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Teaching law at West Point.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

As the nature of military missions changes, both the law curriculum and the law faculty's teaching methods at the U.S. Military Academy must adapt to meet both the professional and academic needs of cadets. We have addressed the former by balancing the courses in the legal studies program according to their dominant academic or professional orientation, and the latter by introducing a "diversity" teaching method, adapted from a proposed approach to first-year law school instruction, to develop the critical thinking skills required of Army officers.

Introduction

Law has been taught at the United States Military Academy at West Point for over 180 years. Like all academic disciplines at the Academy, its purpose is help achieve an overarching goal: "to enable its graduates to anticipate and to respond effectively to the uncertainties of a changing technological, social, political, and economic world" (Office of the Dean, n.d., 6). In the past decade, the academic curriculum, along with the physical and military components of the four-year education and training program at West Point, have changed significantly in order better to achieve this purpose. No longer required to follow an almost exclusively engineering curriculum, cadets must now balance their four-year course load equally between mathematics, sciences, and engineering courses on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on the other. More recently, besides the required thirty-one "core" courses that all cadets must take, cadets are now able to pursue academic majors, including (since 1999) law and legal studies.

A challenge faced by the Department of Law since then has been how best to design an undergraduate program and teach the subject of law to the roughly one thousand cadets each year who take the one core course in law--Constitutional and Military Law--and to the sixty cadets who choose each year to major in law. On the one hand, these cadets are college undergraduates. Most will not become lawyers, but an understanding of law and its role in the nation and the world, as well as the analytical and communication skills derived from the study of law, are important assets for leaders in any field, including military leaders. On the other hand, as future Army officers, cadets need the professional knowledge and skills necessary to perform the numerous legal tasks required of military officers. These include decision-making responsibility in areas such military justice, environmental law and regulations, labor law, government procurement, and international law.

The legal studies program must therefore address both the "academic" and the "professional" aspects of teaching law to cadets that are implicit in the Academy's overarching academic goal. As used here, the term "academic" refers to courses that have an orientation towards the theoretical understanding of law and...

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