Your first few weeks of law school can feel like moving to another country where everyone speaks a slightly different language—and you need to be fluent by midterms. Perhaps that’s why Stetson looked to a venerable institution from the UK’s legal system to help 1Ls connect with each other, their professors, and the profession: English Inns of Court.
In this first episode of a two-parter, we sit down with Stetson Law Professor Timothy Kaye, one of the program’s inaugural “benchers”—i.e. faculty mentors—to discuss how Stetson’s Inns program got its start, the system’s British origins, and how the program cultivates a more thoughtful and immersive approach to the study and practice of law.
Transcript:
Speaker 2 (00:02.862)
People want to know what it means to be a lawyer. so obviously a lot of that comes through the curriculum. So you learn how to think like a lawyer, how to reason like a lawyer, how to write like a lawyer. But you're also part of a legal community and there's a set of values and ethics which go with that. It's not simply joining a ready-made community with a set of values and you have to buy into everything already. Sure, there's a baseline set of values which you have to buy into, but beyond that,
When you join this community, you're essentially reconstructing it. You're deciding what values are important and how it should respond to the challenges of modern society and modern life.
This is Real Cases, a legal podcast presented by the Stetson University College of Law. We'll sit down with Stetson Law faculty and students to examine today's critical cases and debates in environmental, international, elder, and business law, plus the role of social justice in these fields. Join us as we open the case file.
I'm Daniel O'Keefe, Master of English Literature from Indiana University. This episode is the first in a two-parter about Stetson's Inns program, which began in the fall of 2023. It's based on the tradition of English Inns of Court, which are professional associations for barristers with roots stretching back to the Middle Ages. Stetson's Inns connect first-year students with faculty and student mentors and with one another via small groups that gather together for formal and informal social occasions
led by a faculty bencher and supported by a 2L or 3L student reader. We'll explain more about the terminology in the interview. In this first episode, we sat down with Professor Tim Kaye, one of the inaugural faculty advisors for the program. A graduate of the University of Warwick in England, Professor Kaye teaches torts, advanced torts, products liability, remedies, jurisprudence, and technology issues in law practice management.
Speaker 1 (02:07.628)
I asked them to give me a broad overview of the program's goals and how it differs from typical first year orientation.
Yeah, so I think the traditional way of welcoming new students to law school is to say, welcome to law school on the first day, maybe we'll take you through a mock class. And then after the first day or the first week, it's basically sink or swim after that.
And so what we decided was that this is a rather strange way of welcoming new students because you put a lot of effort into trying to recruit them in the first place and making the place sound welcoming. And then we just essentially keep our fingers crossed that Stetson is indeed as welcoming as we say without actually putting any direct effort into making it welcoming.
So the Inns are really an effort to expressly make Stetson more welcoming, but also to do it in a way which isn't simply about saying, you're part of a new community, here's a nice social event to go to. So it's about welcoming them not just to a new campus, but to a professional organization, to a professional set of ethics, to a professional community.
Could you tell me a little bit about that, about the professional aspect of it? What about the program reinforces?
Speaker 2 (03:33.75)
Well, essentially, people want to know what it means to be a lawyer. so obviously, a lot of that comes through the curriculum. So you learn how to think like a lawyer, how to reason like a lawyer, how to write like a lawyer. But you're also part of a legal community. And there's a set of values and ethics which go with that and a way to conduct yourself. And it can be as simple as replying to emails in a timely fashion and writing.
emails in an appropriate fashion. It's also things like when you get an invitation to a particular event, if you say you're going to make sure you're actually going. And if something turns up that means you cannot go, then to let the person know as soon as possible that sorry, intervening circumstances mean that things have changed. But it's also about the values of the profession. So
that is to say the values of the profession as a working professional. So things like the value of the rule of law and the idea that we are a society that values rules rather than the authority of particular individuals. So there are certain things about being a lawyer which are important and which need to be understood. Now there are course there are are aspects of being a lawyer which
are contested. People have different views about how lawyers should behave, how formal they should be, for example, how they should treat different sorts of clients. And the other thing that we try to do is to get them to think about those things so that they are paying some attention to what sort of lawyer they want to be. It's not simply joining a ready-made community with a set of values and you have to buy into everything already. It's
Sure, there's a baseline set of values which you have to buy into, but beyond that, when you join this community, you're essentially reconstructing it. You're deciding what values are important and how it should respond to the challenges of modern society and modern life.
