Attention 1Ls: This Is Law School Bingo And It Will Save Your Life

A new book offers a variation of Law School Bingo. That got us thinking: how many ways are there to play this law school staple?

Welcome to law school!

These opening days and weeks are going to feel pretty disorienting. Perhaps it’s a little clichéd, but you’re embarking on a wondrous journey — a safari of the mind! And much like a real safari it will be way too expensive and require a bevy of ethical compromises to justify to yourself. Also you’ll probably get dysentery.

But when you’re sitting down to two hours of droning on about the peppercorns they grow at Blackacre, there’s a way to keep yourself entertained and, in a round about way, learn something too. It’s a time-honored tradition called Law School Bingo.

Law School Bingo is like poker: there are many variations and they’re all awesome. Truly a game requiring an alert ear, cagey strategy, and 90 minutes of lecture time to kill. The perfect antidote to 1L Contracts. I always played Law School Bingo as a variation on the second vignette in this series: fill out a box with a bunch of student names, and every time one of those gunners asks a question, mark your box.

If you don’t think there’s strategy involved there, you aren’t trying hard enough. To paraphrase Tolstoy, most law students are all alike; every gunner is a gunner in their own way. Peruse those readings and if you’re about to cover Lochner, line up those Fed Soc Objectivists sitting in the back for the middle row and wallow in their impassioned defense of child labor.

Many versions of this game require the winner to ask a question and work in the word “Bingo.” That’s certainly a challenge, but it also all but guarantees you get busted by the professor who undoubtedly won this game at one point themselves. A better version of the game requires the winner to ask a question and work in a predetermined, contextually believable code phrase to let other players know you’ve gotten your Bingo. Honestly, crafting a coherent question under these circumstances means you have to earn your Bingo. I remember once launching into a very nuanced point about a case on forum selection clauses before I tossed out the “vis a vis” that we’d set as the week’s code, reveling in the barely audible groan from somewhere else in the room.

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Oh, and don’t take the soft way out and set up some Slack window. The true challenge is having to raise your hand and concoct a question that’s both relevant and gets the codeword across. It’s about exposing yourself naked to the whims of the professorial inquisition to win a game of pride. Don’t take the coward’s way out.

A new book on legal education actually offers up a variant of the game closer to the drinking game from the first vignette in that video. In The Education of a Lawyer (affiliate link), Gary Muldoon offers his thoughts on the molding of lawyers, both in law school and in practice.

And in discussing law school, he cheerfully corrupts the next generation of law students by encouraging them to try their hand at his version of Law School Bingo, based around concepts and pompous terminology thrown around by the professor.

Tremendous. Though not sure this specific card would be much fun. I mean, I doubt “Palsgraf” and “Widget” will come up in the same lecture (though if it did!). Still, there’s a lot of great Bingo fodder here. I definitely had professors for whom using “query” may as well have been the free space.

What other versions are out there? Well, you could merge the two and play off what gunners say during class.

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Or you could just play with random law school events.

Maybe you don’t play it during class, but during Law Review editorial meetings. Or recruiting events. There are so many options. Doubtless every law school has its own twist on the game to include its own local flavor. What does/did your school play? Send your cards and rules into tips. Maybe if we get enough interesting options we can compile a sort of Hoyle’s of Law School Bingo.

Earlier: Let’s Waste Some Time On A Friday


Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.