Prof shares what he didn't learn in law school

By Judy Lin

Stephen Yeazell has three words recapping his experience of teaching.

"I love it."

An ardent quest for knowledge hinged to a passion for sharing what he has learned have led him to the subject of his upcoming Faculty Research Lecture, "What's Not Wrong With the Civil Legal System — and What Is."

The David G. Price and Dallas P. Price Professor of Law, Yeazell recalled his college years at Swarthmore as the period when his "impulse to teach" first emerged. Following a master's degree in English and comparative literature from Columbia University, Yeazell took a job teaching junior high school students in New York City.

"The first year of teaching junior high school was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life — including unloading boxcars, which I once did," Yeazell said. "Yet by the time I'd been doing it for a couple more years, it was exciting, and I began to see how someone could do this as a career for a lifetime."

Yeazell went on to law school, receiving his J.D. from Harvard and in 1975 joining the UCLA School of Law faculty, where his talent for teaching has been recognized with the Rutter Award for Distinguished Law Teaching, as well as the campuswide Award for Distinguished Graduate Teaching.

Along the way, Yeazell found himself talking to alumni and to lawyers in practice, asking them about "what really mattered to lawyers — who wins, who loses, who pays."

In his Faculty Research Lecture, one of the highest honors bestowed by the UCLA Academic Senate for distinction in research, Yeazell hopes to explain what he's learned about the dynamics of civil litigation.

His lecture will bring together three sources that often don't intersect: litigation statistics, lawyers' accounts of their practice and the trade press. Yeazell said that his research has caused him to question many of the things he thought he learned as a law student.

For example, he said, "the typical assumption that I had in law school — and that I think a lot of laypeople have — is that if you're involved in a lawsuit and there's an insurance company involved on the other side, the insurance company will spend the plaintiff into the ground."

In reality, he said, "that turns out rarely to be the case. In fact, some insurance companies are keeping their lawyers on such tight leashes that they believe they cannot adequately represent the people they're supposed to be defending."

And on the other side, he said, "the plaintiffs' bar is not your grandmother's plaintiffs' bar. When I went to law school, no one dreamed that the attorneys general of 20-some states would hire, on a contingent-fee basis, plaintiffs' lawyers to sue the tobacco industry."

Yeazell will describe how these apparent anomalies fit together into the pattern of modern civil litigation in his lecture on April 12 at 3 p.m. at Freud Playhouse. See details.