Part 3 of How Not to Succeed in Law School

Third part to the funny law article. This is where it really starts to get good.

How Not to Succeed in Law School
By James D. Gordon III, Professor of Law, Brigham Young University

100 Yale L.J. 1679
Copyright © 1991 Yale Law Journal Company.


V. THE FIRST YEAR

Remember those horror movies in which somebody wearing a hockey mask terrorizes people at a summer camp and slowly and carefully slashes them all into bloody little pieces? That's what the first year of law school is like. Except it's worse, because the professors don't wear hockey masks, and you have to look directly at their faces.

At first, it's not so bad. You get to read a semi-interesting medieval case in which somebody says, "Forsooth, were it not that Birnam Wood had come to Dunsinane, I would unseam thee from the nave to the chaps." But the honeymoon ends when you have to go to your first class. The professor has a black belt in an ancient martial art called "the Socratic method." After the professor completely dismantles a student for sheer sport and humiliates several dozen others, he then points out forty-seven different things in the two-paragraph case that you failed to see and still don't understand. You leave class hoping that maybe there is still a job opening at your brother-in-law's toothpick recycling factory. You are beginning to learn why law school has been compared to a besieged city: everybody outside wants in, and everybody inside wants out.

Many students write "case briefs," or one-page summaries of the cases, before class, in case the professor calls on them. This is a good strategy if you have the slightest aversion to utter humiliation. The brain is a truly wonderful thing: it works from the instant you awake until you go to sleep, and it doesn't stop until the moment you get called on in class, when it suffers a complete and immediate core meltdown. Your professor and 150 other students are waiting patiently for you to state the facts of a given case, and the only sound in the room is a low gurgling rattle coming from the back of your throat.

The key to the Socratic method is that the professor never reveals what the answer is. He keeps insisting that THERE IS NO ANSWER. Consistent with this view, he spends the whole class period asking questions that no one even begins to understand. To get the answers, you have to buy commercial outlines, which cost $ 16.95 apiece and are published by the same people who publish Cliffs Notes and Key Comics. The commercial outlines are written by the professors and provide them with a handsome income on the side. To insure that you will buy them, the professors tell you that, whatever you do, DO NOT buy any commercial outlines, because they will make it TOO EASY for you, and you will not develop the analytical skills and hard work ethic that law school is supposed to teach. Pretty cagey, these professors.

At the beginning the people in your class seem like nice enough folks. But gradually everyone begins to realize that their only hope of getting a job is to blast the chromosomes out of their classmates in the giant zero-sum thermonuclear war game called "class standing." Class standing is what saves law school from being a boring, cooperative learning experience and makes it the dynamic, exciting, survival-of-the-fittest, cutthroat, competitive, grueling treadmill of unsurpassed joy that it is.

Class standing does irreparable psychic injury and scars bright and creative people for the rest of their natural lives. Following law school graduation, it often happens that a bright and creative person is about to do something bright and creative, but then thinks, "No, I was only number 67 out of 150 in my class. I'm probably not capable of any mental activity greater than picking slugs off zucchini plants." So she doesn't do anything.

To make sure that the message gets through, the professors are not content with the demeaning and humiliating exercise of calculating class standing. No. First, they tell students that class standing and grades do not matter. Not at all. They know that the students will remember the episode with the commercial outlines and will therefore conclude that nothing else in the entire universe matters except class standing and grades. Then, to strike the final blow, the professors adopt a grading system straight out of the seventh level of Dante's Inferno. They take students who have undergraduate GPA's of A-minus, and who have never gotten a B-minus in their entire lives, and they give them -- get this -- all C's! ! This will prove that the professors know the law better than the students, in case that point was somehow overlooked. Most law students never recover from this act of evil genius. They spend the rest of their lives figuring out how to get even with the rest of humanity. This is also the reason that Supreme Court Justices are always so testy with each other in their opinions. An example: "When two of our esteemed colleagues left the majority and joined the dissent, it raised the average IQ in both groups by thirty points." HA! The Justices are still hopping mad about that C-minus they got in civil procedure forty years ago.

