Where Success Leads Law Students To

You want your law students to be people who get good grades, because law school requires a lot of studying. And you want those who can show their smarts on a test like the LSAT.
 

But ponder, if you will, the applicant's grades. If the college senior's transcript reflects an average of five courses per semester for three years, and if each line on the transcript contains three relevant data items,32 then a law school that receives 6,000 applications would have to review a total of more than a half-million data items if they were really going to examine the details on all those transcripts.


It might help the admissions people if they had the time to enter all that data into a computer and analyze it. But they don't. It would also help if all applicants came from the same college, because then the law schools could begin to figure out which professors were tough graders. As it is, there's no knowing whether an A in literature at College No. 1 is comparable to an A in literature at College No.

There's a lot that you can't tell from the cumulative GPA, and even from the transcript's course-by-course details. We all hear the standard comment that, "Well, the GPA is just a rough measure, but it is often a helpful one." We should shorten that comment thus: "Yes, the GPA is just a rough measure. Period."

And then there's the LSAT, that other primary determinant of your law school future. According to the people who created it, the LSAT is designed to give some measure of your aptitude for the work that you'll have to do in the first year of law school. This notion leads to an odd result.

It works like this. You take the LSAT and do extremely well. This gets you into an excellent law school. The LSAT is usually a pretty good predictor; sure enough, you do well in that school. People tend to like the things they do well, and, as the saying goes, if you love to study law, you'll hate to practice it. So you graduate from law school, go to work, and discover that you were really much happier back in school.

So you return to law school as a law professor, where you join other people who went through a similar process. As professors, you and your peers decide on the curriculum. The people who write the LSAT take a look at what you and your buddies are requiring of first-year law students, and they design the LSAT accordingly.

The LSAT does not ask whether you have what it takes to be a good lawyer. It just wants to know whether you'll quickly pick up the attitudes and methods that you'll need to succeed in law school. If law school is closely linked with real-life lawyering, then the LSAT will be a good guide as to who should become a lawyer. And if law school is off in its own world, then the LSAT might have nothing at all to do with finding the best future lawyers.

You might think of lawyers as "savant-idiots" - that is, as a reverse of that idiot-savant. They're brilliant in many ways, except where they're stupid. But where they're stupid, it's like they fell through a hole in the floor, and you suddenly get this weird feeling that there's nobody home inside their heads.

For example, the LSAT does not require nearly the same math abilities as, say, the GMAT, which you take as part of your application to business schools. Of course, you don't need to know as much math to practice law as you do to be a businessperson - if only because the legal system was cooked up, and has been maintained, by people who like to work with words more than numbers. Numbers matter in the real world, but not much in law school, and therefore not much on the LSAT.

Lawyers are overconfident of their chances of winning lawsuits, especially in cases in which they had been highly confident of winning to begin with. This affects the decisions they make about whether and how to settle or litigate cases.

The problem goes well beyond the subject of mathematics. In remarkable sympathy with the attitude of many of today's lawyers, Plato (a philosopher) observed about philosophers that Until philosophers are kings ... cities will never have rest from their evils - no, nor the human race, as we believe - and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.

For philosophy, the bloom is off the rose. Philosophy has ceded most of its old territory to the sciences. You don't philosophize, anymore, when you want to know something about the real world. Most of the time, you're better off finding, or becoming, a scientist.

If you're as non-scientific as the most muddled philosopher, and if you don't want scientists telling you to butt out because you don't know what you're talking about, the best advice is this: Don't go into philosophy. Go, instead, into law. Law is perhaps the last refuge in our world for those who, knowing nothing, wish to assume that they know more than enough. Nowhere except the courtroom do you find people making arguments and arriving at far-reaching decisions about the most important problems of our society without ever having taken so much as a single college course in the subjects they address. As one judge put it, Judges... are handicapped not merely by lack of information but by the narrowness of their training.... No one... can become an instant authority on psychiatry, lung diseases, computers, accounting, reconstructive dentistry, aviation, structural engineering, and hospital management - to name only a few of the problems that one has had to rule upon in the past few years.

Attorneys pride themselves on their ability to think critically, and yet their egos and their training often forbid them to be self-critical and admit that they are not competent to solve certain kinds of problems. The fact is, law school's training makes you smarter in some ways, but it definitely makes you more stupid in others.

You find the same thing in attorneys' social skills. You'll learn, many lack even the most basic notions of courtesy. Unfortunately, in the words of one legal administrator, "there is work floating around the hallways of the most prestigious law firms that could be done by a cadre of trained chimpanzees"- posing the very real risk that the lawyers will be too smart, and frustrated, for the job.

Since lawyers pride themselves on their precision, we might reasonably ask them to say, in the future, not that they are simply the best and the brightest - because, for many purposes, they aren't - but, rather, that they are the best and brightest, as measured by the LSAT, for the specific purpose of excelling in the first year of law school.63 There are other kinds of brilliance, and there may even be other kinds of brilliance that would be valuable in the practice of law, but the LSAT does not recognize them, and therefore the law school admissions committees do not get a comparably objective measurement of them.