Hot Bench: Professor Corts ’11

Interviewed by: Samuel Koeppel ’28 (bjp4zx@virginia.edu), Benvin Lozada ’28 (benvin@virginia.edu), and Alexis Pudvan ’28 (nrt9un@virginia.edu)

Thanks for sitting down with us! To start, would you mind introducing yourself? What do you do here at the Law School, and what's your history with UVA?

For this academic year, I’m the Visiting Professor of Legal Research and Writing, and I was a student here from 2008 until 2011. During my time at UVA—the first time around—I was a legal writing fellow for my 2L and 3L years, and a senior fellow in 3L. So I would say I have a pretty long history with the legal research and writing program at UVA.

Before law school, you were an actor. What part of your acting career do you think prepared you best for law school?

Three different things jump to mind. The first is: Shakespeare was on to something when he said that all the world is a stage. There's a sense in which I would argue that all of life is a performance. So the performance of law school—in some ways, I would say that my acting career prepared me for that. I think one of the most underappreciated ways that an acting background can prepare you for law is being able to empathize and put yourself inside the shoes of another person.

Also, when you're an actor, one of the first things they teach you is to suspend disbelief and to try to live truthfully under the imaginary circumstances that you're in. As applied to law, that helps, because sometimes you're dealing with clients who have done things that, ethically, you don't agree with. But the idea is that you suspend your own judgment or your own value system—you're not passing judgment. You're really just trying to listen and take it in and understand the world as it exists, in the life of the law or the life of the case.

One more underappreciated thing is that when you're an actor, you have a script, and you have to differentiate yourself from the other actors who are reading from the same script by having a very clear point of view. I think that it's an underappreciated aspect of law. In a sense, the law is the script we're all handed. We're all playing from the same resources. And so learning how to bring those resources to life is very much a creative act.

What part of the Law School has changed the most since you went here?

Oh, this is so embarrassing. The first thing that popped into my head is that this time around, I am not nearly as lost, insecure, or confused. I'll just own that, but here's the kicker: I'm not sure that I knew that I was lost and confused the first time, as I was going through it. But now, certainly, what is so rewarding is how much hasn't changed.

The physical space has changed in interesting ways, too—there are random new stairwells that now exist that weren't there before. I'm aesthetically-minded; I appreciate the work that's been done

What's one thing about the Law School that you're happy to see has not changed?

Oh, that's easy. The people, by far and away. The thing that I loved about UVA Law the first time around was the relationships I was afforded with other students. The faculty also blew my mind away with the extent to which they were available to students. Now, some of those faculty are still here, and I’m able to reconnect with them in a new way. I think UVA attracts really interesting people and has been doing it for a long time now, and that I love.

How do professors in legal writing choose the issues we're writing memos and briefs about?

The problems that I'm working with this year are not ones that I created myself. These are ones that I inherited from Ruthie Buck ’85, who was an icon in the field and who was truly one of the most beloved professors here. I can say, in general, there's an art to it. You start by thinking about the instructional design of your course and what skills you want to give students an opportunity to practice and learn. You're looking for a problem that is complicated enough with the rule side or the law side of the equation that you've got a lot to work with there. Then you also want to make it factually interesting, to encourage analogical reasoning. We need to learn how to compare facts that are similar, distinguish on the facts, things like that. So I would say it's a hybrid, but it all flows from the instructional objective that you have: What skills do I want to teach?

If you could change one thing about the legal profession, what would it be?

Two things jump into mind. First, I want more lawyers committed to the rule of law. Second, I would change legal education, the way that we teach law. I would be open to some rethinking of the way we train law students. It doesn't have to be hugely disruptive, but I would tweak some things.

What do you think is the biggest change that we can make to produce better lawyers? How do you try to emulate that change in how you teach students?

Historically, we have really emphasized thinking like a lawyer. And there's no doubt that needs to happen—it's a huge part of the equation. But I do think that there's some more that we can do, which has to do with the values that lawyers need to hold and the skills that lawyers need in order to practice law: manage people; manage time; manage technology; regulate emotions; assume leadership in the community; assume leadership of firms; run a firm as a business; communicate effectively in civil ways. There are lots of skills that are corollary to the practice of law that matter in the life of a lawyer, but are not the skills of legal analysis and writing.

Which do you think is more stressful: the opening night of a show or oral arguments?

Opening night of a show is so much more stressful because there are so many more variables that the actor has to deal with. The lights can go wrong. The set can go wrong. The props could not be there. You could forget a line. Somebody else could forget. There are so many ways that things can go wrong.

Opening night is also the night when the reviews are about to all come out. Yes, it's true that in an oral argument, you get real-time feedback from the judges. But in my opinion, reviewers and the general public who are online writing and critiquing everything that they see are far more anxiety-producing. There's so much respect built into the law, and a judge is going to speak to the attorney with more respect than a reviewer of an actor is ever going to show.

And as a final question: Westlaw or Lexis?

Oh, that's easy. Westlaw is just my preference. I'm not saying that it's better at all. It's just the one that I've always used. And there's something about sticking with the one that you've always used.