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Moritz 1L Advice
More "real world" advice on law school from Garret Moritz. Some good, fresh information here, and his first tip—Embrace Confusion—is very heartening. Just like I'm all about ambiguity, I'm all about confusion. I can be very comfortable when confused (though that sounds strange to say), and in fact I'm almost reflexively suspicious of things that seem too cut and dried (because, again, the world just doesn't work in binaries, despite what programmers might lead you to believe). Although Moritz has probably never read it, his description of the "legal fault lines" exposed by confusion is very like Alan Sinfield's description of how literary criticism works. Sinfield's book is called, not surprisingly, Faultlines. So after three solid years of learning to look for and appreciate the nuances of texts, situations, theories, and problems, I am well-prepared for embracing the confusion. I probably won't have too work too hard (but a little) on keeping my mouth shut, and semicolons were my friends a long time ago. (What's pretentious about punctuation that shows a close relationship between two otherwise complete sentences?)
Moritz also has a great piece on how cell phones are ruining society, and one about the fact that our society is more feudal than democratic. Great stuff. Couldn't agree more. In fact, gTexts is the latest addition to the blogroll at left. Moritz describes himself as "a remorseless windbag and busybody," and while anywhere else those might be seen as negative traits, at gTexts they produce hours of fun.
Posted 10:00 PM | law school
LSAT Lameness
Below is a sample LSAT question and the possible answers. What do you think the answer is?
Question:
Six months ago, a blight destroyed the cattle population in the town of Cebra, eradicating the town's beef supply. As a result, since that time the only meat available for consumption has been poultry, lamb, and other non-beef meats.
Which of the following can be reasonably inferred from the statements above?
- Villagers in the town of Cebra consume only beef raised by Cebra farmers.
- Cebra villagers prefer lamb and poultry to beef.
- The town of Cebra has not imported beef for consumption during the last six months.
- Most of the residents of Cebra are meat eaters.
- Before the blight occurred, Cebra villagers ate more beef than any other type of meat.
Click "more" for the answers.
Choice (3) is correct. If elimination of the town's beef supply means that no beef has been available, then the town must have had no external beef provider for the past six months.
Choice (1). We know that Cebra-raised beef has not been available for the past six months, and that beef in general has not been available for the past six months. What role does non-Cebra beef play in this situation? If beef has not been available at all, we can't infer if it's because Cebrans don't eat non-Cebran beef, or because non-Cebran beef hasn't been available.
Choice (2). This choice addresses unsupported meat preferences. The argument centers on availability, not preference.
Choice (4). We have no basis to infer that most Cebrans are meat-eaters.
Choice (5). This choice is concerned with consumption patterns prior to the blight, but our stimulus provides no information from which we can infer previous beef consumption. We only know that the blight wiped out the beef supply six months ago, and since that time beef has not been available.
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I got the question right, but I found myself making a plausible case (in my head) for the answer to be 1. Why? After thinking about it a bit more, I don't know, because obviously the question of whether Cebrans eat non-Cebran beef would be second to whether it's even available for consumption, and it couldn't be available if no non-Cebran beef had been imported. The point is, the questions are phrased such that they can appear to be asking you to make fine distinctions, which are often not so fine after all. Tricky. But then, I could see why some lawyers would try to make such tricks their stock in trade... Must remember to watch the details. If it takes too much thought, I've probably missed an obvious distinction somewhere.
Posted 09:13 PM | law school
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 11:18 AM | law school
