Couching her comments in "left brain vs. right brain" terms, she urges professors to encourage students to see the big picture rather than just memorize details. Not only should they learn about precedents in case law, they should also try and understand cases where judges put aside precedents and forged new ground. She argues that remaining socially relevant requires that "we re-think and re-brand the theoretical and practical skills’-sets that we teach."
To her credit, Franzese calls her hemispheric rhetoric "metaphorical," as new research shows there are fewer real differences between the two halves of the brain than previously thought. But some specializations are true. Jing Luo found, for instance, that solving problems that resist straight reasoning but require an "aha" moment of insight to reach a solution engage the right hemisphere in ways that linear, computational problems do not.
This is perhaps what Franzese is getting at when she refers conceptual thinking as being "out of the box and integrative." The classic out of the box experiment is the nine-dot problem (click the link, I'm not going to explain it here), but I think she's getting at more than simply stepping outside a situation or looking at it from a different angle. She wants students to use "empathy, story, symphony and meaning" to make connections between legal texts that are less than obvious, to not only know the law but to see through it and walk around in it, to deliberately seek out different aspects and gain insights in the process.
It's interesting in this respect to note that the act of insight and that of empathy both involve the same brain region, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), half of which is dominant for emotion and the other half for critical thinking. It seems fitting that this one region should be so heavily implicated in both kinds of thought. One might say, to paraphrase an old saying, that emotion is thinking, and thinking is feeling, and in the ACC the twain doth meet. Not necessarily a right-left notion, but something to think about.