You are not wrong. It’s a common joke in law school that the one thing law school doesn’t do is teach you how to practice law. That you have to learn on the job.
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No experience with law school, but in med school we were taught that we were learning how to learn to be doctors. Actually learning to treat patients, deal with the complicated relationships necessary, begins in residency and continues into the early years of practice. I look back in horror at some of the things I said and did early on. I have gotten much, much better over the years, but it never, ever ends. I am a better doc now than I was 5, 10, 20 and 30 years ago. Some of that is things i learned here, lots was from things I learned from my patients and parents, a tiny bit was stuff from CME programs. But it just continues. The day you quit learning, get different job. I am guessing here, but i suspect law is similar.
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A good part of legal education is teaching you how to think like a lawyer. I don’t think that’s always a great thing, but it has definitely changed how I view the world and how I view problems. I certainly say “it depends” a whole lot more than I used to.
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This is a bit overly dramatic, but essentially as true today as it was in 1973. This movie was a pretty accurate glimpse of the first year of law school at the time. The professors are, as a whole, more patient and tolerant today, but it’s still true enough that when I rewatched this after starting law school, I was surprised at how familiar it felt.
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This is a huge problem in law practices. Law school does not prepare people for the actual work. Baby lawyers need some keen oversight for a while before they get the hang of whatever area they are specializing in. Pretty much like a residency but not actually required.
There’s been a push that I think is gaining traction for more practical courses in law schools. Right now, the only practical learning is done in clinics, which are optional and often hard for non-traditional students to participate in.
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That brings back memories! Not of law school, but of watching that in the theater and recognizing how SMART that was. It made a lot of waves at the time.
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The other part of that movie that is pretty realistic is the depiction of “cold calling”. One thing absolutely still true today in law school is that there are reading assignments you have to do before your first ever day of your first ever class of law school. And every class after that, actually. It’s not like you go to your first day of classes, get a syllabus, and then start studying. You get the syllabus ahead of time, and you are expected to be prepared to answer questions if called on on day 1. In the Paper Chase, famously, the main character did not know this and showed up to class having done none of the reading, and then Housman’s character calls on him, and when he is unable to answer, he just puts him on his shit list, literally, with no plans to ever call on him again. Today, it’s not as bad if you are unprepared, depending on the program and the professor. Most of mine just told us at the start of the class that if you were ever going to be unable to answer questions, just email them before class. And as long as you didn’t do that all the time, it was fine. Unfortunately, some of my professor’s were really bad about checking email. I had a mild heart attack in October, 2020, the first semester of my 2L year. Because of COVID, we were still doing classes remotely, and I was out of the hospital and able to “attend” my next classes, but I hadn’t been able to do any of the reading because I’d been in the hospital. So I emailed the program coordinator and my professors to let them know. And then in my next Criminal Law class, the professor cold called me. And I had to tell him why I hadn’t read any of the material and the entire class found out I’d had a heart attack. He was very understanding, and felt bad that he hadn’t checked his email, and it’s funny now, but it didn’t feel great at the time.
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I had the opposite of that happen in grad school. I was an ‘older student’ getting back into it, and desperately tried everything I could think of to figure out where a particular professor’s syllabus and assigned reading might be (this was in the 80s, so no WWW as we know it now), and it turns out he expected to just show up on the first day and give the syllabus to us then. I’m like, we’ve just wasted a class, WTH? College wasn’t like that. The Paper Chase wasn’t like that. But somehow the supposedly-excellent grad school I was at was lackadaisical about such things.
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Interesting. My undergrad was all like that. You showed up on the first day of class, and the professor handed out the syllabus, and then either did a basic overview kind of first lecture or just dove right into the material. To be fair, most of my classes were math, science, and engineering, and I think that material is more suited to just diving right in.
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Yes, definitely easier.
The pointy bit is supposed to face forward, the blunt hot bit is supposed to face backwards, don’t press the “makes wings fall off” button, don’t lick the valves of the cryogenic tanks… what else is there?
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and the right’s success in how it frames higher education
Yep, AND the part the Post won’t say out loud – the supposedly “liberal” media’s actual rightwing bias.
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A quick summary: cuts to diversity programs and a new privately funded administrative chair to focus on conservative political and economic thought.
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Wow, this is an unexpected follow-up…
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Fawzia Afzal-Khan is University Distinguished Scholar at Montclair State University in New Jersey:
A respected colleague, who along with myself and a couple of others, has been unflagging in his attempts to get pro-Zionist faculty on our campus Discuss listserv to confront their complicity in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza (an overwhelming number of whom are children), has been publicly silenced.
I woke Thursday morning to an email from this colleague informing me that he had been charged with violating the university’s Title IX code in a complaint filed against him by someone on the campus listserv. As a result, while the complaint winds its way through the system, he is not permitted to post or participate in any further discussions on this forum.
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Perhaps it’s a good time to consider whether creating a quasi-judicial process where university administrators with no training in law can act as judge, jury and executioner was actually a bad thing after all.
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