The Second and Third Years

The second and third years are about the same as the first year, except that you are a cool second- or third-year student, and now you know that you can make it in law school. Therefore, you live without the sense of terror that was your constant companion during your first year. However, this loss of fear may reduce the students' motivation to do the extra, nonessential things--like read the cases or actually go to class. Some classes look like seminars, with only a handful of students, until the day of the final exam. Then, two hundred students you have never seen before show up, carrying outlines. Astonishingly, half of them will do better on the exam than you will.




To avoid these problems, some professors adopt attendance policies that permit only a few absences. These policies are basically designed to spread communicable diseases throughout the entire class as quickly as possible. Other professors deny non-attending students the right to take the final exam. This avoids the embarrassment of having students who are able to pass the class without the assistance of the professor's brilliant teaching.

You are also much more efficient as an upper-level student.

This efficiency, however, does not result in more free time. Instead, the professors cover the material twice as fast, and now you are required to read a 1,300-page casebook in a single semester instead of a year. This forces you to become a "lean, mean, learning machine"-i.e., you get someone else's outline and memorize it. Of course, this means that you don't develop the critical reasoning skills that law school is supposed to produce. It also means that you cram a forty-page outline into your head the day before the exam, but a week later you can't even remember whether you ever took the class. This approach also produces mega panic attacks from which you will never recover, no matter how long you live. For the rest of your life, you will be plagued by recurrent dreams of taking tests in classes that you have never attended, and you will wake up in a cold sweat. But at least those will be only dreams. For now, the nightmare is real.

One advantage of the second and third years is that you get to choose your teachers (this is called forum shopping) based on the difficulty of their grading curve. The professors believe that you choose their class based on their teaching ability and the centrality of their course to your future career, so it's wisest not to reveal this little trade secret. The professors describe their courses in a list called, appropriately enough, "Course Descriptions." They try to make the courses sound like interesting and important classes that no person who calls herself a lawyer would dare overlook. They do this because if no one attends their class, the dean might fire them. Or worse, make them teach Property.

An honest list of descriptions might look something like this:

Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). How people resolve disputes without lawyers, because a simple dog bite case takes five years and $50,000 to get to trial. Learn how to recognize ADR and to squash it.

Conflict of Laws. Memorize several ways of saying, "If you play in my yard, you play by my rules."

Constitutional Law. Ridicule people who still believe that the framers' intent has any relevance whatsoever.

Corporations. How to cheat creditors, shareholders, employees, consumers, the IRS, and the environment for fun and profit. Mostly profit.

Criminal Procedure. Learn enough about the rationale behind the exclusionary rule to defend yourself at cocktail parties.

Evidence. Memorize the hearsay rule and its 50,000 exceptions. Good for people with a photographic memory and gangs of free time.

Federal Courts. How to administer prisons, schools, and most of society from the bench.

Income Taxation. Prepare to be a tax lawyer. A tax lawyer is a person who is good with numbers but who does not have enough personality to be an accountant.

Jurisprudence. How to be a jurisprude.

Landlord-Tenant Law. See how medieval English feudal law has a modern application.

Lawyering Skills. Spend your hard-earned tuition money to learn what your first employer will pay to teach you anyway.

Products Liability. Set yourself up for life by finding a cockroach in your Jolt Cola.

Racketeering (RICO). Learn how to use this powerful anti-extortion law to extort large settlements out of honest business people.

Roman Law. In case you need to sue a Roman.

Securities Regulation. See why Mark Twain said that humans are the only animals that can be skinned more than once.

State and Local Government. Learn how the broadest governmental powers in America are reserved to a city council composed of two real estate developers, a retired earthworm inspector, and a used Styrofoam sales agent.

Wills and Estates. Dead people and their things. Also known as "Stiffs and their Gifts."

Students think that these classes are difficult, but in reality they are no harder than an undergraduate chemistry class. In fact, most of your law professors couldn't even pass a chemistry class today. When they took chemistry years ago, the periodic table only had four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. They learned, for example, that fire has three electrons in the outer shell.

Terror Dissipates

By the third year the students' terror about law school finally dissipates into the atmosphere (and contributes to the hole in the ozone layer). However, the terror is replaced by something equally dreadful: unmitigated boredom. Professors frequently have to summon the paramedics because a student has lost consciousness in class. The only thing that keeps your pulse going is the realization that soon this will be over. Hang in there. To keep your brain from atrophying completely, you could bring a stack of crossword puzzles to class. However, I recommend against raising your hand and interrupting your professor's lecture to ask, "What is a six-letter word for 'catatonic'?"

