lot is it's the other way that where people come in and they don't think that they want to be a trial lawyer, but then take a class that sort of sparks their interest or their passion and they realize they then love it. So, so the first thing is, you know, take some class, some externship, some internship and give yourself exposure to either confirm that you like it or to see if you do like it.
00:33:53
Speaker
But then, you know, our curriculum is rich with lots of opportunities to get yourself prepared to be a trial lawyer. So, you know, the most important sort of first class that you're going to take sort of towards litigation is evidence. And most people take evidence during their first semester of their second year. And then sort of building upon that evidence class, you know, you can take trial ad, you can take pre-trial litigation.
00:34:22
Speaker
you take deposition advocacy. You can take these courses that sort of
00:34:28
Speaker
directly connect to the skills that a litigator uses. Not that all of the other courses that we offer in the curriculum aren't connected to litigation. I mean, you have to have the fundamental grounding and understanding of a law, but then sort of as you progress in your law school career, you start to look for some of those courses that are working on some of those particular skills that you might use in the other world. Got it.
00:34:55
Speaker
So, as I said before, you are hands down one of the most popular and revered professors at the law school. As I like to say, probably have won Professor of the Year more than anybody else in the time that I've been at the law school.
00:35:16
Speaker
including the year when you were basically away for the entire year and taught only a week-long course and still managed to win Professor of the Year at the end of the academic year. So I think that that speaks really highly of how students think about you as a professor.
00:35:33
Speaker
What do you think it is that you do in the classroom or outside of the classroom that leads students to feel like, you know, this is a person who whose classes I want to be in. Whatever he's teaching, I want to be there. Well, thank you for all those kind words. I don't know exactly. I know a few things about me as a teacher. And, you know, I do hear some feedback from the students.
00:36:00
Speaker
And one of the things that I do hear from them, which is genuine, is that they can tell I love what I do. I show up in the classroom excited and energized and my adrenaline's pumping and I try to bring that energy to the classroom. Do I have off days? Absolutely.
00:36:22
Speaker
But about 98% of the time I can bring it. And so I think I bring a lot of that to the classroom. And I think that the students can feel that and they can recognize it. I think I also benefit from being a trial lawyer. I spent a career learning how to engage people and engage jurors and make sure they understand me and make sure they're paying attention
00:36:49
Speaker
So I take a lot of the things that I both used and learned as a trial lawyer and that I teach to trial lawyers into the classroom to keep the students engaged in the course. So I think, you know, I think those two things are important because I love the job.
00:37:12
Speaker
and students sort of understand that I love this job and I love what I do, I think they feel comfortable coming to me and talking to me and you know we discuss issues going on in their legal career and you know or in their you know law school career and so I have I also get the opportunity to have a lot of personal interaction uh with the students as well uh but you know so I think that those are the main driving things you know behind it and and I also
00:37:40
Speaker
I also probably teach in a style that's slightly different than what they've seen in their first year of law school. And it's just different. It's not better. It's not worse. But I think they probably enjoy a change of pace. And I teach in what's called a problem method. So even in larger classes, the students are sort of arguing every day these small problems.
00:38:09
Speaker
in sort of the role of the lawyer. Now, it puts a lot of pressure on them, but at the same time, you know, it starts to sort of put them in the role of a trial lawyer. So it's not a better or worse method. It's just a different method of teaching that I think sometimes gets the students a little bit energized in my classes.
00:38:29
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's definitely something to be said for a classroom where you sort of, you know, for students to be engaged, right? Most of us don't like to be lectured to over long periods of time. So something where, you know, you really get to have that interaction with students is so terrific.
00:38:46
Speaker
And I will say, as somebody who has seen you give speeches and welcome our students at Admitted Students Day or at Orientation, you're just a good storyteller. And there's also a piece to it, and I say this not in an insulting way at all, because I think it's very true of how I teach as well. You know, teaching is a performance.
00:39:08
Speaker
Right. I mean, there's an element of it that is, as you say, your adrenaline is pumping and you're standing in front of this group of people and you want them to learn and you want them to be excited. You know, you want them to be engaged and you sort of, you know, there is that sort of feeling of being a little bit like an actor sometimes in those moments. Or maybe I'm the only one who feels that way, but I feel like maybe not. I don't know. I mean, you just nailed it on the hand. Absolutely. In that.
00:39:35
Speaker
What we do in a classroom is we keep the students engaged. And we try to keep the students engaged. And one of the ways in which we do that is sort of by performing. And it's not about performing in place of substance. It's about figuring out ways to deliver that substance in a way that keeps the students engaged.
