Bringing Dramaturgy to Law School

-- By ChristianRonald - 10 Mar 2017

A common complaint I have heard from upper-year law students and recent graduates is feeling “stuck” on a path they didn’t intend when they entered law school. As law students, we expect law school to be an opportunity to create a new career for ourselves, but before we realize it, a default career path has been created for us. Because of the challenges and uncertainty in the first year, it is tempting to passively accept that default path as our new goal. In this essay, I propose a method for resisting that temptation using ideas and tools from the field of dramaturgy.

What is Dramaturgy?

Dramaturgy is the study of dramatic literature, structure, and theory. Most theatrical artists engage in some sort of dramaturgy by practicing their craft and analyzing their creations. A dramaturg, however, is a person whose primary function is to advise artists and constructively evaluate their work. Effective dramaturgs wear many hats, including researching the historical context for a production, helping a playwright craft or edit a play’s narrative structure, and giving a director notes from the perspective of an audience member.

How Law School Presents a Dramaturgical Problem

When we applied to law school, we had to tell a story. Like all application essays, these stories were written to persuade admissions officers to accept us, so they contained a certain unavoidable artificiality. On the other hand, they were stories motivated by our past experiences, and they sought to explain why we wanted to be lawyers.

Soon after arriving, however, we were inundated with information about jobs, specialized moot courts, 1L club board positions, and advice about how to excel in law school and our careers after graduation. Almost immediately, we were encouraged to shift our attention from the stories we created before law school to a new medium of storytelling: our resumes. Columbia Law School resumes, we were told, had to be structured and formatted precisely the same. That way, prospective employers would be able to instantly recognize the CLS brand.

The problem with this subtle shift of our attention is that it created an entirely different audience for our stories. Instead of asking how a particular job might fit into the story we want to tell with our career, we were asked to think about how we could tell our story in a way that made us a “good fit” for a particular employer. In law school, this shift presents a dramaturgical problem, because it keeps us from constructively evaluating the original stories we told when we explained why we wanted to be lawyers.

A Proposed Solution

One method for helping us resist this shift in our attention would be to write a revised story at the beginning of law school, inspired by our application essays, which we would periodically edit and consult throughout law school. Instead of an employer-minded resume, this story would be written with ourselves as the target audience. It could be something that we choose to share with professors or classmates, but it could also remain somewhat private. It would be difficult to require students to actually revisit and consult this story, but they would carry symbolic significance even if students chose not to edit them. They would remind us that we set out to create a new career path for ourselves when we came to law school, and that we could opt out of the default path provided to us. Dramaturgical analysis always requires some original text or piece of art to constructively evaluate. These personal stories would give us a creative document to consult throughout our law school careers instead of a rigidly formatted resume.

Two Specific Dramaturgical Tools

If we were required to write these stories at the beginning of law school, there are two specific dramaturgical tools we could use to refine them: relying on a concept and cutting scenes that do not contribute to that concept.

In theater, a concept is a particular message or question a play explores that is ultimately grounded in today’s reality. Dramaturgs often play a key role in identifying these concepts, especially when helping an artistic director choose plays for a particular theater’s season. In this role, the most important question a dramaturg can ask is: “Why are we putting on this play for today’s audience?” For our personal law school stories, then, it would be important to identify these concepts for ourselves. On the first day of this class, we discussed loving justice and hating injustice as the only reasons for returning to law school. Our concepts could be specific iterations of loving justice or hating injustice defined by the particular change we want to make in today’s society as lawyers.

Concepts cannot guide a theatrical production unless artists are willing to cut out the parts of the story that do not serve that particular concept. Especially for classical plays, dramaturgs are asked to cut out whole scenes or characters to comport with a director’s concept for a particular production. The same would apply to our personal stories. Unlike a resume, which encourages us to cram as many activities as we can on one page, the goal for our personal stories would be to make sure all of the activities we were pursuing were consistent with our central concept. Otherwise, they would be cut. It is easier to rationalize activities as “resume builders” than compare them against a personal story supported by a clear concept.

So What?

Writing a personal story and continually revisiting it would be difficult and require commitment during the challenges of law school. However, I think simply having a personal creative document would go a long way towards resisting the temptation to accept the default career path set out for us. It would give us something other than our resumes in which to ground our attention. Then, using dramaturgical tools, we could shape these stories to reflect our own path as lawyers instead of someone else’s.

This draft is a good and thoughtful reason why instead of revising this, you want to undertake the second essay, which is the object you are calling for people to write.