Journal of Legal Education (Association of American Law Schools)

Gerber, Paula

O\u27Hara, Claerwen

English

Teaching Law Students about Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status within Human Rights Law: Seven Principles for Curriculum Design and Pedagogy

Bowman, Mary Nicol

Legal Writing as Office Housework?

Watkins, Dawn

Guihen, Laura

Using Narrative and Metaphor in Formative Feedback:  Exploring Students’ Responses

Glater, Jonathan D.

Law School, Debt, and Discrimination

Greene, Susan

751
Knitting 101:  
Why Law Professors Should Share 
their Hobbies with their Students
Susan Greene
I begin each year by asking my first-year law students in my legal writing 
class to submit a one-page answer to the question of what makes each of 
them happy. In addition to a stealth assessment of my students’ writing skills, 
this assignment also allows me to open up a class conversation about the 
importance of maintaining those things—be they human relationships, animal 
relationships, hobbies—throughout the upcoming stresses of 1L year and the 
lifelong pressures of practicing law. We revisit this assignment at the end of the 
year, and I again remind my students not to lose sight of the elements of their 
lives that make them unique and bring them a sense of happiness.
My students who write about a hobby bringing them happiness are 
in good company. Maintaining their hobbies will bode well for them over 
their careers as students and as lawyers. Law students have selected a career 
path with the inauspicious distinction of generating among the most highly-
stressed professionals.1 It is also a career that requires mental focus, clarity, 
and creativity.2 A hobby advances all of these goals, kickstarting creativity by 
allowing a wandering mind to see a new angle, easing depression and stress, 
even lowering blood pressure.3 Hobbies confer the added benefit not only of 
nurturing better, more productive lawyers, but of providing the perspective 
that being a better, more productive lawyer is not everything.4 And for law 
students who have long been motivated to be “the best” at any given task, a 
1. “[B]etween 21 and 36 percent [of lawyers] qualify as problem drinkers, and [] approximately 
28 percent, 19 percent, and 23 percent are struggling with some of level of depression, anxiety, 
and stress, respectively.” Nat’l task Force oN lawyer well-BeiNg, the Path to lawyer 
well-BeiNg: Practical recommeNdatioNs For Positive chaNge 7 (2017). Lawyers also 
suffer from high rates of clinical disorders, 
2. Susan Greene, Slow Lawyering: How Law Practitioners Can Slow Down in a High-Speed World and Why 
It Matters 43 l. & Psychol. rev. 1 (2018).
3. Jaya Saxena, The Case for Having a Hobby, N.y. times (May 10, 2018), https://www.nytimes.
com/2018/05/10/smarter-living/the-case-for-hobbies-ideas.html.
4. Id.
Journal of Legal Education, Volume 68 Number 3 (Spring 2019)
Susan Greene is an Assistant Professor of Legal Writing at Brooklyn Law School.
At the Lectern
752 Journal of Legal Education
hobby allows them to relax into, say, a game of basketball, without the pressure 
of trying to be the number one draft pick for the NBA.5
Yet for many students, adrift in a sea of outlines and anxiety over the 
pressures of being a law student, cultivating a hobby or even developing a new 
one seems a luxury in time and energy that they cannot afford. Therefore, it is 
incumbent upon law professors to lead by example. I do this very informally, 
talking with students about my own hobbies as a quiet reminder that personal 
pastimes merit a place in any busy schedule. I have had conversations with 
students about yoga, meditation, running, the books I read for pleasure, 
and knitting. While each of my own five preferred hobbies carries interesting 
parallels to the practice of law and teaching, it is knitting whose resemblance 
is the most stark and is the one that has been the subject of my most thought-
provoking conversations. A knitting workshop could dovetail nicely with 
my legal writing courses, because four axioms hold true across stitches and 
memos: (1) you cannot start without a plan; (2) pace yourself over the course 
of your project; (3) sometimes the little things are the big things; and (4) no 
two results will ever be the same. 
You cannot start without a plan. A successful knitting project requires a tremendous 
amount of planning—patterns, sizing, measurements, number of skeins, and 
more—before ever casting on the first stitch. Likewise, before tapping the first 
letters of a memo on a keyboard, my students must plan out how they will get 
to the final product. This involves both big picture planning: research, write, 
edit, edit again; and a more granular plan: jurisdiction, keyword searches, 
IREACs, and more. To start writing or knitting without a plan means you may 
know neither where you are going nor how best to get there.
Pace yourself over the course of a project. Like many knitters, I have any number 
of half-knit scarves and disembodied sweater arms languishing in a basket, 
patiently awaiting the return of my attentions. My best knitting projects, 
meaning the most enjoyable experiences of creating and the best finished 
products, are those through which I work with a calm, steady, sustainable 
pace. Stitch, stitch, stitch. Frenetic stitching at a frenzied pace is unsustainable 
and is often followed by periods of stagnation. I can always tell from looking 
at a finished project where I rushed stitches and where I took a break. Seamless 
knitting derives only from steady pacing.
So too must my law students establish and maintain a steady pace to their 
study of law to achieve success. Rushing one area, be it writing a memo or 
outlining for a class, causes anxiety while doing the work and diminishes the 
likelihood of success. At the beginning of each writing assignment, we have 
a class discussion on pacing—assignment due dates, interim work, estimated 
lengths of time for each piece—and then a post-mortem at an in-person 
conference after the writing assignment has been submitted. My students are 
5. Id.
753
astonished when I can point to a section of a memo and ask if they wrote it at 
the very end with less time than they had for other sections. As with knitting, 
the rushed areas tend to show. 
Sometimes the little things are the big things. The knitting work about which I 
grumble the most is the finishing work at the very end, like weaving in the 
edges. Likewise, it is the citation forms and final grammar checks that seem 
to most irritate my students and at times, get ignored entirely. Perhaps this is 
because, after completing the lion’s share of the work and, particularly, the 
most intellectually challenging parts, there is little energy left for the more 
simple tasks. Yet those seemingly simple, final tasks carry outsized weight, 
because they are the first thing an outside eye will notice. A dangling string in 
the middle of my hat or a citation to the wrong reporter in the middle of an 
analysis section will distract the outside observer from the hard work that went 
into the piece and suggest a sloppy approach by the creator. 
No two results will ever be the same. Knitting recently became a political statement, 
when pink hats resembling cat ears6 appeared atop the heads of scores of 
Americans. Pink yarn and a basic stitch predicated each, yet much like the 
individuals who made them or wore them, each hat was a bit different from the 
others. I think of this diversity each semester, as I hammer formulas for writing 
into my students’ heads: IREAC, thesis paragraphs, components of a rule 
explanation; and even more so during those assignments for which I provide 
a closed universe of cases from which to work. Twelve semesters of teaching 
later and I still wonder, will I get forty memos that are mostly the same? Yet 
somehow, like hats knit from the same stitches with the same color yarn, each 
resulting memo is unique and bears some mark of its writer’s individuality. 
6. Nicole Brodeur, Pussyhat Production Causes Run on Pink Yarn, the seattle times (January 10, 2017), 
https://www.seattletimes.com/life/lifestyle/pussyhat-production-causes-run-on-pink-yarn/.
Knitting 101


