There should be an increased awareness that the "distress" many law students experience is not limited to how students feel.  Isolation has important academic and institutional repercussions as well. Institutionally, this isolation results in uneven testing and a potentially inaccurate, skewed grade distribution for all students. 

     Additionally, isolation can especially burden minority and other non-traditional students, causing them further prejudice. [Isolation] often leads to poorer grades regardless of academic ability. This is because exam grades do not necessarily measure ability. Instead, to a large extent they may measure who has access to the essential survival information which is not generally taught in the first-year classroom. Moreover, not only can isolation prevent minority and non-traditional students from a fair assessment of their actual academic ability, but isolation may also disproportionately impact minority students' job opportunities with law firms and law school academic appointments as well. Thus, if perpetuated by law schools, isolation in fact fosters continued long-term segregation in the legal and academic communities

     [This] article explores the problem of isolation in law school, particularly as it affects minority and other non-traditional students. It challenges the assumption by most law schools that once a student is admitted into law school she competes on a level playing field. Ostensibly, the playing field is level because as a result of the standardized first-year Case Method instruction, presumably all students have roughly equal access to the same type and amount of information upon which ultimately they are all tested. Consequently, it is assumed, students with superior knowledge of the material and greater ability will perform better and receive higher grade. [However] those assumptions are no longer valid.   [This article] moves from the research on isolation and academic performance and explores the voluminous new research on learning theory and "methods" instruction. [Unfortunately], much of the disparate research on psychological and academic isolation, as well as the new research on learning theory and methods instruction has been conducted in a vacuum, without sufficiently acknowledging the interrelationship of each separate branch.

     Using a wonderful phrase borrowed from another discipline, [this article] urges the law academe to acknowledge its own educational "Methodolatry" which is evidenced by an unwavering devotion to Langdellian Case Method instruction. It urges the law academe to relinquish this methodolatry and fashion a new hybrid approach to first-year instruction. This new approach produces better law students and ultimately, much better practicing attorneys because students are fully grounded in the skills of learning how to learn, as opposed to simply learning what to learn. 

     Specifically, this Article confirms that in fact, isolation is the worst counselor. It also suggests that it is only by abandoning an outmoded methodolatry that we can begin to move law students to the subterranean, bountiful river of information that currently exists beneath, atop, or outside most of their experiences as law students. 

     Ultimately, there are three goals for this Article: first, to refocus on isolation as a root cause and not merely an effect of psychological distress; second, to use a new model, "Creating a Context for Pedagogy" to provide a working bridge between learning theory and methods research; and third, to illustrate how undergraduate and law school ASPs successfully integrate all of the disparate research in the three areas of isolation, learning theory and methods instruction. Consequently, the ASPs provide a greatly enhanced learning environment, particularly for minority and other non-traditional students who tend to be the most isolated.

 

First, isolation produces profound academic and institutional ramifications in addition to psychological ramifications; 

Second, law schools must acknowledge that frequently they neither "test what they teach," nor give the proper type of feedback that is required for successful learning; 

Third, the institution must recognize that its own Langdellian methodolatry promotes psychological and academic distress; 

Fourth, that potentially all students suffer needlessly as a result, but that non-traditional students are likely to suffer much more acutely and as such, the institution may unwittingly promote continued discrimination and segregation even beyond its law school corridors; 

 Fifth, that a just and fair-minded educational institution should not make grades, prestigious appointments and future job opportunities dependent upon the mere fortuity of access to the river of survival information; and 

Sixth, that a new instructional approach--one that brings students to the river of information--will genuinely free many students psychologically and educationally, and thereby move them from isolation to empowerment and autonomy