So, What's Law School Like?

I've been through a semester and taken my first finals, and now I've had enough vacation time to get some perspective on the experience, so I want to stash a kind of retrospective here. I hear first semester of your 1L is supposed to be the roughest part, and that it's all suppoed to be downhill from here. We'll see.

Anyway, I like it here. You get to struggle with big, lofty ideas and at the same time worry about how they work in detail on the ground, with real consequences for real people. And your classmates care about these things to, and they're a sharp and engaged bunch who have interesting things to say. So all that's good. It's kind of what I was looking for.

I really wasn't sure what to expect coming out here. I deliberately insulated myself from books and movies about law school, so that I would come in without a biased (probably biased towards the negative) perspective. To this day, I haven't seen The Paper Chase or read 1L. In the first week we met with a student advisor who asked if we had any questions about briefing cases. I raised my hand to ask, "What does it mean to brief cases?" I still don't know how briefing is supposed to be different than regular note taking. And I don't really do much of either.

Law school is a lot like other kinds of school. They give you stuff to read, you talk about it in class, and there's a test or a paper at the end. There are some quirks because they're trying to teach you several different things all at the same time, but the basic model is the same. And though last semester was a good deal more challenging than my average quarter in college, it wasn't nearly as hard as my worst two. I never went into that shell-shocked survival mode where you don't have time for anything but working and sleeping. It was tough, but I always felt I could handle it.

What makes things hard (and why I think everone reports it gets easier) is at first you're not just learning a set of legal rules. If all you had to do was learn the rules, reading cases all day wouldn't make any sense, because it is a terribly inefficient way to get to them. When you hear someone complain that professors "hide the ball," that's what they're talking about. Now you do have to learn some core doctrines, and unfortunately that's mostly what you'll be tested on, but that's not the whole story.

What the case method is really designed to to is teach you to derive rules on your own from judicial opinions. Out there in the wild world judges don't like to announce what rule they have in mind, or they may not have a specific rule in mind at all. And even if they did, there are simply too many ways for things to go wrong to specify all the rules out in advance. I imagine that for most cases that get argued there isn't a clear rule set down somewhere, and the lawyers and the judge have to infer it based on old cases. So law schools want to teach you how to figure out what the law is when there isn't a Glannon's you can go look up, and the only way to do that is to figure out how to read cases.

I think that's what the Socratic method is supposed to do too - not force you to think on your feet but to force you through that derivations process. Good socratic teaching ought to be heavy on the hypotheticals, to force students to explore all the implications of their reasoning. Good Socratic dialogue is a tool to get past confirmation bias. I enjoy that kind of back-and-forth, and I think the key to keeping your cool is to be unafraid to make mistakes. I've said some ridiculous things when the prof cold-called me, but I knew that I was there to learn, not to know the answers already.

Of course this is a tricky business and only skilled professors can really pull it off. If they waste all their time grilling students about factual details that didn't affect the ruling, well, I don't know what to say. I imgaine a lot of the time the Socratic method is done simply out of inertia, and without any understanding about what it was intended to accomplish. On the upside, most law professors speak fluent, unaccented English, so you can at least make out what's going on. Bad methods may be better than bad speech.

The main problem is the school doesn't explicitly tell you about these other goals. But that's what I'm here for, right? They also tend to do a poor job of testing for them. The incentives in law school can be way out of whack, but that's a whole 'nother post at this point. Posting past exams mitigates it somewhat, as students actually know what they'll have to do in the end.