@annaivey recently posted a conversation she had with a prospective law student. He was sitting in on a class at one of the best law schools in the country where he’d been waitlisted. And he found himself wondering, why can’t law school classes be like the Fox drama, House, M.D.?
The student’s post is as follows:
The law classes I audited were not at all what I expected. I imagined the law class dynamic as similar to that between the doctors on “House.” Here the head doctor poses an unexplained phenomenon. Subordinates then offer explanations and poke holes in the responses of their colleagues, and defend or reshape their arguments as the head doctor challenges them. This all happens at a brisk pace with each insight accompanied by a sharp witticism. Not so. In fact, far from the hyper-engaged doctors on “House,” the students in the first class I attended looked like they were doped up on Thorazine. The professor, kind and extremely knowledgeable, probably called on eight students during the hour and twenty-minute session. Not a SINGLE ONE could answer his questions. I don’t mean they offered something and were deemed incorrect. I mean they freely admitted “I don’t know” or, more commonly, just shrugged.
At first, I was impressed by the civility of the students. No one snickered or rolled their eyes. Presumably, they themselves had been the victims of unexpected questions and understood the embarrassment.
That wasn’t it. They just didn’t care.
Sitting in the very back row I had a panoramic view of everyone’s laptop. The man in front of me was comparing airline fees, the woman to my side googling dance lessons. Several screens devoted to movies. Nearly everyone had chat windows in the foreground. One guy was watching porn.
I kid you not.
(Well, he was flipping through images of large-breasted women in bathing suits.)
Criminal law wasn’t much better, though at least in that class one woman was very prepared. Still, even with a good professor, there was just no energy in the room. Ron Suskind once quoted an administration official who described President Bush at his cabinet meetings as a blind man in a room full of deaf people. No communication. That’s what it felt like.
A part of me became embittered. “The front row is watching the f#$@%ing Matrix and I’m on the waitlist?!!?”
“OMFG! WTF,” I wanted to text the girl next to me whose face was buried in her iPhone.
Now, maybe I chose some bad classes, or came on a bad day. I hope that’s the case because [city] wasn’t nearly as bad as I remembered it. People were unexpectedly friendly and the campus was gorgeous. Their [deleted] law center is probably the best in the country and the school has a tremendous reputation in [country]. Plus, many of my friends live in the area. Of course I will stay on the waitlist and of course I will submit a statement reaffirming my enthusiasm for the school. But if I were admitted I would want to sit in on more courses before committing.
I will be interested to see how this compares with [competitor school] when I visit it for an admitted students weekend.To tone down some of the pretentiousness, here’sthe update this student posted later:
Having now had a good night’s sleep, perhaps I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge. For all I know the professors assign 1,000 pages of reading a week and, on the day I observed, asked questions about a footnote on page 882. Or perhaps although the professors seemed very good to me, they might pale in comparison to professors the students have in their other classes, classes to which the students rightly devote the bulk of their attention. Maybe law lectures are just not valuable sources of information and don’t improve final exam grades.
I also could have pointed to welcome surprises, like the fact that [school] was the most racially diverse school that I’ve ever seen. I didn’t mention that before because I wasn’t in the mood at the time to think positively about the institution.
In any case, if you just focus on the gaping divide between reality and expectations then everything I’ve written so far is reliable. I really DID imagine law school classes like the differential analysis in “House” and the X law school classes I witnessed really WERE nothing like that. I was GENUINELY disappointed by what appeared to me to be the lack of engagement on the part of the students and perhaps even more disappointed by the resignation of the professors to their lethargy. Also, I finally got what you were saying about law school being a trade school. There was little that was “intellectual” about the discussion in those classes. To be quite honest, it reminded me a lot of the logical reasoning and, especially, logic games sections of the LSAT.
I am sure after these next visits many more of my assumptions will be up-ended.
This post has been bothering me since I read it.
First of all, if you’re dumb enough to believe that every single law school class will be like a rapid-fire diagnostics session with the greatest (fictional) medical mind in the country, you deserve the disappointment. Get OVER yourself.
Heck, even if you’ve watched “Paper Chase” (if you haven’t, please don’t, you’re just perpetuating an awful stereotype that all 1Ls have watched “Paper Chase” or must watch “Paper Chase”) you probably think that that’s how all law school classes and all law school professors are. Again, get over yourself.
If we’re still plodding along with the House analogy, it’s fair to say that even med school classes aren’t like House. House is barely like House, for that matter, if you think about it, because House always comes upon the answer by himself and all the bickering and diagnostics among the teammates were just exercises in bullshit for the purpose of wasting 40 minutes of a 44 minute program so that House could solve everything in the last 4 minutes and tie it all up with a bow.
To go into law school after watching television shows or movies about law students or students pursuing professional degrees is like prepping for your 2hr flight from Chicago to DC by watching Snakes on a Plane. And of course, go into something with high expectations and you’ll be as disappointed and petulant and bitter as the student from the above excerpt.
