First-Year Classmates at Law School: What to Expect

A discussion of first-year personalities would not be complete without mention of your fellow students and the various impacts they may have on you. Learning what to expect from them should not be part of a plot to undermine their efforts and exploit their weaknesses in a competitive manner. Rather, it is simply a way to preserve your own psychological health. Why is this so? Generally, your fellow law students were very successful undergraduates. By and large, they majored in the humanities or liberal arts. The majority came directly to law school from college, although there is a growing number of older students going back to school after raising a family or moving on from another career. Most law students are normal people of above-average intelligence, and they are witty and fun to be around. However, a few personality types are either so compulsive or competitive that they cannot help (whether intentionally or unintentionally) undermining your own confidence and mental well-being by making you question your own abilities.

A simple rule is to avoid, if at all possible, personality types that make you anxious and nervous. Some students will claim to study 24 hours a day and talk about nothing but law. Although their claims of great scholarship are of dubious validity, these types can nevertheless make you question whether what you are doing is adequate, even though you are fully prepared and studying as hard as you reasonably can. It is better to avoid these types entirely unless you can limit your contacts to mutually helpful arrangements involving note-sharing and other activities of reciprocal benefit (a doubtful proposition). You simply do not need the extra stress of worrying about whether you should be losing sleep doing unassigned reading. If you do a good job on the assigned reading and make judicious use of appropriate study aids, you need not worry about whether you are studying enough.


Another type of law student to avoid is the type that drains you emotionally by making constant unreciprocated demands for time, notes, briefs, study materials, outlines, etc. Often these students do not go to class themselves; when they do, their notes are poor or nonexistent, and they are unable to discuss the pertinent concepts and issues intelligently. Whether they are simply lazy or not, it does not behoove you to enter into a time-consuming relationship with individuals who will always take and never give. While you can, and should, have mutually beneficial arrangements with many other law students (with respect to tape-recording missed classes, providing copies of notes, and discussing issues), you should make sure that you are getting something out of such relationships as well. After all, you are attending law school to obtain your own legal education, not to educate someone else in a way that detracts from your primary goal. Additionally, you do not need the psychological headache of feeling like you have been taken advantage of. This will produce negative emotional responses that impede your ability to absorb the course material and prepare for examinations.

Another type of student with whom you may have an unsettling encounter is the man or woman who, while never seeming to study, claims to be getting stellar grades. The danger here is you may be tempted to emulate what you believe this person is doing by underpreparing for your classes and exams. "If," the devil on your right shoulder may be saying to you, "this person is going to ball games, on ski trips, and out to nightclubs and bars on a daily basis and still getting good grades, why can't I?" There are two answers. First, if the individual in question really is succeeding academically with minimal preparation, she is probably brilliant, and your law school career is too important to gamble on finding out whether you are just as brilliant. Second, the distinct possibility exists that you are being misinformed and the individual is not actually doing as well as she reports. In either case, your study strategy should not change one iota.

Lastly, you may encounter fellow students with strongly held political, religious, or philosophical viewpoints who mistakenly believe law school is a debating forum and that political rhetoric is an acceptable mode of legal analysis. Be assured that it is not. At exam time, most of your professors will be looking for legal rules and some logical application of these rules to the facts your exam presents. Political rhetoric will rarely, if ever, get you any credit, either in law school (with the possible exception of a legal philosophy class known as Critical Legal Studies) or in the courts. Therefore, while it may be tolerated by lenient or bored first-year professors, it is best to just ignore much of the babbling that inevitably spews forth in all first-year classes. Concentrate instead on what the cases say and what the professor says and asks.

With the foregoing in mind, you should have at least a fairly good idea of what to expect from your first-year law professors and fellow students. Remember, knowing what to expect ahead of time and avoiding unpleasant surprises is a big part of becoming acclimated as quickly as possible to the law school environment and scoring as high as you can in the law school game.