Helping Law Students to Understand US Supreme Court Oral Arguments: A Planned Experiment

The transcripts of oral arguments before the US Supreme Court provide interesting opportunities from the viewpoint of legal education. As the pinnacle of legal argumentation, they illustrate, often in dramatic fashion, a sophisticated process of concept formation and testing driven by skillful posing of hypotheticals. Yet it is not easy to get beginning law students to understand the arguments and the underlying processes of hypothesis formation and testing. We introduce a novel project with the dual aims of developing an AI model of concept formation and testing as well as an intelligent tutoring system for beginning law students We describe a planned experiment in which we will evaluate to what extent law students’ study of the Supreme Court oral arguments can be improved by providing detailed and specific selfexplanation prompts. It is hypothesized that detailed prompts to explain connections between tests, rationales, dimensions, and hypotheticals will help students to induce ad...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ICAIL
• Authors: Vincent Aleven, Kevin D. Ashley, Collin Lynch
• Keywords: Concept Formation, ICAIL 2005, Law Students, Oral Arguments