The First Year of Law School

Remember those horror movies in which somebody wearing a hockey mask terrorizes people at a summer camp and slowly and carefully slashes them all into bloody little pieces. That's what the first year of law school is like. Except that it's worse, because the professors don't wear hockey masks, and you have to look directly at their faces.

At first it's not so bad. You get to read a semi-interesting medieval case in which somebody says, "Forsooth, were it not that Birnam Wood had come to Dunsinane, I would unseam thee from the nave to the chaps." But the honeymoon ends when you have to go to your first class.


The professor has a black belt in an ancient martial art called "the Socratic method." This form of mayhem has nothing to do with the technique by which Socrates gently sought to have his students teach themselves the truth hidden inside each of them. The only connection that the law school version of the Socratic Method has with education is that it teaches you to hate the sound of your own name. After the professor completely dismantles a student for sheer sport and humiliates several dozen others, he then points out forty-seven different things in the two-paragraph case that you failed to see and still don't understand. You leave class hoping that maybe there is still a job opening at your brother-in-law's toothpick recycling factory. You learn why law school has been compared to a besieged city: everybody outside wants in, and everybody inside wants out.

The professor usually calls on a different student each day. However, Professor Charles Thaddeus Terry, who taught at Columbia at the turn of the century, once called on the same student every day for four months because of the liveliness of the response. This is a true story -- Lawyer's honor.

To enable them to call on students, professors require students to sign an enormous seating chart. A student might try to avoid getting called on by not signing the seating chart, but this is not a recommended strategy. She will discover that throughout the semester other people-who are also hiding from the professor-will persistently, sit in her "empty" seat instead of in their own seats. So students have devised other ingenious methods to reduce the chances of getting called on-like writing their names upside-down, or in infinitesimally tiny letters that can be read only with an electron microscope. Assuming that professors will avoid calling on names that are long or difficult to pronounce, students with common names sometimes elaborate their names-as in "Michael Brown-Momrath-Outgrabe-Okefcnokee-Endoplasmic-Reticulum-Stratford-on-Avon, Jr." However, students who do this should be prepared to have their professor call them something slightly less elegant, like, "Hey, you in the blue shirt." Lastly, some students write the name of someone else--usually a prominent jurist-instead of their own on the seating chart. Rumor has it that someone named "Billy Rehnquist" has flunked out of countless law schools for attending classes but never taking his final exams.

Many students write "case briefs," or one-page summaries of the cases, before class, in case the professor calls on them. This is a good strategy if you have the slightest aversion to utter humiliation. The brain is a truly wonderful thing: it works from the instant you awake until you go to sleep, and it doesn't stop until the moment you are called on in class, when it suffers a complete and immediate core melt-down. You feel like Curly of the Three Stooges: "I try to think, but nothing happens." Your professor and 150 other students are waiting patiently for you to state the facts of a given case, and the only sound in the room is a low gurgling rattle coming from the back of your throat. Many students brief cases only during the first year, but a guy I know (believe it or not) briefed every single case all three years. Between him and me, we briefed half the cases.

The key to the Socratic Method is that the professor never reveals what the answer is. He keeps insisting that THERE IS NO ANSWER. Consistent with this view, he spends the whole class asking questions that no one even begins to understand. To get the answers, you have to buy commercial outlines, which cost $16.95 apiece, and which are published by the same people who publish Cliffs Notes and Key Comics. The commercial outlines are written by the professors and provide them with a handsome income on the side. To insure that you will buy them, the professors tell you that, whatever you do, DO NOT buy any commercial outlines, because they will make it TOO EASY for you, and you will not develop the analytical skills and hard-work ethic that law school is supposed to teach; pretty cagey, those professors.

There are lots of different commercial outlines and other study aids available: Gillies, Nut Books, etc. Although they are produced by many different publishers, all study aids have two things in common:

1. They contradict what your professor said in class.
    
2. They contradict each other.

So they're all equally effective.

