What were you trying to teach us? I know one of your goals was to teach us to be lawyers, not just to think like them. I think you tried to accomplish that by a) trying to teach us the federal rules, b) trying to teach us to be good story tellers or c) trying to teach us how to use the Internet as a story telling tool.

Clearly, I hope one of your goals for this class was to impart some knowledge about the substantive body of evidence, or the federal rules. I do however believe that that was only tangentially related to what you were really trying to accomplish. The truth is, I probably learned a lot more "black letter law" evidence in reviewing the multiple choice questions in preparation for the exam than I did sitting in class. So I figure, if it was your intent to impart "textbook evidence", you probably were not successful in my case. But, then I thought, if I am able to do that on my own, you must have expected that from me, given your many years of teaching at HLS, and thus, that was not your driving intent.

This probably means that as far as the substance in evidence is concerned, I believe you were more interested in getting us to se how they operate in practice. This view partially explains the courtroom videos and the guest speakers.

Why all the guest speakers? Could it be because you felt they were on the cutting edge of the use of evidence in the legal sense? Or just because they were your friends? I ruled out both of the reasons mentioned above? Then it occurred to me. The reasons for inviting all the guest speakers was to present us with the various ways that stories could be told. Your goal must have been to teach us that in evidence and in law, just as in other endeavors in life, it is important to tell the best story. It was all about story telling, wasn’t it? Why else would you bring in both side of A Civil Action - Dr. Greenspoon to talk about medical marijuana (by the way, he was very effective) - Peter Berkowitz - and others. Why else would you want us to tackle cases such as impeachment, MK Ultra and others - it was to see if we could tell effective stories for our point of view, wasn’t it? I believe that one of your goals was to teach us that the federal rules(in the context of evidence) were not there to be applied mechanically, but that we need to focus more on using creativity to get our story told. This brings me to the other thing I think you were trying to teach us.

In line with trying to tell the best story possible, I think you tried to get us not to focus on only the "traditional" media to get our stories out, but rather to explore all media available and then use the medium that we believe would yield the best result.

To that end, I think that you were particularly interested in getting us to see the internet as a medium that could be very effective in telling our stories now and in the future.

One other item was that if we really believe in something or an issue, we should not shy away from them because they are controversial or could lead us to ridiculed.

After Dr. Greenspoon’s presentation, it occurred to me that it was possible that one important thing you wanted us to get out of this class was that there was a great future for marijuana use for medicinal purposes. But upon further reflection, I concluded that it was only a minor goal.

As you said at the beginning of class, you goal is teach us to be lawyers, not just how to think like lawyers. To that end, I believe you attempted to teach us how the federal rules are applied in practice, keeping in mind how to work with the rules, within the rules (and maybe around the rules) and to use of storytelling to accomplish our goals. You probably also tried to impart to us that we should explore all mediums to get our stories across with an emphasis on the internet as a new useful medium. Medical use of marijuana was not a major goal.