A better title could be found, perhaps....

For it?

An insight of limited utility. It would be difficult, even in seven times seven months, to prepare young people, incompletely, for an activity it requires experience as well as sagacity to perform well. As someone who practices law, every day, with young lawyers, I feel certain that I cannot, as teacher, given any amount of time, prevent young people from making mistakes. Probably this has something to do with the fact that in a quarter century practicing law as well as teaching it I have not been able to prevent myself from making mistakes. I make them, as my young lawyers make them, all the time. But we practice together, having complementary strengths and weaknesses, and we do a very good job.

The question isn't whether law school fully prepares you for law practice. It cannot, so it evidently doesn't. The question is whether law school prepares you to have a practice, and to benefit yourself and your community—intellectually, economically, professionally, socially—as much as possible by your experience in it.

The law we encounter in the classroom—mostly in the form of appellate judicial decisions—is largely formal, normative and often presented as the inexorable conclusions of the judges’ rational weighing of things like precedent and interpretative canons. However, as one professor once reminded me, the cases we read in our casebooks are essentially “freaks”—that is, a tiny, unrepresentative percentage of legal problems that manage to batter their way up to appellate court. Moreover, justice does not always come from the courts or even a lawyer’s knowledge of the law. Robinson, for instance, is able to secure a shorter sentence for his Serbian-Fujianese client because he knew how to manipulate others and use extralegal methods to achieve his objectives. Reading about how Robinson dealt with his client starkly drove home the point that the actual practice of law shapes and is shaped by the attendant peculiarities of human behavior, whether they be clients, third parties, judges, or lawyers. Unfortunately this is a fact that I find myself overlooking when dealing with doctrine and abstract legal theories in class.

Well, you don't have to overlook it just because you are also giving a higher priority, for the moment, to the formal materials and linguistic habits of legal behavior. Realism, a commitment to the primary importance of what things do rather than what they are called, is perfectly compatible, as Homes and Felix Cohen both showed, with very precise understanding of technical material. In fact, being a lawyer means mastering both the materials of legal "science," and the realities of social action.

Sure. That's the easy part. But if it's just an hour of experience before the Bar exam instead of after, it doesn't mean much. Turning that experience into more than an hour's work of learning depends on the teaching that surrounds it. This is the overwhelming importance of the clinic, which is a form of law practice designed for teaching, so that an hour of experience and hours of preparation and an hour of reflection can produce knowledge and maturity of judgment worth years. The best externship, the best clerkship, or similar apprenticeship relations, are also founded on the master's skill in teaching. But the teaching is inherently more diffuse, because only the clinic is built as a practice to put its highest priority on the utility of its processes for teaching.

But it's not clear that law clinics or externships are a particularly effective way of studying the breadth of humanity. Assuming for the moment, arguendo (as they say in law school), that your previous stock of human knowledge gained in Vancouver is totally inapplicable in the different universe of the United States, surely one could devise better means of broadening your social circles.

The advantage of the first first draft was its effort to employ imagination. The replacement of that draft by this one deprives us pretty much of your imaginative effort, which is too bad. This essay has a less lighthearted, perhaps even slightly sinister, feeling. You swear by the value of externships. You will spend more time cultivating your network. You will do less fretting over grades. You are going to be a good, socially-minded, young person, and become a thoughtful kind of lawyer. It's all very earnest, but it's not got your irony.

Now let's do what neither draft has clearly done so far: state the idea you want to convey to the reader. Both drafts are coy in different ways, which is inefficient even in the cases where it is charming. If we take the central proposition of the present draft, it is that you are too sheltered, by background and current environment, to understand the society in which your lawyering occurs. Much might be said about this proposition, not all on one side, and with more imaginative energy, it could be more fun for the reader, and for you, to think through.

Paper Title

Introduction

Limitations of law school

Practical experience

People

Paper Title

-- By AilsaChau - 25 Feb 2013

Section I

Subsection A

Subsub 1

Subsection B

Subsub 1

Subsub 2

Section II

Subsection A

Subsection B

“Like Winston at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Serge puffed, cigarette in hand, after I asked him about how he felt about his 1L summer associate callback with Pimperton Dunsfeld. Serge and I were just outside the subway station at 116th and Broadway, directly in front of the gates of Columbia University. It was six o’clock, a cold, windy February night and Serge was having a quick smoke before we headed downtown to attend an evening reception at the offices of Smith Porter & Manning, a large New York firm.