Speaker 1 (05:50.722)
I really like that what you said just now about the fact that you're reconstructing the profession once you become a member of it. And I think that very often people, when they're outside of a profession or especially when they're looking to enter it but haven't yet, they kind of think of it as being a monolith, right? That there's a set way of doing things. And once you're inducted into that, you understand how everything works.
I like the idea that people need to be brought to the state where they are professional and they understand it. They understand it well enough in order to think about how to interpret it and to think about how to let, like you said, to reconstitute it themselves.
Exactly. mean, one of the things that some attorneys get very upset about is that the legal profession is the butt of various jokes. But I think you have to think about, why is it the butt of various jokes? And some of those jokes are maybe exaggerations, and you might think that they're unfair, but some of them have roots in truth.
And so you should be really thinking about, do I want to join a profession that behaves like this? Maybe there's something here that we need to improve.
So the Inns program is pretty new. It started in the fall of 2023. So tell me, what was it like when you and the other professors were starting it up for the first time?
Speaker 2 (07:17.198)
Well, it was quite nerve-racking, to be honest, because we were all doing something that hadn't been done before. And one of the hallmarks of the program is that each of the inns, so in the first year we split the incoming first year group into eight inns, and each of those inns is essentially run by a senior professor whom we call a bencher.
And one of the ideas was that the benches should all stamp their own personality on their ends. So it wasn't meant to be one corporate top-down approach. It was meant to be the law school, the College of Law thinks that this idea is important, but there are many different ways of being an attorney. As I just said, you're about reinterpreting and reconstituting the community of lawyers. And so it's important that each of us stamps our own personality on our
into essentially show students that you can be members of this profession while some people are extroverts and some people are introverts and some people are really keen on writing and some people are really keen on how you stand up on your hind legs and argue advocacy and so there are lots of different ways to be a lawyer and so it was really about
seeing how the students reacted to each of us doing our own thing, which was, was very interesting.
And is it a situation where students get sorted into the Inns and they find their way through it or do they pick them at the start of their first year?
Speaker 2 (08:52.33)
They're completely randomly sorted. yeah, there's a mix. And while I say completely randomly, we try to make sure there's a good mix of races and genders. But there's no we don't we're not looking for a particular person to go in a particular in we're not looking for people who've expressed a preference or for a particular type of law or who have particular interest to go in a particular it no everyone's meant to be spread about.
I feel like the decision to have senior faculty members sort of imprint their own unique personality on each house is, it seems to me like a good way of building a certain sort of esprit de corps among.
each of them. Yes, within the Inns, each Inn is broken down into what we call tables, which is a group of typically six students. And each of them has a reader who's a second year, sometimes a third year, but usually a second year student who's, and now we can use people who've been through the Inn experience as readers. Obviously in the first year, we couldn't do that. So the idea is that the people on a particular table get to know the other members of that table particularly quickly.
And we call them tables because they literally sit at a table together. So it's a group of people who by default will get to know each other because they're sitting on that table right from orientation and regularly then when the Inns meet again. Now that gives them a sort of core to fall back on. And as you say, the students don't...
don't normally know each other before they arrive at Stetson. They may have very different interests and here they find themselves with five other people who they're going to spend quite a bit of time with at the beginning. And what I've noticed in my inn is that that table relationship remains remarkably strong into the second year. So the students who in my Inn were on a particular table have remained extremely close with the members of the rest of that table.
Speaker 1 (10:55.384)
That's nice also that it gives them connections right away with people who are in there, who are past their first year.
Yes, well one of the things that we were very conscious of is that when a new cohort of students comes into the College of Law, they're separated into sections, which works fine for the first year, but then into the second year, there are no longer any sections and people are now mixed up. And lots of people feel sort of cut adrift because the people that they were used to being with now are taking different classes they might never see them.
Whereas this way the inns do not follow the sections. So the inns essentially cut across the sections. have, so in the full-time group we now have four sections. So each of those four sections is represented in the inns. And you will have different people in the inns, from different sections, different people from different sections on each table. So that once you get into the second year, even though you're no longer with your section,
you still have a group of students who you know really well and it's likely you're going to have classes with these people from time to time because it's not section based. So it gives them some sort of anchoring. It gives them a feeling that they're still part of a community. They haven't sort of been cut adrift in the second year, which I think was happening quite a bit before.
The sections that you mentioned that they initially get grouped into but that go away after the first year. Could you tell me a little bit about how those work?
