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The First Year: The Moment of Truth
Law school lasts three years. In the first year, you're just taking a bunch of basic required courses. Your legal education may not really take off until the second and third year. But that first year can make or break your career.
Why It's Important
When you look in from the outside, you might think law school is just like any other kind of school. You put in your time, and then one day you're finished and you graduate.
But it's not like that. The first year is everything. You need to plan for law jobs from the very start. The clock starts ticking immediately.
Let's say you start law school in September of Year Zero. You'll finish your first year of law school in May of Year One, which is when your "first summer" begins. You go back to school for your second year of law school that September, and that school year ends in May of Year Two, followed by your "second summer." Finally, you graduate in May of Year Three, take the bar exam in your "third summer," and start work at your permanent job in September of Year Three.
So here's how the interviewing schedule works. In the autumn of Year Zero, you'll already start to look for first-summer jobs. In August of Year One, the formal interviewing season begins for second-summer jobs. And in August of Year Two, you'll start interviewing for your permanent job.
At each stage of the process, grades are very important. Employers ask about them, and so does the Law Review. Only the best students make it onto the Law Review, and the only grades the Law Review considers are first-year grades. If you get invited to join the Law Review, you'll probably find that employers drool over you - not literally, we hope - and that your classmates are exceedingly jealous.
The Struggle to Excel
You need good grades to get on Law Review and land the best jobs. You want good grades because they make you feel good about yourself. And you're used to getting good grades, because you were a top performer in college.
The process of getting good grades in law school is not like that of getting good grades in college, though, and for that reason it's humorous, to me, that deans of admissions should choose law students according to their undergraduate GPA's. To do well in law school, unlike college, you have to be able to adapt quickly to an entirely new learning environment.
I, for one, was no good at that. I'm like a locomotive. Get me cranked up and point me in the right direction, and there's no stopping me. But don't ask me to adjust to a whole new world at once. For all I know, Columbia would have been wiser to replace me with someone who had a lower GPA but who could have adapted more easily.
As an example, I rebelled against the "Socratic method" in which many classes were taught. The method is named for Socrates, who supposedly never made statements, but just kept on asking questions. So in law school, your professors ask, and you answer, until they stump you. At that point, you may finally be ready to listen and learn.
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I grant that, as compared to a lecture, it's more entertaining to watch some poor jerk squirm under the professor's relentless badgering. But when you move beyond sadism and start to ask how much you're learning, you have to wonder. It always seemed moronic, to me, to use a question-and-answer format in a class of 150 students. You can't hear what the students are saying, you can't believe they're saying something that stupid (or that complicated), you can't stand a particular student who likes to dominate the debate, etc.
In most of those large classes, no one is assigned to the row of seats in back of the big classrooms, near the exits. As the semester grinds on, you see a growing fringe of students sitting back there, where the lights don't shine too well. These are obviously not their assigned seats, and you realize that this is a form of truce. They'll attend class, even though they don't understand what's going on, as long as the professor pretends they're not there and doesn't call on them.
By semester's end, many students have lost track of what's happening in the intimate little chat that goes on between the professor and the few students who are still on his/her wavelength. Does a student's love of the Socratic Method have anything to do with his/her ability to practice law? No. Is it a better way of teaching than the one they use in, say, engineering school? No. But the Socratic Method will arbitrarily help to determine whether the student understands the professor, earns a higher grade, and gets a better job. When I ran head-on into this teaching method, I had no patience for it. And, of course, it had no patience for me either.
My inflexibility hurt me in another way. I didn't like the books that were supposed to be guiding me.
In college, if you can't grasp what's happening in the classroom, you go home and read your textbook. Even when you do understand the subject, you try to keep looking ahead in the book, to get a picture of how it all fits together. Textbooks usually follow a helpful, sensible scheme of organization that proceeds from step A to step B.
In law school, it's not like that. You work out of a "case-book." As the name implies, this book contains reprints of bits and pieces from important cases that judges have decided down through the years. The cases are often difficult to understand, not only because the law is complex, but also because the judges who wrote them talk in circles.
Half the time, when you've finished reading a case, you say to yourself, "Now what the hell was that all about?" You look at the notes after the case, hoping for answers, but all you see are a bunch of questions or, at best, some comments that seem to be moving forward, as though you were itching for more. You turn the page, and they're starting a new case. You're baffled. You turn some more pages, and you discover that this goes on, case and notes, case and notes, for 50 or 100 pages. And then it's a new chapter, and you're still utterly confused.
Sometimes you learn, long afterwards, that the only reason you were forced to read all those cases, and their incomprehensible notes, was so that you would appreciate why the Supreme Court or Congress eventually changed the law and made all those cases irrelevant. At other times, they make you read a lot of cases just so you'll understand that Congress and the Supreme Court have not made any big decisions, which means that, like you, the law in this area is still messed up.
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