During the first year, the law students quickly divide into three groups:

The Active Participants: Overconfident geeks who compete with each other to take up the most airtime pointing out that before law school, when they were Fulbright Scholars, they thought of a question marginally relevant to today's discussion. Their names appear on the class' "Turkey Bingo" cards, a game you win if five people on your card speak during one class period. The Active Participants stop talking completely when first-semester grades come out and they get all C's.

The Back Benchers: Cool dudes who "opt out" of law school's competitive culture and never prepare for class. They sit on the back row, rather than in their assigned seats, so the professor can't find them on the seating chart. They ask if they can "borrow" your class outline.

The Terrified Middle Group: People who spend most of their time wondering what the hey is going on, and why don't the professors just tell us what the law is and stop playing "hide the ball" and shrouding the law in mystery/philosophy/sociology/nihilistic relativism/astrology/voodoo/sado-masochistic Socratic kung fu?

The cases are, of course, dreadfully boring. There are, however, a few interesting characters you will meet in the legal literature, like the "fertile octogenerian," the "naked trespasser," and the "officious intermeddler." It is best to keep these three people from spending much unsupervised time together. Also, there are a few interesting cases, such as Cordas v. Peerless Transportation Co., in which the judge was apparently a frustrated playwright:

This case presents the ordinary man -- that problem child of the law -- in a most bizarre setting. As a lowly chauffeur in defendant's employ, he became in a trice the protagonist in a breath-bating drama with a denouement almost tragic. It appears that a man, whose identity it would be indelicate to divulge, was feloniously relieved of his portable goods by two nondescript highwaymen in an alley near 26th Street and Third Avenue, Manhattan; they induced him to relinquish his possessions by a strong argument ad hominem couched in the convincing cant of the criminal and pressed at the point of a most persuasive pistol. Laden with their loot, but not thereby impeded, they took an abrupt departure and he, shuffling off the coil of that discretion which enmeshed him in the alley, quickly gave chase. . . .

This judge was obviously having such a good time it's hard to believe that the point of all of this humor was (chuckle, chuckle) to hand down a decision against a woman and her infant children who were injured by a runaway taxi.

Another strange, but interesting, example of our judiciary in action is United States ex rel. Mayo v. Satan and his Staff, in which the plaintiff sued Satan under federal statutes for violating his civil rights. He alleged that the defendant had on numerous occasions caused him misery, plagued him with unwarranted threats, placed deliberate obstacles in his path, and caused his downfall, and therefore had deprived him of his constitutional rights. The court denied the plaintiff's application to proceed in forma pauperis, holding:

We question whether plaintiff may obtain personal jurisdiction over the defendant in this judicial district. The complaint contains no allegation of residence in this district. While the official reports disclose no case where this defendant has appeared as defendant there is an unofficial account of a trial in New Hampshire where this defendant filed an action of mortgage foreclosure as plaintiff. The defendant in that action was represented by the preeminent advocate of that day, and raised the defense that the plaintiff was a foreign prince with no standing to sue in an American Court. This defense was overcome by overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Whether or not this would raise an estoppel in the present case we are unable to determine at this time.

We note that the plaintiff has failed to include with his complaint the required form of instructions for the United States Marshal for directions as to service of process.

The plaintiff in Mayo sued without a lawyer, because suing the devil would present lawyers with an obvious conflict of interest.

But most cases are, in Mark Twain's phrase, chloroform in print. Show me a person who finds them fascinating, and I'll show you a charisma coach for Calvin Coolidge.

VI. THE LAW FACULTY

The law faculty is a distinguished group of prison guards who sit in attack formation at law school assemblies. If you want to know what kind of people law professors are, ask yourself this question: "What kind of a person would give up a salary of a jillion dollars a year in a big firm to drive a rusted-out Ford Pinto and wear suits made out of old horse blankets?" Think about this carefully before asking your professor's opinion on any subject.

