Josh Auriemma of Legal Geekery did an excellent follow-up post about a post he did almost a year ago on 9 reasons to not go to law school. The follow-up post revolves around two comments to that post from a Jane Doe.
The first comment is longer than the original post (which wasn’t a slouch to begin with) but was very positive about law school. Jane basically laid out a lot of very good practice advice about managing law school. In a nutshell, the advice was:
- Understand what law school entails
- Set reasonable expectations about the success you can expect.
- Limit your debt load
- Keep yourself healthy
- Avoid gossip and rumor
At first glance, Jane sounded like the type of practical, grounded, realistic law student that tends to make it through law school with their sanity and relationships in tact. Her advice seemed like exactly the sort of tactical knowledge that students need to have in order to both make an informed decision to go to law school and to get through it once they’re there.
And then, a year later, she quit law school:
Well, I’m back. For all the talking about law school I’ve done: I will sound the warning bells loud and clear. Don’t go. And if you go, don’t be afraid to quit. I made it half way. And I quit. I never met so many sociopaths in one place, I never witnessed so much categorical unfairness and never fell victim to so much intentional ill will all at once.
I don’t think you can criticize anyone’s decision to quit law school. But the rapid change in her attitude between January 2009 and November 2009 was startling. However, after reading the two comments, the reasons become clearer.
So many law students are obsessed with the tactical level of law school. They are hell-bent on optimizing everything in their life in order to do the best they can in law school.
In reality, the most sane law students tend to have a higher-level understanding of law school. They are a little more strategic than tactical.
Looking back over her tips, Jane took this tactical efficiency to an extreme. Take her cost-cutting measures. No matter how expensive books are, I cannot in good conscience ever recommend that someone rely on library books instead of buying textbooks.
It’s not just the hassle of having to copy every page you’re going to read. It’s having the security of knowing that the stuff you need to know is at hand all the time rather than in the library. You pay the $2000 per year for books for that security, and I think it’s one of the smarter purchases in law school.
I don’t have stats on it, but I believe the people who quit law school tend to fall into two groups. One group is the people who just can’t get started, never losing that deer-in-headlights look until eventually the semi runs them over. The other is people who think they have law school wired and then realize they don’t.
If you want to stay in law school and make it all the way through, part of it is realizing you don’t have it wired and never will. Between the stress it puts on a couple hundred people and some of the systemic arbitrariness (the curve anyone?), you can’t turn it into a wind-up toy. And realizing that is the first step in having a real plan to get through law school.