A lot of people complain about the law school curriculum. They point out that the curriculum has not changed much since the 1870's. That's when Christopher Columbus Langdell at Harvard Law School decided that, with a name like his, he desperately needed to discover something before he died. So he discovered the Socratic Method.

Students immediately hated the Socratic Method with a passion. Langdell's teaching style was so unpopular that Harvard's law school enrollment plummeted, and rumors circulated that he might be fired. This is true. However, when law professors across the country learned how much students despised the method, they rushed to adopt it, and Langdell's job was spared.

Then, nothing changed for a hundred years. Lawyers may not know much about education, but they know a lot about precedent. Jonathan Swift observed that precedent is important because, in the law, anything that has been done before may legally be done again. So the Socratic method continued its reign.

The Socratic Method is good for teaching students how to "think like a lawyer." However, because it's so slow, it's not much good for teaching anything else. Consequently, legal education emphasizes legal reasoning skills over specific areas of the law. This generalist approach, of course, has deficiencies. For example, in recent years law practice has become increasingly complex and specialized. In the old days most lawyers were sole practitioners, and they had to do everything from defending dog bites to negotiating corporate mergers with space aliens. A lawyer with a form book and a Dictaphone was an instant expert in anything.

Nowadays things are different. There are mega firms, each with a huge flock (technically, a "pride") of lawyers. Each lawyer focuses on one narrow subspecialty-for example, how to convert backyard birdhouses into time-share resort condominiums.

New Deal

There is also much more law than there used to be. Sometime after the 1870's the New Deal occurred, accompanied by the rise of the regulatory state. In the old days you could clear a wilderness, settle a territory, and declare a war without ever thinking about lawyers. Today you have to consult a lawyer before you hose out the grease pan in your garage. Preferably a grease pan specialist.

In addition, some of the cases studied in law school are out of date. You read hoary medieval cases in which Sir Gawain attacked Baron Relic. Studying ancient sword fights may be interesting, but it leaves you unprepared to deal with the modern world of electronic fund transfers and computer software licensing agreements. Another problem is that you can learn the basic analytical skills in your first year. You endure the second year patiently enough, mostly because you're being wined and dined by prospective employers. Also, there is some satisfaction in being an upper class student and lording it over the first-years. However, by the time you're in your third year, you are bored out of your mind. Of course, the dry professors don't help. W. H. Auden defined a professor as a person who talks in someone else's sleep.

One difficulty with the upper-level curriculum is that, basically, there is no upper-level curriculum. There is merely a smorgasbord of unrelated courses. Consequently, recently law schools have begun talking about curriculum reform. Of course, any lawyer can TALK. Lawyers earn their bread by the sweat of their tongue. The astonishing thing is that a few law schools are actually doing something about it.

One curriculum reform is to provide more training in lawyering skills, such as drafting documents and trying cases. Some schools have adopted this reform because employers have complained, with mosquito-like persistence, that new law graduates can't find the courthouse door, even when they are dropped off on the front steps.

However, law professors don't particularly like to teach lawyering skills. If professors had enjoyed the practical aspects of lawyering, they wouldn't have given up a salary of a zillion dollars a year in law practice. Being forced to teach those things without earning a lawyer's salary is the worst of all possible worlds.

The other major curriculum reform is specialization. Rather than take a lot of survey courses in areas you are not interested in, you can concentrate in a particular area of the law, much like having an undergraduate major. Some schools are beginning to offer specialties in such areas as environmental law, intellectual property, health care law, litigation, and international law. You can receive a certificate stating that you've specialized in a particular area, which can help set you apart when you look for jobs. It also pleases clients, who, oddly enough, don't like paying for a new lawyer's on-the-job training.

Some law professors object, because reforming the curriculum is a lot of work. "We only finished reforming the curriculum a hundred years ago," they complain, "and you're already talking about doing it AGAIN?" Then they go back to sleep.

Other professors object that some students don't know what specialty to choose. Therefore, quite logically, NOBODY should be allowed to choose. Some argue that students might want (or be forced) to change specialties after entering law practice, in which case their handsome specialization certificate will be suitable for conversion into a handsome paper airplane. Learning a new area without taking the professor's introductory course is, you understand, unthinkable. Someone might even have to read a book, or something equally odious. Students should be able to stop learning when they graduate, just as the professors did.

So when it comes to curriculum reform, most law schools are still at the talking stage. This is the stage where law professors feel most comfortable. They may not know much about pedagogy, but they know a lot about parliamentary procedure and seating arrangements. So far, most law faculties are still discussing the motion to table the motion to move the table. Meanwhile, don't hold your breath.