A law professor's greatest aspiration is to be like Professor Kingsfield in the movie The Paper Chase. One professor who saw the movie decided (this is a true story) to act out one of the scenes from the film in his class. He called on a student, who replied that he was unprepared. The professor said, "Mr. Jones, come down here." The student walked all the way down to the front of the class. The professor gave the student a dime, and said, "Take this dime. Call your mother. Tell her that there is very little chance of your ever becoming a lawyer." Ashamed, the student turned and walked slowly toward the door. Suddenly, however, he had a flash of inspiration. He turned around, and in a loud voice, said, "NO, Clyde." (He called the professor by his first name.) "I have a BETTER idea! YOU take this dime, and you go call ALL YOUR FRIENDS! !" The class broke into pandemonium. The professor broke the student into little bitty pieces.

Politics are often divisive at law schools. In the 1960's, the faculties were conservative and the students were liberal. In the 1980's, the students were conservative and the faculties were liberal -- the professors having spent their formative years as members of the Grateful Dead entourage. The 1970's were a difficult transitional period during which, for an awkward moment, faculties and students were able to communicate. They discovered that they did not like each other.

When law professors are not doing important things like writing commercial outlines, they are writing casebooks. Of course, they make you buy their casebooks for their classes. One of the cardinal rules of casebooks is that they must have as many authors as there are soldiers in the Montana National Guard. The more authors the publisher can recruit, of course, the more classes in which the casebook will be adopted.

Just to prove that at heart they are really gentle, fun-loving people, professors will occasionally do something a little bit zany, like wear a costume to class on Halloween. This makes the students laugh and cheer. Before you laugh and cheer, however, you should check your calendar. It is often difficult to tell whether a professor is wearing a costume or not.

ENJOY!

Part 2 of How Not to Succeed in Law School

this is a continuation of the article/series of How not to succeed in law school.

These next two sections are pretty funny but the best section will come tomorrow.



How Not to Succeed in Law School
By James D. Gordon III, Professor of Law, Brigham Young University

100 Yale L.J. 1679
Copyright © 1991 Yale Law Journal Company.

III. CHOOSING A LAW SCHOOL

There are lots of fine law schools to choose from. For instance:

Harvard. Harvard is number one, as you can learn by asking anyone who went to Harvard. Or even if you don't ask. The only disadvantage of going to Harvard is that the graduation robes are the same color as Balls O' Fire Salmon Eggs.

Yale. Forget about Yale. It's so selective that no one ever goes there. If you find this statement doubtful, ask yourself this simple question: Do you personally know anyone who is going there now? Of course not. Oh, sure, there are lots of people who say that they went there in the past, now that it can't be verified. Don't you be fooled.

Michigan. This is a good school, except the official school drink is Prestone. As each winter comes to an end, someone will have to remind you not to stare at that big yellow ball in the sky.

Chicago. Learn how many Chicago law professors it takes to screw in a light bulb. (Answer: None. The market will take care of it itself.)

Boalt Hall (Berserkeley). Boalt is built on a hill overlooking one of the most spectacular views on earth: the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. Therefore, they naturally designed the building so that all its huge picture windows face directly into the fraternity houses across the street. You can't catch a glimpse of the Bay, but you do have a terrific view of fraternity blobs sitting around in their gym shorts, drinking beer, belching, and listening to the music of Twisted Sister at 300 decibels. Oh well.

Columbia. On the front of the law school building at Columbia, you will notice a huge sculpture of a man who has put a noose around the neck of a horse and is throttling it to death. You will not be able to understand the true significance of this sculpture until several days into your first year at Columbia.

Northwestern. Northwestern deliberately charges the highest tuition, on the theory -- called the "Ray-Ban Theory" -- that people will note the price tag and conclude that it must be the best school. Its goal is that eventually people will refer to Harvard as "the Northwestern of the Northeast."

Other Top Ten Law Schools. There are about twenty-five schools in this category. Consult this week's AP and UPI polls.

The "Middle Group." The Middle Group includes all other accredited law schools. These schools actually teach the law.