Speaker 2 (12:27.822)
Well, the sections are simply for academic purposes. So I teach tours and we have what 280 students in the full time program in the first year. We can't have 280 students in tours. So instead they're broken down into four academic sections and each of those forms essentially a class. So I teach one section of 70 and three of my colleagues will teach each of the other three sections in tours, but that section will stay.
in place for all the first year subjects. So whether they're doing contacts or civil procedure or constitutional law or thoughts, if they'll be in the same section for each of those classes in the first year. Otherwise scheduling would be impossible. It means that we can put people in classrooms together without too much difficulty. But then in the second year, there are no mandatory classes. So the sections then go away.
I see. Okay. So this gives them a chance right at the outset to start to form connections with people who aren't necessarily in. Yes. Okay. Interesting. So tell me a little bit about Inns of Court in England. What are they? Where did they come from? And how was Stetson's program modeled off of them?
Yes.
Speaker 2 (13:41.226)
Yes, the Inns of Court in England arose in the Middle Ages, really. So you have to remember that England at that time was very difficult to travel around. So there's basically dirt tracks everywhere. And that meant that if you wanted to be an attorney in England, you would have to find somewhere to live in London, because the only permanent site for courts was in the capital in London.
Courts would travel around as we called it then on circuit from time to time. That's where we get the term circuit courts from. But essentially the courts only sat permanently in London. So that would mean that if you were an attorney you needed a place to stay. So there are lots of attorneys looking for places to stay. So people started to open hotels for attorneys and essentially they would gravitate to certain hotels or inns.
And these inns became the places for attorneys to overnight and obviously also to eat. But because they were populated essentially only by attorneys, it also became a place where they learned from each other. Because there were no law schools in those days. You learned by watching, you learned by osmosis. So you were in a legal community and there was plenty of drinking. There were inns after all.
and alcohol loosened the tongues and so you learned lots of things because people would talk over meals.
Could you talk a little bit about what does that system look like today in the UK?
Speaker 2 (15:23.534)
Oh, even today, these inns play a significant role for barristers, not for solicitors who are different sorts of lawyer. But there are four inns. And if you wish to qualify as a barrister, even today, you have to eat 12 dinners. So it's part of the qualification. So you have to go through law school, you have two years of post law school experience to go through, you have to take a bar exam, but you also have to eat 12 dinners.
And the reason for that is precisely what I said, that you are going to be eating dinners with your peers and with experienced barristers. And the idea is that over dinner, there lots of conversation will be had and you will learn lots of things. And it also is a socializing event, of course. So you get to know people, you get to see how they behave, you get to understand what it means to conduct yourself as a barrister.
And so Stetson has really copied that model. So we have lots of dinners, we have lots of lunches, we have other events which are around food and sometimes drink as well. And the idea is that people then have some time to sit down and talk to each other and you get to learn. I know that from my own experience, I learned more in my law degree.
by talking to fellow students outside of class than they probably did in the classes. the classes were, I'm not criticizing the professors, the classes were great. But afterwards you talk to your fellow students about what happened in class and about what they said and did they mean this or did they mean that or why doesn't this work or what did you make of that? And so it seems to me that...
American law students have got to a stage where that's not that's sort of frowned on. They don't really talk to each other about law. Currently, that's not how it was when I was a student. We did. But the ends give them permission to talk to each other about law. So in in my, in my mind, they're really reintroducing the experience that I had informally as a law student, we're making it more of a formal thing.
Speaker 2 (17:37.922)
But the students are now there and talking about law, which most of them generally don't do outside of the classroom.
Mmm, yeah.
You know, I try to eat dinner pretty much every night, so does that mean that I'm, at this point, ready to practice law in London?
well, if you have dinner with an attorney, maybe.
Could you tell me a little bit about some of the typical hurdles that students tend to experience in their first year that you feel like this program helps them deal with?
Speaker 2 (18:03.752)
the
Speaker 2 (18:15.63)
Yes, I mean, there's the obvious one that the institution is very different from any college experience they've had before. So that's obviously disorientating. And students often have come from different places. And I don't really need to go into those in detail. I think everyone's experienced those even going to college or whatever those experiences are similar. But I think a particular one for law school is that students come to law school
with a very, or at least some students come to law school with a very particular expectation. When you go to college, I'm not sure that you've necessarily got a particular expectation because you're not really sure on which major you're going to do necessarily or how that's going to work out. But I think people come to law school with a very specific idea of what it entails. And they might've got that from movies, they might've got that from a family member.