“I think I fucking love Pimperton Dunsfeld now…remember how humorless and cynical and plain miserable those associates we met at the Pimperton lunch reception a couple weeks ago were? Well, the partners I talked to during the callback were, like, the most interesting people and actually seemed somewhat self-actualized. It actually threw me off a little, how nice they were.”

“Wow, basic human decency, what a surprise,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“It was just weird and unexpected after that stupid awkward reception. I’m actually starting to think that partner track at Pimperton is this twisted survival-of-the-fittest scenario. The process will either strip you down into a sort of über -efficient super-human (if you weren’t one already), or it’ll make you shrivel up and die.”

“Sounds pleasant.”

“Of course, I fully intend to avoid the ‘shrivel up and die’ part.”

“Wait—weren’t you just ranting about how you had serious qualms working at Pimperton because they’re such a horrible soulless institution last week? And the odds are that you’ll end up like those horrible associates at the reception anyway.”

Serge shrugged. “Well, you know, may the odds ever be in my favor, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I guess it’s perfectly possible that I’ll end up a soulless husk of a Pimperton associate but who knows? We’re all gaming some perfectly shitty odds in one way or another just by going to law school in this shit economy. Yet here we all are…”

“So do you think you’ll get an offer?” I asked.

“Hopefully….I think it went okay and they’ve definitely converted me. But Pimperton’s interviewing about 4 people a day for 2 or 3 weeks like a fucking assembly line, so who knows.”

By this time, Serge and I had been standing around in the cold for much longer than I’d like, especially given that fact that I was dressed in a skirt suit with bare legs and high heels in accordance with the reception’s dress code. Shivering, I eyed Serge’s (much more weather-appropriate) suit trousers enviously and told him to hurry up.

“Wait, wait,” he said, taking a few more drags on the cigarette before throwing it to the ground. He sighed. “I want to quit, but then I remember that I’m in law school.” He sighed again as we headed down the steps of the subway station together.

I’d known Serge since the very first week of law school when we happened to be attending the same optional orientation event, a trip to the United Nations Headquarters. Precariously thin with a slow blasé voice that sharply contrasted with his quick nervous hands, he had caught my attention with an impressively erudite discussion on the UN Art Collection. After graduating from Oberlin College with some obscure English lit degree, Serge had spent a year backpacking and working odd jobs around Europe before coming to Columbia Law School. Serge hated living in Morningside Heights (“a cultural wasteland,” he complained) and was perpetually trying—but more often than not failing—to find the time to go to Williamsburg or at least somewhere downtown for some respite. When I asked Serge why he went to Columbia or even law school in the first place, he rambled about Milton for 15 minutes and how the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell and so on.

As we stood on the platform waiting for the train to arrive, Serge yawned and stretched his arms, “Remind me why we’re going all the way downtown for this reception? I hate talking to strangers and I have class at 8:30 in the morning tomorrow plus a shitload of readings to do that I haven’t done.”

“I also have class at 8:30 tomorrow and unlike you, I’m actually behind on my readings. Anyway, it was your idea to come,” I replied. “And everyone’s going tonight, because god knows whether 99.99% of us would ever have the chance to ever darken the doors of Smith, Porter & Manning ever again. Think of it this way: it’s like going to a zoo. Except instead of seeing animals, we get to gawk at the typical Smith associate in its natural habitat.”

Serge laughed. “Since you put it that way”—Serge grinned—“but you know, I think you got it the wrong way around. I think we’re the animals in the zoo. Plucked from the wilderness and placed into this weird alternative-reality version of our natural habitat, we live and breathe and shit in it until it’s all we know…and we’re immediately fucked as soon as we’re released into the wild again, outside in the real world.”

“You realize,” I said, “that we weren’t plucked from anything. We all chose to become law students.”

“I know we did,” Serge said, his voice distant and nearly drowned out by the rapidly-approaching train. “I chose to go to law school, the same way I chose to apply to Pimperton and go to the Smith reception tonight. I chose all these things.” The doors to the train opened but Serge paused just outside the door, turning slightly towards me. “As much as any of us who are risk-averse control freaks can truly be said to have a choice.”

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