The Purpose of Those Three Years of Study in Law School

Many get used to law school, but they never did believe that the Socratic method and the weird casebooks were a sensible way to teach people. What really kill their motivation, however, is the fact that there seems to be no good reason for making them go through the three-year program before they could become a lawyer. We heard lots of different theories on why it was necessary, but they do not hold much water.
 

1. To Help You Choose Your Legal Specialty?


You must not 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. This is not exaggerating. It's possible to be very uncertain about your place in the legal system after three years of law school. There is 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.

2. To Help Employers Determine Who's Worth Hiring?

If the LSAT is designed to predict your performance in the first year of law school, and if legal employers choose you on the basis of that first year, why not skip law school altogether and cut out the middleman? It seems like the LSAT people could cook up an exam that would tell employers the same thing that the first year of law school tells them. Law professors might say that their classes provide a better "screen" of your ability to practice law than any standardized test can, but it's not true, and anyway, if it were, one would have to ask, men, why we need a standardized bar exam.

There are real problems with placing much faith in the screening value of law school grades: school grades as an indicator of your abilities. And there's probably some merit to that. But it doesn't take three years to detect aptitude and motivation:

"What firm has not regularly bemoaned that law school does not prepare students for the practice of law? Yet we are willing to take flaw school grades] as strong evidence of how they will perform in practice. Am I missing something, or does that not make a whole hell of a lot of sense? And who is making these evaluations for us? By and large, professors who... are likely to have little appreciation of what it takes to be a successful practitioner."

Many suspect that a lot of the emphasis on grades comes from a basic desire, on the part of the attorneys who do the hiring, to cover their rear ends. If they hire someone with great grades, they can't be easily criticized if that new lawyer turns out to be a bozo, whereas if they take a chance on someone who was mediocre in law school, and that person does poorly, all the blame will come back to the lawyer who made the hiring recommendation. It's a long stretch from there, however, to the assertion that your law school grades will give employers a reliable indicator of your ability to practice law.

Even without any 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 prof 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, there are many 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 mat, 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 There is, as you'd expect, a link between students' motivation to study in law school and their belief that they're involved in a rational program of study that uses sensible teaching methods. {Professional Education, fn. 42, pp. 37-38.) Besides, law school is expensive enough that a lot of people just don't have any option but to work part-time during their upper-class years, and sometimes even during their first years in law school, (See Kramer, fn. 38, pg. 275.) and more stress in third-year law students than in first-year students.