At the beginning the people in your class seem like nice enough folks. But gradually everyone begins to realize that their only hope of getting a job is to blast the chromosomes out of their classmates in the giant zero-sum thermonuclear war game called "class standing." Class standing is what saves law school from being a boring, cooperative learning experience and makes it the dynamic, exciting, survival-of-the-fittest, cutthroat competitive, grueling treadmill of unsurpassed joy that it is. In other words, it begins to prepare you for law practice.

Class standing does irreparable psychic damage and scars bright and creative people for the rest of their natural lives. A bright and creative person is about to do something bright and creative in her life, but then she thinks, "No, I was only number 67 out of 150 in my class, and I'm probably not capable of any mental activity greater than picking slugs off zucchini plants." So she doesn't do anything.

To make sure that the message gets through, the professors are not content with the demeaning and humiliating exercise of calculating class standing. No. First, they tell students that class standing and grades do not matter; not at all. They know that the students will remember the episode with the commercial outlines and will therefore conclude that nothing else in the entire universe matters except class standing and grades. Then, to strike the final blow, the professors adopt a grading system straight out of the ninth circle of Dante's Inferno. They take students who have undergraduate GPA's of A-minus, and who have never gotten a B-minus in their entire life, and they give them-get this-all C's!!! This will prove that the professors know the law better than the students, in case the point was somehow overlooked.

Most law students never recover from this act of evil genius, and they spend the rest of their lives figuring out how to get even with the rest of humanity. This consuming desire for vengeance is called "appropriate lawyerly zeal."

This is the reason that Supreme Court justices are always so testy with each other in their opinions. An example: The majority writes, "When two of our esteemed colleagues left the majority and joined the dissent, it raised the average IQ in both groups by thirty points." Ha! The dissent responds, "The majority wanted to prevail in the worst way, and the Court's opinion is the worst way it could think of." So there the justices are still hopping mad about that C-minus they got in Civil Procedure forty years ago.

During the first year, the law students quickly divide into three groups:

The Active Participants: Overconfident geeks who compete with each other to take up the most airtime pointing out that before law school, when they were Fulbright Scholars, they thought of a question marginally relevant to today's discussion. Their names appear on the class's "Turkey Bingo" cards, a game you win if five people on your card speak during one class period. The Active Participants stop talking completely when first-semester grades come out and they get all C's.

The Backbenchers: Cool dudes who "opt out" of law school's competitive culture and never prepare for class. They sit on the back row, rather than in their assigned seats, so the professor can't find them on the seating chart. They ask if they can "borrow" your class outline.

The Terrified Middle Group: People who spend most of their time wondering what the hey is going on, and why don't the professors just tell us what the law is and stop playing "hide the ball" and shrouding the law in mystery/philosophy/sociology/ nihilistic relativism/astrology/voodoo/sadomasochistic Socratic kung fu?

The first-year curriculum consists of Legal Writing and five substantive law courses:

Civil Procedure. In this class you will learn about the paper wars of litigation. You will discover why, every time a case is filed, another forest dies.

Contracts. You will study rules based on a model of two-fisted negotiators with equal bargaining power who dicker freely, voluntarily agree on all terms, and reduce their understanding to a writing intended to embody their full agreement. You will learn that the last contract fitting this model was signed in 1879.

Criminal Law. Here you will study common law crimes that haven't been the law anywhere for more than 100 years. Then, to bring things up to date, you will study the Model Penal Code, which is not the law anywhere today.

Property. You will learn about "liven' of seisin" and similar laws governing clods. Some of these legal rules are simply incomprehensible. For example, according to the California Supreme Court, nobody can be expected to understand the Rule against Perpetuities.

Torts. You will study a compensation system in which the trans-action costs generally exceed the payments to the injured parties. Fortunately, most of the transaction costs occur in the form of attorney's fees.

