Law School Update

When I'm not playing "Enter the Matrix," watching movies, or surfing the web aimlessly (life is hard here, you know?), I'm thinking a bit about that law school thing I'm supposed to be doing this fall. GW wanted an $800 payment on Monday, so I headed downtown to deliver it in person, because I can. The trip taught me a few things about GW I hadn't fully realized. For one, because it's an urban campus, things sometimes seem cramped. Instead of the broad lawns and wide sidewalks that separate buildings at suburban and rural universities, GW is divided by busy city streets.

Second, while some students may see an advantage to attending a law school located right on an undergraduate campus, I wonder if it might be better if the law school were more self contained. I spent nearly two hours going from office to office before I found exactly where I was supposed to pay my money. Of course, that's a common experience for someone new to a university campus, but I wonder if things would be simpler if the law school was more self-contained. It turned out the office I needed to visit was within the law school building all along, so maybe it is self-contained and no one I talked to yesterday realized that. Anyway, the problem was complicated a little by the fact that the main law school building (Stockton Hall, I think) is currently closed for renovation and asbestos removal, so some offices are in temporary locations. Anyway, I finally found what I was looking for and paid my money. Now all I have to do is figure out that financial aid thing.

Financial aid. I've been putting it off. I don't want to do it. I don't know what I need to do, exactly. So instead I've been reading books. I started One L by Scott Turow and, while some of it is interesting and helpful, it's also pretty melodramatic. Last night I laughed out loud when Turow started a new section with, "Finally, during that second week, I began to volunteer in class." He then goes on for over six pages about the way he agonized over speaking in class and what everyone else thought about it and all the pros and cons and worries about competition and what other students would think of him and yadda yadda yadda. Come on! Talk or don't talk, but shut up about it, will you? Reading this book makes me realize that law school has to be one of the most overly-scrutinized academic endeavors a person can undertake. In what other academic discipline can you find dozens—if not hundreds—of books about preparing for school, taking tests, dealing with professors, or whether to speak up in class? I just left grad school in English and as far as I know there are less than a dozen books (and that's being generous) on these topics as they relate to English. What is it about law school that makes students such navel-gazers? If I had to guess I'd say it's that law is one of those mysterious professions everyone is aware of but knows little about. Like medicine, perhaps, the law just seems very difficult and complex and high stakes; therefore, people are interested in it, they think about it, and they write about it. However, I wonder if a lot of what is written about the law and law school is just self-perpetuating. Everyone watches "The Paper Chase" and reads One L before they go to law school, and both of these narratives are highly melodramatic and focus on the mysteries and difficulties of law school, therefore lots of students expect law school to be melodramatic and mysterious? I don't know. What I do know is that I don't want to participate in all that if I can avoid it. When/if I start writing melodramatically about law school, slap me, will you?

(Oops, is it too late, already?)

Besides, according to Brush with the Law, that whole debate about whether to speak up in class is a non-issue so long as you don't go to a zero-sum school with a bunch of zero-summers who think that everything good that happens to you must mean something bad is going to happen to them. (I've got to take time to write up my thoughts on that book. I'll do it, really. Soon.)

So instead of worrying about whether to speak up in class, here's some Flash fun for ya: Bushenstein, the story of Yubbledew's plan to remake the Supreme Court. [Link via SixFourteen, which didn't like it at all.] And in the related vein of "Why is our world upside down?" don't miss Tom Tomorrow's indictment of the Christian terrorists —careful! They're all around us!

Posted June 18, 2003 11:08 AM | law school