About Two Thousand Unaccredited California Law Schools. For example: Frank and Morty's School of Law and Cosmetology of the Lower Level of the Seven Hills Shopping Mall. Don't let the classy name fool you. There are basically two requirements for admission to this institution:
1. A pulse, and
2. $ 12,000.
The first requirement can be waived.

Be sure to avoid law schools with "Jr." in the name, such as "Leland Stanford, Jr. Law School." These are actually junior law schools.

People often ask whether it's important that they attend a law school in the state where they intend to practice. The answer, of course, is NO. A good law school's curriculum is not tied to the law of any particular state. This is also true of the "elite" law schools, except that their curriculum is not tied to the law of any particular planet. You should attend one of those schools if you intend to practice law somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy.

IV. APPLYING TO LAW SCHOOL

You will need to submit applications to several law schools, which will cost you fifty bucks a pop. Law schools have you fill out lengthy application forms which require you not only to provide your GPA and your LSAT score, but also to describe your unique abilities and experiences, and the ways in which you might add to the rich fabric of the law school class. It takes you about eighty hours to fill out each of these forms. It takes you even more time to write and polish and repolish the "personal statement." Check over your personal statement carefully to make certain that you have used the two key words every law school looks for: "endeavor" and "cognitive." If all else fails, slip in a sentence such as: "I have always endeavored to be cognitive in all my cognitive endeavors."

When the law school receives your application, it banks your check, adds up your GPA and your LSAT, and throws the rest of the application away. No sane admissions officer is going to wade through 6,000 personal statements. And no law school in its right mind would take the risk of letting you know that your scores are all that matters. If you knew that, you might not apply in the first place. Multiply fifty bucks times 6,000 applications, and you can begin to see their point.

Anyway, after submitting the applications, you will receive several letters saying, "CONGRATULATIONS! ! You are on the 'hold' list for getting on the 'preliminary waiting list' to be considered for admission." They want to make sure that they can fill their class and get the tuition money they need, so they won't reject you until after they see how many students show up on the first day of class. I mean, what does it hurt them if you give up your other career plans and lifelong ambitions, right? Do you want to go to law school or not? OK, then stop whining.

Then, finally, you get accepted.


I know the feeling described in that last paragraph oh so well. Tomorrow will be part 3.

How Professors Grade Exams

This is a pretty funny article on how professors grade law exams. I've heard stories about this process from friends but it's quite funny to see on a blog and with pictures.

Here's the first little bit but click here to see the full post.

It's that time of year again. Students have taken their finals, and now it is time to grade them. It is something professors have been looking forward to all semester. Exactness in grading is a well-honed skill, taking considerable expertise and years of practice to master. The purpose of this post is to serve as a guide to young professors about how to perfect their grading skills and as a way for students to learn the mysterious science of how their grades are determined.

Grading begins with the stack of exams, shown in Figure 1 below.

Enjoy the subsequent laughter.

Part 1 of the How Not to Succeed in Law School

This is a very long and hilarious law journal article. This is not done by me but is definitely worth reading whether you're in, out or never plan on going to law school.


How Not to Succeed in Law School
By James D. Gordon III, Professor of Law, Brigham Young University

100 Yale L.J. 1679
Copyright © 1991 Yale Law Journal Company.

I. SHOULD YOU GO TO LAW SCHOOL?

Would you like to help the less fortunate?

Would you like to see liberty and justice for all?

Do you want to vindicate the rights of the oppressed?

If so, you should join the Peace Corps. The last thing you should do is attend law school.

People basically hate lawyers, and with good reason. That's why you'll rarely escape from a dinner party without hearing at least one lawyer joke. Indeed, literature reveals that people have always hated lawyers. Samuel Coleridge wrote in The Devil's Thoughts:

He saw a Lawyer killing a Viper
On a dunghill hard by his own stable;
And the Devil smiled, for it put him in mind
Of Cain and his brother, Abel.

Even other species detest lawyers. Carl Sandburg wrote:

Why is there always a secret singing
When a lawyer cashes in?
Why does a hearse horse snicker
Hauling a lawyer away?

