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Life is short. Misery is overrated.
'Tis the "back-to-school" season and advice for new law students is plentiful (and welcome). Although the earliest I would start law school would be a year from now, hearing what people have to say about it helps clarify my decision to work toward that goal.
First, there's Dahlia Lithwick's advice in Slate [via Jason Rylander, who has also generously offered terrific and pointed thoughts on the subject]. Lithwick provides a pithy summary of a lot of the best things I've already read and heard elsewhere: Know why you're going to law school and you'll have to work very hard to avoid the lure of BigLaw once you've racked up all those loans. A little line buried within point B-1 is what I'm most concerned about. Lithwick writes:
Law school manages to impose odd new values on virtually everyone.
Of course this is true—it would be difficult or impossible to go through three years of intense education and not be changed by it, and many of those changes are the whole reason for going. Still, I fear law school's homogenizing effects. I feel confident enough in my views and values to know I won't come out of law school some free-market neo-conservative, but how much more "mainstream" might it make my political views? And yet, more "mainstream" is exactly what I hope law school will make me (in a way). People who are too radical or extreme are often dismissed, and our society has developed effective mechanisms for keeping extremes (especially socialist/progressive extremes) safely in the margins where they can make lots of noise but have little practical effect. So law school appeals to me in that it appears to be a way to take a radical sensibility and apply it to mainstream methods of social change (laws, public policy). I guess it's the cliche of trying to "use the master's tools to destroy the master's house," except I don't want to destroy so much as remodel extensively. So if law school gives me a better sense of the mainstream and teaches me how to better communicate with that mainstream, I should come out a much more effective agent for social change. That would be the ideal outcome, the goal. So the challenge is to learn which of those "odd new values" I encounter in law school might be helpful for a progressive social activist, and which of them are just the siren song of the bourgeoisie.
A lot of advice for 1-Ls has to do with not being obsessed with grades or showing off to your professors or whatever, and with having "a life" outside of grad school. That kind of thing forms a large part of "Down the Rabbit Hole," some advice from "Alice W." [via Sua Sponte] All of this sort of advice seems targeted at the serious Type-A personalities. Even the "don't be a recluse" advice is about not spending too much time in the library. I think the advice I'd need would be more like: "Take this seriously—it really is important."
Then there's Top 10 Law School Survival Skills from Lois Schwartz on law.com [also via Sua Sponte]. Point 3 is very encouraging:
I'm all about the ambiguities. In fact, the "black-and-white" version of almost anything has always eluded me. So again, this speaks to one of my more prominent reservations about law—that it forces you to reduce the world to either/or binaries or to follow "the law" as if it were black and white. Since life isn't like that, it's good to hear from a lawyer that law and law school don't have to be like that either.
Schwartz also defines what a "hornbook" is—finally! I've been seeing references to these things everywhere, but no one's taken the time before to tell me that hornbooks are "scholarly treatises on law school subjects." Now I know. But wait. Does that mean a hornbook is basically an academic essay or journal article? Or are we talking book-length works only?
Posted August 25, 2002 11:18 AM | law school
