Professor Howard L. Smoot

Professor Howard L. Smoot is a law professor who measures legal education by its usefulness to people with real problems, not by its prestige. In Rudy Baylor’s account, Smoot’s commitment to public service is sincere, but his courses and advice also reveal how easily legal instruction can become detached from practice: students are urged to help for free, while the people they meet look to them as if they already possess the wisdom of experienced lawyers.

Identity and Teaching

In his early fifties, Smoot is described as a kindly, somewhat disorganized academic, with a crooked bow tie, bushy hair, and red suspenders. For twenty years he has taught courses that few colleagues want and few students choose, including Children’s Rights, Law of the Disabled, Seminar on Domestic Violence, Problems of the Mentally Ill, and a course informally called Geezer Law. He once proposed a course on the rights of the unborn fetus, but controversy followed, and he took a sabbatical.

Smoot’s teaching priorities put him at odds with the career ambitions that dominate law school. He believes students arrive with idealism and a desire to serve, then spend three years in fierce competition until many care chiefly about securing the right firm, making partner, and earning well. His own exhortations to forsake money and work without charge are part of that critique. Rudy recognizes its force even as he finds Smoot’s lectures boring and admits that he himself has come to hate law school and feel uneasy about legal practice.

Work at Cypress Gardens

Smoot brings students to Cypress Gardens Senior Citizens Center to meet people with legal problems, making the course a first encounter with clients rather than an exercise confined to lectures. The center’s older residents gather there each day for a hot meal, songs, and company; on the day Rudy describes, many have hearing aids, some use wheelchairs, and several are already drowsy after lunch. The setting is informal and demanding in a way the classroom is not: the residents’ attention turns the students’ legal identities into an expectation that they can help.

At the gathering, Miss Birdie Birdsong introduces Smoot and his students as visitors who will listen to residents’ concerns and offer free advice. Smoot appears genuinely pleased to be there, despite the dreary surroundings and the small class that remains. He takes the microphone and gives a broad talk on matters including health care, budget cuts, living wills, tax exemptions, elder abuse, insurance payments, Social Security, legislation, nursing-home regulation, estate planning, and medication. His range reflects the course’s practical purpose, though the lecture runs long enough that residents begin to nod off and one watches the time.

Smoot does not treat the sparse response as a reason to withdraw. He thanks the group, promises to return, and sits at the table while residents approach the students for individual consultations. The contrast between his earnestness and the sleepy audience gives the scene its ambivalence: he is devoted to the work, but good intentions alone cannot make legal advice easy to give or ensure that a roomful of prospective clients will respond as students might expect.

Teaching Through Practice

The consultation session exposes the difference between appearing nearly qualified and knowing how to guide a client. Rudy, still a law student and terrified by his first real client conference, sits with a legal pad and an expression meant to look intelligent. Smoot’s course has put him in front of people who rely on that appearance, even though his practical experience is limited. The setup makes the students’ education reciprocal: they are meant to offer help, but must also confront the limits of what they know.

The class is an elective worth only two credit hours, requires little work, and has dwindled from eleven students to four after a month. Smoot’s constant appeals to serve without pay contribute to the attrition in Rudy’s telling, while the course’s low demands also helped attract Rudy in the first place. That mixed response makes the class a pointed example of the gap between public-service ideals and the incentives law students actually face. Smoot keeps bringing students to real people; the institution’s status system makes that work easy to dismiss.

Guidance to Rudy Baylor

Later, Smoot discusses the Black family’s dispute with Great Benefit after Rudy gives him a three-page case summary and proposed strategy. Rudy recommends that the family contact a trial lawyer and pursue an insurance bad-faith action; Smoot reads the analysis carefully, expresses strong approval, and agrees with the recommendation. His response gives weight to the legal direction Rudy has reached, even though Rudy is still a student and the case has not yet been filed.

Smoot also reviews Rudy’s work concerning Miss Birdie’s proposed revised will. Rudy tells him that she is comfortable and wants to remake it, then presents a five-page document. Smoot scans it quickly and says it looks fine without examining its contents closely. He knows Miss Birdie from years of student visits and is surprised to learn she is wealthy; Rudy withholds further details, including that she is about to become his landlord. The episode sets Smoot’s generosity and trust beside the limits of a cursory review: his approval is encouraging, but it is not a thorough examination of the document.

Significance

Smoot is neither a celebrated strategist nor a polished lecturer. His importance lies in the work he continues to value when the surrounding culture prizes lucrative employment and advancement. At Cypress Gardens he puts students in direct contact with elderly residents; in his office he takes Rudy’s case analysis seriously and endorses a public-interest route against a powerful insurer. Together, these moments make him a practical advocate of legal idealism, while Rudy’s account preserves the friction between that ideal and the imperfect teaching, limited attention, and career pressures through which it must operate.