From time to time admissions at BLS gathers 30+ potential students, often with their parents, and has them sit in on a class. I think watching their reactions is interesting. There’s a certain amount of fear in their eyes, maybe a little bit of anxiety. Others are clearly nascent gunners who are already studying for finals and probably know more than I do about punitive damages. The common thread with all prospective students, I think, is the look of uncertainty of whether they should come here.
Now that I’ve had a good taste of what law school is like (at two schools no less), allow me to issue my own “WK pearls of wisdom” based on my 12 weeks of legal education in an effort to dispell uncertainty: Law school is hard, but it is not impossible. It just requires lots of work. Innate intelligence helps, but that’s subsidiary to work ethic. This is like every other academic pursuit except the magnitude of information one has to compress, organize, remember and use is far more vast. There really aren’t a lot of tricks or shortcuts to mastering it. You’ll read all day, brief all day and outline all the information. The information you learn can be hard to understand at first, but with enough effort it’s almost all comprehensible (except for 19th century opinions. I still hate those and think they should be banned from casebooks). Maybe it helps if you worked in a law firm or you were on a debate team or you’ve read every John Grisham novel or your mom is a lawyer, but so far it seems like those prior experiences give only marginal benefits and are not totally relevant indicia of one’s success or enjoyment of law school. What counts is how much you are willing to work and how much you like working. That’s it. That’s law school so far, a great deal of brain work.
So, if you really hate sitting quietly for hours, using your brain, reading sometimes very arcane material for hours on end, think about other occupations. The above description somehow seems negative, but a lot of people, including myself, really enjoy that kind of work.
On a sidenote, admissions should have the visitors sit in on a Legal Analysis, Research and Communication (LARC) class. If you can sit in on an 8 am class with Prof. LARC, who has to say a number, followed by the words “point” “subsection” “but if…then see number (repeat cycle for one hour)” and you haven’t lost total interest, then maybe this is your place because LARC is is the rawest, most bare and base form of legal education I’ve encountered so far.
-WK
Posted by WK 