The best thing you can do when about to enter law school is do so with an open mind. Realize that it won’t be like college where you slept through all your classes, showed up to lecture in your pajamas, played wiffleball between classes..and before classes…and after classes…basically any time you weren’t in class, really, and managed to whip out that grade-saving 10 page paper in about 4 hours before it was due.
Also realize that it won’t be as horrendous as it was in “Paper Chase.” It won’t, on the whole, be as nerve-wracking or replete with personal abuse as a diagnostics session with the godsend that is Hugh Laurie. And it hopefully won’t be as bad as it was for the author of Planet Law School.
Everyone’s law school experience is different, and stressing about yours isn’t going to make it better. Everyone has to attend two hour class sessions and sit there and try to get something from it. Everyone has monstrous reading assignments and huge briefs and motions to painstakingly research, synthesize, and edit. Law school is not a talent show, and it’s not what this student from above thought it would be. You don’t sit at the edge of your seat in class, ready to jump on every question the professor poses and poke holes in everyone else’s arguments so that you might emerge on top as the supreme ruler. There is no flag to be captured, no tremendous feats of character to be proven, and it’s perfectly all right if Piggy’s spectacles remain intact.
My impression is that the student who posted the first impression (before the update) was a typical undergraduate overachiever with some mighty illusions of being the next Atticus Finch. A little harsh, perhaps, but the original impression is one of the most petulant, bitter, whiny things I’ve ever read. My advice? CRY MOAR, to indulge in fanspeak.
Seeing people surf the web, watch movies, play Spider Solitaire, even look at porn (love the dramatized use of the word before he/she admits that it might have just been a Hanes catalog flipped to the swimwear section) while in class is not at all uncommon. The updated version speaks to this, and the student seems to recognize this and be able to get past his or her bitterness at being waitlisted at this school.
Law school classes are often interminable. Reading, understanding, and briefing cases can be exhausting based on how much the professor assigns. Reading hundreds of pages of supplementary material to understand fifty pages of course material is incredibly taxing. Doing all that while keeping up with your papers and managing to work in time to sleep and attend classes can be near impossible for some.
And just like you play your Comcast On Demand movie and pause it thirty minutes in to go to the bathroom, then an hour in to get some dinner, then ten minutes after that because you forgot to get a napkin, then twenty minutes after that because your mom called (and so on), sometimes the only way to get through a law school class is to distract your brain. Listen to the lecture, check your email. Listen to the lecture some more, take care of some @replies on Twitter. Work on the in-class exercise from the book and play a quick hand of Spider Solitaire.
Granted, watching a movie is a little over the top. I will give the student that.
As for the bored replies, lack of participation, and the general apathy about not knowing the answer and not being ashamed of that, there’s a simple reason. In the past and in popular culture, law professors live and die by the Socratic Method. They’ll pose a problem and start up a veritable civil war in the class.
Is it lawful for the owner of an apartment complex to reserve some units only for whites and not let a non-white rent that unit (even if all the non-white units are taken and he’d make a profit) just on the basis of the color of his skin, the professor will ask.
No, will come the roar from one side of the room. That is an infringement of civil liberties and a violation of the Constitution! It is a bigoted and vile practice and a prime illustration of the evils society would succumb to without educated and ethical lawyers present to set things straight!
Yes, it’s lawful, will come the cry from the otherside of the room. This cry will be meeker, admittedly, because no one wants to be labeled a racist. The apartment owner privately owns the apartment complex and it’s up to him who he rents to. It’s not necessarily fair, but the rights of the owner must be protected!
These two sides of the issue raise a lively, spirited debate in which students take over the discussion, standing from their seats to refute or advocate a colleague’s arguments as the professor watches from the podium, grave even in his tremendous approval of the fine legal minds he’s sculpting.
Yeah, in your dreams.
The real case is that while the Socratic Method used to be THE way to teach the law, it’s fading in popularity. You will, like me, most likely get that one professor that still lives and dies by the method, but he just does a really crappy job of it. He poses hypotheticals and lets you argue and never gives you the right answer, thinking that the merit of the discussion comes from the discussion and the answer is immaterial. WRONG. Even Socrates was given the answers after he deliberated over the question for a while, for God’s sake.
Anyway, not a time to dredge up bad memories. Most professors just don’t rely on the Socratic Method that way anymore. It’s not at all uncommon for professors to spend the entire class session lecturing and expecting very little participation. To assume (or as my Socratic Method professor would berate us, “It’s PRESUME, not assume!”) that all professors use that rapidfire-question-answer-debate-debate-debate model is just an oversimplification. And dumb.
Bottom line: Don’t be as critical and whiny as this student. Go into it with an open mind and understand that the way law was taught to your parents or grandparents, the way it’s taught to fictional characters is more often than not definitely NOT the way it’s taught in the real world.
I’ve gotta say, the personal abuse doled out in this blawg entry was rather House-like, huh?
=P
