The Law School Study Made Attractive

Not all law students were lighthearted. But even the most serious ones turned their attention to extracurricular pursuits in their upper class years. For the better students, there were the demands of the Law Review and of other legal journals. Some devoted their hours to clinical programs, going to court on behalf of the poor, as I probably should have done. One classmate would step out of classes every now and then to call his broker and buy or sell gold futures. Another one arranged an impossible schedule in which she took her law school classes in the morning, worked at a law firm in the afternoon, and taught two classes at a community college at night, while commuting from Staten Island and devoting weekends to her dachshund and her doctoral work in astrophysics.




My own extracurricular activities included getting elected to the student senate and starting a war with an authority on grammar at Student Lawyer, the ABA's magazine for law students. We were fighting over, would you believe, the proper use of the word "only." That's right. There's this word, the word "only," and the question is whether you can put it after, rather than before, the word it modifies. I mean never mind.

It started with a letter from me to this grammar authority, and quickly reached the point where she was writing articles, for every law student in the U.S. to see, in which she said things like, "Woodcock so muddles facts and logic that only a full scale response will do," and "This is one of the many fine distinctions Woodcock managed to miss." I got in a good last word, though, in which I said she was losing her grip and implied that the magazine's editor had to be asleep at the wheel to let her publish this crap. I wrote a letter about it to William Satire, the language columnist but, judging from his reaction, he may have thought that I was on drugs.

I don't know. Hey, this battle soaked up some time I would otherwise have wasted on Corporate Taxation or something, and it made me temporarily famous. A lot of my friends mentioned it. One classmate the type who liked to hang out in the jurisprudence section of the library even seemed proud of me.

Even without such extracurricular interests during your upper class years, you'd naturally lose interest in the nonsense of the Socratic Method and that daily classroom grind. Having survived the first year, you know the shortcuts, and you know you can make it. In the words of one professor who mourns his loss of power over students.

The irregular attendance, poor preparation level, and disinclination to participate in class discussion demonstrated by so many third year students are the subject of constant complaint."

As an upperclassman, when the professor asks, "How many fingers am I holding up?" you're tempted to reply, not with a number, but with another question, such as, "Up what?"

Those last two years are not really a time of leisure. You still have to work. And that's not entirely bad. I, and others who had resisted some of the craziness of first year, found that, during these upper class years, we were able to take elective courses that interested us more, and our most harshly competitive classmates bothered us less.

Other aspects of the situation were worse, however, and perhaps that's why we partied so intensely. In the first year, you're working hard, but you haven't yet been proved to be second best. In the third year, by contrast, your mediocrity is established. And at the same time, you now have to grapple with how you'll fit into the cold, cruel world, which is approaching you at an altogether unpleasant speed.

There was the definite feeling that, as one law professor puts it, those who do the best on exams adopt an air of "presumptuous self-importance,'' while the more average students frequently feel worthless, isolated, and detached. Despite the partying and escapism, or perhaps ultimately because of it, the little known fact is that there's significantly more stress in third year law students than in first year students.

The Purpose of Those Three Years of Study
I got used to law school, but I never did believe that the Socratic Method and the weird casebooks were a sensible way to teach people. What really killed my motivation, however, was the fact that there seemed to be no good reason for making me go through this three year program before I could become a lawyer. I heard lots of different theories on why it was necessary, but they didn't hold much water.

To Help You Choose Your Legal Specialty?
I don't doubt for a minute that spending three years in law school can introduce you to different areas of the law. But it's a limited introduction. You won't get much of a feel for real-life legal practice from your law professors, many of whom have no such experience. Studying geology does not make you a coal miner, and the study of law doesn't seriously initiate you into legal practice.

You do get some experience from your brief summer jobs. It's a start, but it's probably not enough to tell you for sure whether you'll even like being a lawyer, much less which kind of lawyer you might be. This is why many law firms rotate you through different areas of the firm during your first year of practice, letting you sample each of them before you decide where you're going to settle down.

Law schools certainly can claim that, during those three years, they increase your understanding of the law. But the fact is, three years of anything will make you more knowledgeable about law than you were before you started. You could be a pig farmer for three years and learn as much about the real-world legal profession as you'll know after law school.
You'd get up in the morning, slop the hogs, and then spend a couple of hours each afternoon going to different courts, doing paralegal work for various kinds of lawyers, and reading things that directly answered your questions. I'm not exaggerating. It's possible to be very uncertain about your place in the legal system after three years of law school. There's no substitute for hands-on experience.

In short, if law school is intended to help you plan your future, it's not exactly an outstanding success.