Law Schools

Starting Law School? Don’t Start Lord Of The Flies, Too.

Law school has the capacity to offer you great abilities, but it also has the ability to take your humanity away from you.

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There is a secret about going to law school.  It’s a well-kept secret.  Here it is: Law school can be kind of like high school.  If you let it.

What I mean by that is that just as a group of people from smaller ponds clumped themselves together into the big pond of high school, so too are people clumped together from the small ponds of undergrad to the big ponds of class rankings, journals, etc.  It is a major transition.

Some people will not make this transition well.  They will be truly evil to their colleagues. They will do everything possible to sabotage the success of their peers.  They will steal notes, sow discord, and summon every aspect of their inner eighth-grader.  Some may graduate from law school in much the same fashion.  They will never go beyond or rise above this base instinct, practicing law while out to destroy.

Don’t be that person.  Don’t let your insecurities drive you to lash out.

Others will wither.  The once boisterous and confident undergrad student who used to volunteer in class will be silent, questioning their decision to go to law school, whether or not they really know the information, and they will become their own worst enemy.

Don’t be that person either.  Don’t let your insecurities drive out that which made you great.

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Some people will worry about every instinct they have to help people.  Some will try to share study aids, notes, and otherwise help those who are struggling.  In the face of that, they will face anger from those who would rather they not help out those who are in need.  Some will see their compassion as a weakness, while in fact it is a great strength.

Don’t be the person who gives up being compassionate for others.  Don’t let the insecurities of others drive out that which is good in you.

I could go on.  The basic gist is that law school has the capacity to offer you great abilities, but it also has the ability to take your humanity away from you.  If you let it, you and your peers could be like a microcosmic version of Lord of the Flies.

As a friend once wrote:

Some of you might develop an unjustified and dangerous arrogance which can pose considerable risk to your long-term ethical and moral well-being.  You may mistakenly believe and arrogantly think you know it all; that you can justify any position you wish; that you can parse rules to no end; and, that you can manipulate facts to suit any objective — all in the name of the end you seek.  It is a serious and dangerous mistake to be seduced by these beliefs because they misunderstand the nature and purpose of legal reasoning and the other skills you will learn here, threaten the public purposes of the profession and pose a great risk to you as an ethical person.

Whatever you may think at this point, your ability to resist temptation and avoid ethical transgressions may be tested after a few months in law school as you become more sophisticated with analytical thinking.  A central counterweight to this risk is the maintenance of personal ethical standards.

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Easier said than done.  But law school is about learning a method of discourse, how to think like a lawyer, and how to become a lawyer.  None of these goals requires you to leave your humanity at the door.   Nor should you ever do so.

LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here.  He is way funnier on social media, he claims.  Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg) or Facebook. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.

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