Reflections
By Patti Alleva*
June 30, 2019 marks the conclusion of Professor Patti Alleva’s 32
years at the University of North Dakota School of Law. To honor her
professional contributions, the law school hosted a celebration reception on
Homecoming Friday, September 21, 2018. Interim Dean Brad Myers
invited Professor Alleva to open the event with remarks of her choosing.
The Baker Courtroom audience included current and former justices and
judges of the North Dakota state and federal courts, practicing lawyers,
law students and alumni, Webb family members, faculty and staff from
both the law school and university communities, and friends of Professor
Alleva’s from in and out-of-state.
The North Dakota Law Review has included a print version of
Professor Alleva’s talk – titled Wholeness: Thoughts On Law
Teaching, Lawyering, and Living – as part of a special tribute in
Volume 94, Issue 2. We encourage you to read Professor Alleva’s entire
essay, but with the Law Review’s permission, featured here are excerpts
from that piece (with renumbered and abbreviated footnotes). Professor
Alleva divided her remarks in two. In Part I, she stressed the significance
of teaching to self-awareness as a professional attribute central to helping
students to consciously account for the multiple dimensions of professional
decision-making. In Part II, Professor Alleva talked about what being
a teacher of law has meant in her life and shared some personal thoughts
prompted by her upcoming transitions.
Part I
In these times of resource constraints and curricular readjustments,
it bears emphasis that we must not lose sight of the importance of
teaching to the “whole person” that each student is and will become
as a practitioner of the law.1. . . [Ultimately, this critical goal] is
perhaps best facilitated by . . . putting [students] in realistic lawyering
situations, either actual or simulated, so that they must not only
think like lawyers, but also act like lawyers and feel like lawyers, and
experience what it really means to connect the dots between legal
doctrines, practical skills, and ethical values to solve client problems
in a holistic fashion.2
So, in learning how to make comprehensive sense out of the client’s
situation, it is vital that fledging lawyers bring to bear what Law
Professor Anthony Kronman has called “a wisdom that lies beyond
technique – a wisdom about human beings and their tangled affairs
that anyone who wishes to provide real deliberative counsel must
possess.”3 As Kronman suggests, it is one thing to have a technical
grasp of the legal issues raised and quite another to be a lawyer who
can discern and account for the human and social dimensions of the
client’s problem which inevitably surround and color those technical
legal questions.4
6
THE GAVEL
Professor Alleva on the
UND campus in Fall 2014.
Enter here – the student as whole person. To best prepare students
to make integrated professional judgments with wisdom beyond
technique, we must find places across the three years of law
school to engage them as whole persons – preferably, as part of
an intentional and graduated sequence of touchstone learning
opportunities exploring the synergistic nature of professional
decision-making.5 We must provide safe learning spaces for
“teaching from the inside out” – that is, for demonstrating to
students the professional imperative of going inward to self-reflect
and to deliberately draw upon not only their learning about legal
rules, but the fullness of their life experiences, the fullness of
who they are – using, as [Law] Professor [Curtis] Berger [has]
so powerfully described, their heads and hearts, their intellectual
and emotional perceptions, their legal and non-legal insights
and instincts, in order to understand and solve legal problems
holistically. . . . After all, we are humans who happen to be lawyers,
not lawyers who happen to be human. Drawing from the depth and
breadth of who we are grounds our advice in what we know about
each other as fellow human beings – arguably, the wellspring of
empathetic understanding and compassion.
So, in engaging the whole of who students are, and helping them to
bring wisdom beyond technique to legal problem-solving, we must
expressly encourage them to keep in conscious touch with what