But then they come along to Stetson and while in some cases it is what they expected, particularly if they've had a family member recently come to Stetson like a brother or sister, often it's very, very different from what they thought it was going to be. And I think that's quite a shock for lots of them. In particular, I've noticed quite a few students who have family members, older family members who've been practicing for a while.
thinking they want to go and work in the same field and they come and study and decide they absolutely hate that field. And then that's very disorientating. And it's a big problem for them if they want to talk to their relative, whether it's a parent or an uncle or whatever, they've now got to say, I don't really want to come and work in your law firm. And I think that that's a problem and quite a few of them have. I think the other thing is that it's
a bit of an eye-opener for people who maybe haven't been paying that much attention to news and current affairs. And so you can't really be a lawyer without paying attention to those things, because the law has to respond to all the things that are going on around us. And I think that's quite a shock for lots of people to realize how life is for people other than them. mean, everyone's experienced their own
Speaker 2 (20:38.766)
their own things and experiences that they learn about other people have been through may be very different.
topic of students deciding what area of law they want to go into. Could you, let's talk a little bit about your background. What was your experience like in law school and how did you make some of the decisions that you made about what areas of law you wanted to study?
Well, I did my law degree as my accent suggests back in England and England like most countries around the world has law as a first degree not as a graduate degree. So I did my law degree from the age of 18. So that's very different from what people experience here. And people ask me does that mean it was very different? And the answer is the curriculum wasn't really that different.
But I think the attitude was different and maybe not in the way that most Americans would expect. So I think that when I say this to most Americans, they think, well, it's 18 year olds probably didn't take it very seriously. And that's true up to a point, because I think Americans sometimes take it a bit too seriously and it's not good for their mental health. But I think that the main thing is that
there aren't the rites of passage involved. So when you come to law school, there are lots in the US, there are lots of tales of how bad it is. And people seem desperate to terrify new law students with tales of how appalling going to law school is. And then I think after you've been there a while, I don't think it really is all that terrifying.
Speaker 2 (22:25.676)
Whereas when I went to law school as an 18 year old, there were no such stories. So people weren't terrified. It was all, yeah, we've chosen to do this. This is fun. We now no longer have to do the high school curriculum, which involves some subjects we don't really want to do anymore. We can come and study a subject that we're looking forward to and where people are going to treat us like adults.
And so I think that that was a big difference. I noticed that is very different from the experience of the students that I go through, is that they look a lot more sort of weighed down by expectation and burdens which really shouldn't exist because law school really isn't that bad.
Yeah, I remember when I was a kid I wasn't especially interested in law school but I had always heard those stories about look to your left, look to your right, one of you wasn't going to pass or horror stories about people ripping out pages from library books to prevent their classmates from being able to read the materials they needed for a test or things like that.
The good news though is technology has overcome that problem. So you can get most of what you need now online so people can't go ripping out pages of books. At least that, I have seen that happen, that's true. But yeah, that was years ago. So it's not really a problem anymore.
So I know you teach in a few different areas of law, but you mentioned torts before. Would you say that's mostly what you specialize in?
Speaker 2 (23:59.788)
Yeah, I would say so. Yes. I mean, I teach talks every year and I do products liability too. So, and I've written books on both. yes.
Yeah, so what got you into torts?
well, initially back in the UK, when I was a professor, I started off teaching contracts and in the UK, if you teach contracts, you're normally expected to teach taught to, which isn't how it works here, but in the UK took contracts. Teachers would normally teach taught. So I started teaching taught because that was just the expectation. but then taught became what I did more of.
And that was mainly institutional requirements to start with. But then other events took over and it became my major focus.
And what brought you to Stetson?
Speaker 2 (24:58.772)
I was at a conference in Oxford in England and there were two other professors there from Stetson and I gave a paper and I criticized somebody else's paper and the professors came up to me and said, well, you seem really good to us. Would you be interested in a job in America?
you
So I said, I don't know, never really thought about it. And they said, well, can introduce you to the dean who's here on her way to a study abroad program, and she'll tell you about the job we have in mind and tell you how to apply. So that's what I did.
How did, was it the first time when you moved here, was it the first time that you had ever lived in the United States? How did you, I feel like the transition from England to Florida is a big one. How did you feel about the move?
Yes.
Speaker 2 (25:51.918)
I think it was a bigger one for my family. I don't think it was such a big one for me because after all, I'm still doing a similar sort of job. And yes, I had to learn different cases to teach and I had to get used to new colleagues, but it's essentially the same and the same thing. So I think for me, it was probably not that hard. My son's a tennis player, actually a tennis pro now. And I think that he had no trouble either.
He got off the plane, thought, is nice and warm, I can play tennis all the time. And he was transitioned okay. But I think for my wife and daughters, it took a bit longer. Yeah.