Knitting 101: Why Law Professors Should Share their Hobbies with their Students

Merritt, Deborah Jones

McEntee, Kyle

Gender Equity in Law School Enrollment: An Elusive Goal

Meyer, Philip N.

Davis, Caitlin A.

Law Students Go to the Movies II:  Using Clips from Classic Hollywood Movies to Teach Criminal Law and Legal Storytelling to First-Year Law Students

Weresh, Melissa H.

Assessment, Collaboration, and Empowerment: Team-Based Learning

Tiscione, Kristen K.

Building Bridges Across Curricular and Status Lines: Gender Inequity Throughout the Legal Academy

Guthrie, Chris

Lamm, Emily

The Aid Gap

Not a member yet

Teaching Law Students about Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status within Human Rights Law: Seven Principles for Curriculum Design and Pedagogy

Legal Writing as Office Housework?

Using Narrative and Metaphor in Formative Feedback: Exploring Students’ Responses

Law School, Debt, and Discrimination

Knitting 101: Why Law Professors Should Share their Hobbies with their Students

Gender Equity in Law School Enrollment: An Elusive Goal

Law Students Go to the Movies II: Using Clips from Classic Hollywood Movies to Teach Criminal Law and Legal Storytelling to First-Year Law Students

Assessment, Collaboration, and Empowerment: Team-Based Learning

Building Bridges Across Curricular and Status Lines: Gender Inequity Throughout the Legal Academy

The Aid Gap

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