The cases are, of course, dreadfully boring. However, there are a few interesting characters you meet in the legal literature, like the "fertile octogenarian," the "naked trespasser," and the "officious intermeddler." It is best to keep these three people from spending much unsupervised time together. Also, there are a few interesting cases, like Cordas v. Peerless Transportation Co., in which the judge was apparently a frustrated playwright:

This case presents the ordinary man--that problem child of the law--in a most bizarre setting. As a lonely chauffeur in defendant's employ he became in a trice the protagonist in a breath bating drama with a denouement almost tragic. It appears that a man, whose identity it would be indelicate to divulge, was feloniously relieved of his portable goods by two nondescript highwaymen in an alley near 26th Street and Third Avenue, Manhattan; they induced him to relinquish his possessions by a strong argument ad hominem couched in the convincing cant of the criminal and pressed at the point of a most persuasive pistol. Laden with their loot, but not thereby impeded, they took an abrupt departure, and he, shuffling off the coil of that discretion which enmeshed him in the alley, quickly gave chase………

The judge was obviously having such a good time it's hard to believe that the point of all this humor was (chuckle chuckle) to hand down a decision against a woman and her infant children who were injured by a runaway taxi.

Another example is Fisher v. Lowe in which the plaintiff sued the defendants for damaging his beautiful oak tree with an automobile. The trial court held that the defendants were immune from liability under the no-fault insurance act. The Michigan Court of Appeals held:

We thought that we would never see a suit to compensate a tree.

A suit whose claim in tort is prest upon a mangled tree's behest;

A tree whose battered trunk was prest against a Chevy's crumpled crest;

A tree that faces each new day with bark and limb in disarray;

A tree that may forever bear a lasting need for tender care.

Flora lovers though we three,

We must uphold the court's decree.

Affirmed

Justice Jackson once listed some humorous ways that judges declined to follow their own prior opinions:

Baron Bramwell extricated himself by saying, "The matter does not appear to me now as it appears to have appeared to me then." . . . Lord Westbury, ... it is said, rebuffed a barrister's reliance upon an earlier opinion of his Lordship: "I can only say that I am amazed that a man of my intelligence should have been guilty of giving such an opinion."

A strange case is United States ex re/. Mayo v. Satan and his Staff in which the plaintiff sued Satan under federal statutes for violating his civil rights. He alleged that the defendant had on numerous occasions caused him misery and unwarranted threats, placed deliberate obstacles in his path, and caused his downfall, and therefore had deprived him of his constitutional rights. The court denied the plaintiffs application to proceed in forma pauperis, holding:

We question whether plaintiff may obtain personal jurisdiction over the defendant in this judicial district. The complaint contains no allegation of residence in this district. While the official reports disclose no case where this defendant has appeared as defendant there is an unofficial account of a trial in New Hampshire where this defendant filed an action of mortgage foreclosure as plaintiff. The defendant in that action was represented by the preeminent advocate of the day, and raised the defense that the plaintiff was a foreign prince with no standing to sue in an American Court. This defense was overcome by overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Whether or not this would raise an estoppel in the present case we are unable to determine at this time.

We note that the plaintiff has failed to include with his complaint the required form of instructions for the United States Marshal for directions as to service of process.

The plaintiff sued without a lawyer, because suing the devil would present lawyers with an obvious conflict of interest.

These are some of the interesting cases. But most cases are, to paraphrase Mark Twain, chloroform in print. The latest casebooks actually have a pocket part containing smelling salts.

Last but not most, I advise against becoming romantically involved with anyone in your law school class. Your time is much too precious for such frivolities as friendship, love, and meaning. And if your time is not too precious for those things, it will be for the person in whom you are interested. Your dating life will likely resemble topics studied in the second half of Contracts: Misunderstanding, Repudiation, Frustration, and Excuse.

So that's what the first year is like. Unfortunately, the first year is the best year of law school. The three years of law school are similar to the three kinds of rocks:

The first year: Igneous. You are on fire.

The second year: Metamorphic. Tremendous pressures change you dramatically. The third year: Sedimentary. Yawn.

If you stayed in law school any longer, you would become fossilized. Just look at your professors.