I've always found the term "Socratic Method" to be interesting, as it usually just means that they ask a lot of questions, using them to make the students demonstrate knowledge of the material and defend or abandon their ideas of what the meaning of the law is. From my philosophy classes, however, I remember Plato's Socrates was using questions more like a prosecutor, as a way of rope-a-doping the interlocutor to make him say something contradictory or unreasonable, and then Socrates would knock him out.
If you take Socrates at his word, I think he is sincerely trying to find answers. He asks a question that he really wants to know the answer to, but then sees potential flaws in the answer, so he asks more questions to test the strength of the answer. Even though he ends of "knocking out" his interlocutor, I think he would prefer to get an answer that holds up to scrutiny.
I think the value of good Socratic questioning is to get the student to examine his assumptions and to learn to think more deeply. However, it can easily become an intimidating bullying session if done incorrectly.
As applied in law school, the idea is that the professor never answers a question or makes a direct statement of his own. It's difficult to bully someone in that situation. Granted, IME some professors were better than others at abstaining from interjecting their own claims directly. But from a pedagogical perspective I'll take the professor who bullies over having to sit through hours of lectures. At least he has to work for it, and students quickly learn the score.
One of my professors with whom I would have disagreed most vehemently when it came to contemporary social, political, and even legal issue was eminently capable of sticking to the method. Never once, IIRC, did he answer a question (posted by himself or a student) or directly interject a statement of law and its application. His Constitutional Law course was most memorable (and cherished) for the way he challenged me and everybody else. He also taught a seminar, Jurisprudence Readings, that was popular enough that other professors would enroll. In my class the readings were Plato's Republic and Laws. One professor left after a few classes, quite obviously because he was frustrated by the strict Socratic Method. This professor kept trying to interject his interpretation of other Plato and Xenophon works to try to "correct" the direction the class discussion was going, but the professor leading the seminar wouldn't have it. This student-professor was visibly annoyed on occasion, which felt a little uncomfortable. (I wonder if he felt "bullied". Perhaps it didn't occur to him that he wasn't the only well read student.) I took one of his classes the prior semester and wasn't surprised; he didn't apply the Socratic Method very rigorously in his class, which was closer to a traditional college course where both lecture and class discussion closely tracked the narrative of the textbook.
I did see what one might call bullying in law school, but it wasn't tied to the Socratic Method, per se. The Socratic Method requires that each and every student come to class prepared, having at least read all assigned material. "I don't know" isn't an answer; you at least have to be able to say something like, "the material said [insert reference], but I didn't understand how it applies". If you can't do that, you obviously didn't come prepared and some professors will call you out on it. Likewise if you're called in class and can't respond because you've lost the context. A law degree still means something these days precisely because students, especially 1Ls, are flunked out of school.[1] And you can't cry you weren't warned. Good professors give you ample, unambiguous warning in public.
[1] Not because you didn't respond properly in class. For most classes your grade is entirely determined by the final exam. But precisely because you're not typically graded on other assignments, the professor is doing you a favor by keeping the pressure on during class. Sometimes you could have easily aced a course simply by cramming a couple of weeks before the class; sometimes not. Neither you nor the professor can be sure, and in any event if class time is to have any value everybody needs to be engaged.
> The Socratic Method requires that each and every student come to class prepared, having at least read all assigned material. "I don't know" isn't an answer; you at least have to be able to say something like, "the material said [insert reference], but I didn't understand how it applies". If you can't do that, you obviously didn't come prepared and some professors will call you out on it. Likewise if you're called in class and can't respond because you've lost the context.
This was the most valuable part for me; it required you to a) have actually done the background material, b) be engaged enough in the classroom to follow the context of the discussion, c) to be able to form an opinion even if you did not have one, and d) to be able to consider the merits of an alternative opinion.
These are fundamental life skills, especially so in the legal profession, and in my opinion form the basis of engaging with other people as people: understand their context, engage with them in discussion, consider what they say, and be willing to share your thoughts.
In the dialogues that I've read, the things Socrates tries to figure out are the big questions that possibly don't actually have correct answers, so a disappointing outcome is seemingly inevitable. Also, they are actual attempts to solve these big questions, not to teach something that the teacher already knows the answer to.
If you're using the socratic method to help someone discover how they can apply an if-statement to execute a section of code conditionally, then you're working for a different purpose and to solve something much easier than Socrates was.
