gTexts Blog Redux

LAW SCHOOL ADVICE: DON'T LISTEN TO IT. Lots of advice for law students floating around the blogosphere. There's Ipse Dixit, Dahlia Lithwick, and something would-be law students should probably take more seriously, advice from from an actual law student of the modern age. As (1) a law student myself and (2) a remorseless windbag and busybody, I can't resist putting my two cents. I'm a law student too, after all. (though keep in mind my experience reflects the local color of being a student at Harvard Law School; I imagine other places are not radically different because of the general acceptence of Langdell's model for law schools, as well as "cross-pollination" and all that, but no doubt each school offers its own, slightly different experience).

Advice on Advice. Really, it's all a load of manure (my advice included). I once heard Dershowitz say that when you ask people for advice, they just tell you what they did. If you follow advice, you just end up living other people's lives. I think this is largely very true -- you can ask a C student for advice and they'll tell you "what worked for them" during law school. But even if you ask the ten top students in the class, you'll probably get about ten different answers. Indeed, the best students are often independent and iconoclastic. Reject slavish conformity to other people's lives, whether they are successes or failures. You really should try to find your own best way; indeed, muddling through it all on your own is the point of law school, nay, life. (I'm not suggesting being some kind of "lone wolf" -- nor am I suggesting not lone-wolfing it -- but I am suggesting listening to lots of people, but making decisions for yourself).

That said, I can't resist giving you my advice. There's something fundamentally broken in humanity: we all think we have something worthwhile to say.

Embrace Confusion. If there is one part of the transition from other disciplines to law school that is tough, it is the need to cope with confusion. When you are confused in law school -- which will happen often -- the first and very understandable impulse is to try to reason your way into a clear answer, to shut the door on confusion. If you do this, you are generally moving backwards. Law itself is very confusing and there are a lot of tensions. For all their posturing and presentation of the illusion of clear answers, law professors are going to split the doctrine right down the middle of major tensions on their exams. During the year, when you realize you are confused, don't despair -- celebrate! Usually you have just identified one of those legal fault lines. Instead of convincing yourself of ways to make things straightforward, explore your confusion, dissect it, understand it, learn where it comes from. Finding ways of systematizing and exploiting legitimate confusion is the key to law school; it's why people are constantly shaking their heads over getting an A when they thought they flunked and getting a C when they thought they aced an exam. When every answer you give is clear and one-directional with no detours, you've missed the nuance; you've failed to embrace law school confusion.

Talking: Shut Yo' Trap. Before I started law school, a very wise law student told me not to talk much in class. This was good advice for me. As you can tell from my blogging, no matter how bad my ideas may be, I'll still vomit them up and share them with whoever will listen. But, I consciously restrained myself, and it turned out not raising my hand and trying to jump into the fray was pretty easy after the first few weeks. I talked when cold-called, and tried to impress, and raised my hand when I has something really good to say, but generally I bided my time.

But wait, why shouldn't you talk? For one, all the other law students will make fun of you if you're a "gunner". But a better reason is the power of law school karma -- for some reason all the people who are huge gunners early all end up doing badly. (You won't hear them talking much second semester). While many simply chalk up this "karma effect" to divine providence and leave it at that, I think there's a logical reason big talkers so often end up getting burned. The big talkers don't realize that they are part of the law professor's show; when the professor encourages them, and keeps going back to them, it is most often because they are getting one side of the issue out. The big talkers get so caught up in stating and defending their position that they miss the whole, the chorus of competing views and philosophies. As a noninvested listener -- and you should listen to the windbags, they have a lot to say -- you start to see patterns, and you start to systematize the kinds of conflicting arguments people bring to bear on legal problems. Generally speaking, when a professor asks student A for an answer, and then asks student B why student A is wrong, neither student's answer is the point, nor is the point which view is stronger. The point is the interaction of those answers: they're a lesson on the nature of legal conflict. You miss this when you're in the fray; you get it when you watch it patiently, day after day, from the sidelines.

Scheming Machiavellis will note that if you don't talk, you won't build up rapport with any professors, whose all-important recommendations are a valuable commodity come 2L year and clerkship season. Ipse Dixit offers his solution: "Pick one class you find especially interesting...and excel in it. Know each day's material in this class backward and forward, even if it means spending time on it that "ought" to be spent just keeping up with another. Your goal is for the professor in this class to consider you the number one student in the class. You'll be wanting recommendations in a couple of years, so start earning them the first month." I think the instrumentalist sentiment here is fine, but the way Ipse Dixit proposes going about it is risky and may not maximize returns. Trying to "excel" in one class almost guarantees you'll do worse in that class on the exam than your other classes, because you'll apply your collegiate standards for "excelling" -- knowing every answer in some rote form. When you try to "excel" you'll become a gunner, you'll try to make things too clear, and thus miss the all-important and totally legitimate confusion. Plus, it's a gamble. Law school grades admittedly are somewhat unpredictable -- it's just one, blind-graded test at the end of the semester -- and you're better off seeing which class you get your best grade in and then doing some research for that professor later, and developing a more personal relationship then.

Briefing, Outlines, Study Groups. The debate over these practices is bunk. People spend a lot of time agonizing over how to study, but I think it's largely a matter of personal style. I will say that it seems very important to work past exams in groups, say small groups of 2 or 3; especially when you don't have an answer key, this can be very valuable. But it's only valuable if you take disagreement the right way -- you shouldn't treat exam discussion as too much of a debate with one right answer; instead, view differing answers as opening your mind to the other side of the argument, a side you missed. Even if you don't agree with each other's answers, all of your actual exams would be stronger if they acknowledged those other interpretations and approaches and then struggled with ways to resolve the conflict. Indeed, when you work the actual exam, if things seem clear, you're probably doing something wrong. It seems counter-intuitive, but find ways to make yourself confused about what the right answer is, explore them, and propose -- with some humility -- a way to resolve the confusion. Acknowledging counterarguments is a time-honored rhetorical technique for boosting your crediblity, and law professors eat this kind of stuff up.

Semicolons. Get used to them; for some reason, since entering law school I can't write without using them constantly. I think the law school mentality of compiling arguments lends itself to lots of semicolons; on the other hand, it could just be their pretension value.

Reading. Seriously consider reading The Bramble Bush during your first year. You won't be sorry.

posted by Garrett Moritz | 2:43 PM |