One area you teach in is technology issues and law practice management. Could you, could you tell me a little bit about that and what drew you to that?
Yeah, must be about 15 years ago now. Stetson did not have a journal in advocacy, which seemed a bit of an omission since we're typically ranked number one in advocacy by US News and World Report every year. So some students in the advocacy program approached a colleague to create a journal.
and she approached me because she wondered whether we could do it a little bit differently from a traditional journal. So your traditional law review is a hard copy publication, which people write very long, rather dull articles for. And these law reviews get sent around to various law libraries and nobody reads them. That's what happens.
Speaker 2 (27:32.686)
But some careers depend on getting published in them on a regular basis, even though very few people read them. And her view was that she didn't want articles not being read and why did they need to be long and boring? So she and I discussed how we could do this and we decided it'd be better if we could have the Law of the One Line instead.
and make the articles a bit shorter and snappier because you don't want to be reading 50 page article online. You want to be reading something shorter. And also we'd have a different target audience. So we were thinking more of targeting professors who teach advocacy, sure, but also people who are practicing. So people who are in court who would learn new techniques, which now they're out of law school, they might not know about. So
We thought this was a good idea and we worked out a program, what would you say, a work process for editing the articles and producing the relevant copy. And we had someone in the universities, the College of Law's public relations department, who was going to put them online for us. So that seemed like we had everything worked out. And then the person who was going to put everything online got a better job offer and left.
And so we were left with a work process, which was fine up until the last part where there was no one to put them online. So I had to learn pretty quickly how to do that. And then from there, I got interested in it more and more and started to learn how to aggregate people's code or edit it a little bit. And eventually I learned how to code. So
Yeah, so now I can write lots of different code. spend a lot of my time writing code. I've written things that the university uses, that we have database systems, which I've written for the university. We have the online law review. I have a publication publishing house, which is all online, which I've created. A colleague and I have built an award-winning website called Tri-File, which simulates e-filing in the federal court system.
Speaker 2 (29:48.462)
And in teaching, I specialize particularly in teaching how to design and maintain websites that are accessible to people with disabilities. So what people don't realize is that you can use a website even if you are unsighted, but obviously you can't use a mouse. So everything has to be done through a keyboard and you use some special software which reads what's on screen to you.
But you have to make sure that when you code the website that it's coded in a way that the screen reader can understand. And so that's what I teach because people are very concerned that it looks good, but it might be that it doesn't work for anyone who can't use the mouse.
Yeah, yeah.
So a classic example of that would be, say there's a form that somebody needs to fill in to apply for something. It could be applying for a grant, or it could be applying for a job, or whatever it is. And so if you have a mouse, you can go into the relevant fields in the form and submit the form. Well, if you're not clear on what you're doing, you might actually make it impossible for somebody who can't use a mouse to complete that form.
I teach people how to make sure that they, when they do things like that, that the forms that they build can be filled in by somebody who's using only a keyboard.
Speaker 1 (31:18.21)
Definitely seems like when it comes to the law that that issue takes on a particular level of urgency too.
yes. Well, it's particularly important if you're a higher education institution or if you're offering a public service. So there have been plenty of lawsuits against both types of entities for having websites which effectively deny people access to the services that are meant to be there because of their disability, which is a clear breach of the Americans with Disabilities Act. So it has significant legal implications.
One of the things that I do in that class is I take people through ordering a pizza. It's a nice simple way of showing the problems. And I compare two different pizza companies. And one has a site where it's clearly relatively straightforward to order a pizza. And the other one has a site where it's pretty much impossible to order a pizza.
Could you tell me a little bit also about product liability law?
Well, that involves things like faulty vehicles, drugs that cause unintended side effects, or sometimes side effects which are known about but the information has been suppressed. It contains essentially anything which could do you harm, which is product. So food poisoning would be a classic example too.
Speaker 2 (32:47.906)
So it's essentially anything like that. I mean, you're using some computer electronics now. If they were wired up in such a way you could get an electric shock from, that would cause a perhaps liability case.
Well, Professor Kaye, thank you so much for being here. On the next episode, we'll continue our discussion with Dean Ann Mullins, Professor Kristen Adams, and with a recent Stetson Law grad, Mariana Monforte, to get a variety of perspectives on how the Inns help new students adapt to law school and grow into their professional personas. This has been Real Cases. Thank you for listening. Check back for more episodes about an array of legal topics presented by the Stetson University College of Law. Learn more at stetson.edu.
Topics: Real Cases Podcast
