“Professors Montcalm and Milburn-Knizner offer this sound, if counterintuitive, advice.
TLP;DR: The Truth About Gen Z Law Students & Why They Need More, Not Less”
Publication forthcoming in The Albany Law Review
MEGAN MONTCALM, Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University
Email: montcalmm@duq.edu
APRIL MILBURN-KNIZNER, Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University
Email: milburnkniznera@duq.edu
“They can’t read!” “They can’t write!”
Educators—including law professors—across the country have made a virtual cottage industry of bemoaning the skills deficiencies they perceive in the typical Gen Z student. You hear it in faculty meetings, read about it in academic journals, and the popular media hypes it too. While it undeniably is true that law students today are entering their first-year classes with weaker critical reading abilities, shorter attentions spans, and less stamina and endurance for rigorous study than cohorts in the past, this is far from their whole story.
Gen Z students are smart. They are achievers. As a generation, they care deeply about issues of social justice and change. But, like all generations before them, they are products of the society and schools that raised them. Their early (and ongoing) access to smartphones, reliance on screens for reading, endless rounds of standardized testing, and more, have shaped who they are today, and how they learn. As legal educators, we must keep pace.
As Gen Z students stream into our classrooms for the next decade or longer, we must move beyond asking, simply, “Who is the Gen Z student?” We must start asking, “Why?” And, most importantly, we must ask ourselves, “What are we going to do about it?”
We are not the first to write about the unique characteristics of the Gen Z student. (Nor will we be the last!) But this article contributes uniquely to the current literature by taking a deeper look at Gen Z’s formative experiences and how they have shaped a generation’s critical reading abilities and academic study skills. Further, this article offers concrete and practical adaptations to the current law school curriculum.
First, when teaching the new skill of critical case reading, law schools should return to the hard-copy, print resources used by Gen Xers and Baby Boomers. Online reading resources should, of course, not be abandoned entirely (we do care about trees!), but students should be trained to use them in a purposeful way. Second, law schools should assign unabridged opinions, which should be read together in class, and across the curriculum. Third, law schools should incorporate “pleasure pedagogy,” and strive to make law school a place where students remember—and remain enthusiastic about, and engaged with—the reasons why they decided to go there in the first place. Cases always will be a cornerstone of legal education, but discussions of current events should return to the classroom. And, finally, law schools should counsel students more explicitly about the negative impacts that technology, including smartphones, social media and generative artificial intelligence, can have on their learning.
In short, when today’s Gen Z students respond to law schools’ demands with “TL;DR,” we should answer by giving them more, not less.
