The Myth and Reality of the Study of Law

No matter why you go to law school or how you got in, you have a lot to learn - about everything - and so will you.
 

 

• 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.


1. 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.

2. 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.

Many law schools have other journals besides the Law Review; often, though, their prestige depends on the grades of the students they accept.

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.

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.

Students respond in different ways to these problems with the law school teaching method. Some, who are doing poorly for perhaps the first time in their lives, will rebel at that and either drop out or pretend to understand. Meanwhile, in a true indication of how nasty the situation can get, some of those who think they are not doing well really are.

3. What the Pressure Does to You

Perhaps you've had the experience of dealing with people who've been working 80 or 100 hours a week for months on end. At times, they're irrational. Their moods swing with the wind. They have no patience. This experience is not limited to law students.

But there's something special about law school. It goes beyond the quantity of work and the pressure to get it done. Law school is the door into a hard new world. It brings you face-to-face with a different, less friendly kind of person, and eventually that's what you become too.

Now, not everyone agrees that law school is terrible, or that it favors those who arrive there with a certain set of attitudes. The ABA, for example, does not want the law schools, its pride and joy, to be accused of doing evil things to people. So in Law Schools and Professional Education, they comment that, in one important study, "The ... students entered with highly positive estimations of legal practice and the justice system. Over the first year their views became less positive.... But it requires some considerable invention to conclude that the first year at ... law school instilled cynical views. A more appropriate interpretation is that first year students began with positive views of the legal profession and of the justice system but during the year came to perceive greater ambiguity, complexity, and human frailty. That seems to be both appropriate and healthy. ... Further research is clearly appropriate."

But let's think about that for a minute. Reasonable dictionaries may differ, but, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, cynical means "disposed to disbelieve in human sincerity or goodness; sneering.''100 So let me ask this: Do these law students lose their belief in sincerity or integrity? The ABA seems to say, "No, it's not that first-year law students come to doubt other people's sincerity. They just learn that people are ambiguous, complex, and frail."