00:40:00
Speaker
I wanna talk about the course that you did with Kimberly Moran who is renowned expert on forensics and you had an opportunity to teach
Innovative Law and Forensics Course
00:40:11
Speaker
with her. So I'd love to hear about that class, how it came together and what you're doing with that class. So this was a really fun and exciting class that we've been talking about for a couple of years. So Kimberly and I started working together a few years ago because we did a lot of work in Nigeria
00:40:29
Speaker
was fascinating. And frankly, she just blew me away. She's so good and so talented at what she does. And so we collaborated in Nigeria on two different occasions. And then we talked about figuring out a way to collaborate here. So we know one thing that sort of
00:40:50
Speaker
was, you know, missing in the law school curriculum was some, a few advanced litigation courses. And one of the things that we can't get to in some of the other courses is expert testimony. We can't get through it in depth. And from Professor Moran's perspective, she wanted to give the, her students, who are most of, or many of them going to be expert witnesses down the road,
00:41:17
Speaker
the opportunity to interact with lawyers and to be examined by lawyers and prepared by lawyers to give testimony. So we sort of overlapped two different classes, sort of an advanced trial act class with her, you know, forensic science class. And we created this course where everybody worked together. And so everybody learned sort of the fundamentals of forensic science.
00:41:44
Speaker
And the law students then learn how to prepare, to direct examine, cross-examine expert witnesses. And then the forensic students learn how to be expert witnesses throughout this process. So it was just a wonderful collaboration, which I got to learn a lot. I know the students got to learn a lot about and demonstrate.
00:42:07
Speaker
That is so great. And those opportunities, I mean, because of the work that I do, which straddles, you know, bioethics and other things, you know, I've had the opportunity to be able to, you know, teach medical students and that interdisciplinary work is so enriching sometimes for the professors as much as for the students. So that's a really wonderful opportunity. And do you feel like that you all will continue to have collaborations like that?
00:42:33
Speaker
Absolutely. Our hope is to do it in person the next time we get to do it. It was challenging having to make some of the last-minute changes because we went remote, but we think that bill went really well. But yeah, we hope to make it a regular offering and a regular collaboration going forward.
00:42:52
Speaker
I love that. So I would say that you are a person who is, and I say this because I think we're sort of a little similar in age, that you're somebody who's not junior, but you're also not somebody who's towards the end of a career.
International Work and Future Plans
00:43:07
Speaker
So you've definitely got a lot of years ahead of you. And what do you sort of imagine for yourself over the next several years? I mean, you've had so much success in what you've been doing, so much success as a teacher, so much success in the past as a practicing lawyer, so much success as a trainer of lawyers. So what's next for you?
00:43:30
Speaker
I think right now, I feel really passionate about continuing to do the international work that I've been doing in the last few years. This wasn't intentional by any stretch of the imagination, but about every sort of seven or eight years of my career, there was a new thing for me that added on to what I was doing that really got me excited.
00:43:55
Speaker
And I was sort of, when the pandemic hit, I was sort of in the middle of doing this international work. It was really exciting to have the impact that we were having on an international level and to be able to work with legal systems that were still developing and creating and having an opportunity to work with those governments to shape their legal systems.
00:44:22
Speaker
really brought a lot of excitement to my personal and professional life. So once we get beyond this pandemic, you know, I think that that's something that I'm looking at doing, you know, continuing to do for the next 10 years and thinking about maybe ways to start to engage law students in some of this work and in some of this teaching that I do. And in terms of the next sort of publication I'm thinking about doing is I'm thinking about writing a book that is
00:44:52
Speaker
more general that can be used more easily in other countries. So the book that I've written on, Trial Advocacy with Steve Lubette, we use that book internationally, but there are some things in that book that don't apply to certain parts of the world. You know, so if I'm working in Tanzania, the chapter on jury trials is meaningless to them because they don't have jury trials in Tanzania, right?
00:45:22
Speaker
So I think, you know, that's going to sort of go hand in hand with, you know, continuing to do, you know, some of this international work. Well, that sounds exciting. And I'm looking forward to hearing about, you know, your travels once we can travel safely again. And, you know, it's just an enormous pleasure to have somebody like you on our faculty and as, as one of my colleagues. So thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. I really appreciate it and really enjoyed speaking with you, JC.
00:45:51
Speaker
Thank you for the experience and thank you for all the wonderful work you continue to do for our law school. We make you proud to be a Rutgers professor and certainly proud to be your colleague. Thank you. Awesome.
00:46:12
Speaker
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