It is true that some lawyers are dishonest, arrogant, greedy, venal, amoral, ruthless buckets of toxic slime. On the other hand, it is unfair to judge the entire profession by a few hundred thousand bad apples. In fact, there are many perfectly legitimate reasons for going to law school. For example, ask yourself the following questions:

Do I want to go to medical school but can't stand the sight of blood?

Are my inlaws pestering me to death to do something meaningful (i.e., lucrative) with my life? Have I considered circulating petitions to ban inlaws, but realized that it would only spawn stupid bumper stickers saying, "WHEN INLAWS ARE OUTLAWED, ONLY OUTLAWS WILL HAVE INLAWS"?

Did I major in English and have absolutely nowhere else to turn?

If these questions ring a bell, you might feel that law school is for you. Lie down for a while until the feeling goes away. If it doesn't go away, prepare yourself for the consequences. For example, your grandparents will immediately scrape off their bumper sticker that says, "ASK ME ABOUT MY GRANDCHILDREN." You see, they grew up in a time when a person's word was his bond, when a handshake was enough, when disputes were worked out amicably and quickly among people of good will. Fortunately, you don't live in such primitive times! Today, you can make a handsome income exploiting other people's personal tragedies and society's declining sense of community. And just in time, too -- right when you are graduating from college. Talk about lucky!


II. TAKING THE LSAT

Before you can go to law school, you have to take an exam called the LSAT. Nobody knows whether the "A" in LSAT stands for "Admissions," "Aptitude," or "Arbitrary." The LSAT basically measures how well you can use a number 2 pencil to fill in the little circles on the computer sheet. Be sure to fill in the circles completely and carefully. Do not make any stray marks on the paper. This will lower your score. The instructions at the top of the exam carefully explain that these are the grading criteria, but hardly anyone ever pays any attention to them.

The old LSAT scores went up to 800, but a few years ago the LSAT people (whoever they are) changed the exam so that now the highest possible score is 48. This looks pretty suspicious, if you ask me. I mean, why 48? Why not a nice round number, like 100? The secret truth is that a group of law professors who scored 48 on the old exam lobbied the LSAT people to make 48 the highest score.

The old LSAT had -- I am not making this up -- a math section. After conducting an exhaustive nationwide study, however, the LSAT people finally realized that no one had asked a lawyer to solve a quadratic equation or find the cosine of an angle for, probably, several centuries, and so they eventually deleted it. This action was taken against their better judgment (using the term loosely). After all, the math section provided a handy way to discriminate among people of equal intelligence.

Frankly, the current LSAT isn't much better. It asks questions like, "Compare Madam Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities with Huckleberry Finn in Huckleberry Finn." This makes no sense at all, since lawyers rarely address this question.

Another typical question on the current LSAT goes like this:

Assume you have a fox, a goose, and a bag of corn. You need to row them all across the river, but the boat will carry only you and one other thing at a time. If you leave the fox and the goose alone, the fox will eat the goose. If you leave the goose and the corn alone, the goose will eat the corn. How do you get them across?

The answer is so simple a child could get it: you beat the goose silly with an oar, and then take the fox across before he flees for his life. This question is so stupid I don't even know why they include it.

It never seems to have occurred to the LSAT people that their test might deign to include a few questions that actually relate to a lawyer's work. For example:

(1) Abe is a lawyer who wins a personal injury lawsuit for Betty, a quadriplegic. Abe should take a contingent fee of:
a. 30%
b. 50%
c. 100%
d. (The correct answer) 100%, plus a bonus for taking a public service case.

Or:
(2) The judge receives a bribe of $ 5,000 from the plaintiff's lawyer. He then receives a bribe of $ 10,000 from the defendant's lawyer. The judge should:
a. Notify the state bar association
b. Notify the police
c. Notify the FBI
d. (The correct answer) Return $ 5,000 to the defendant and try the case on the merits.

The LSAT people say that LSAT preparation courses do not help, since the LSAT tests knowledge and skills that cannot be improved by last minute cramming. Regardless of what the LSAT people say, however, you will notice that there are several suspiciously solvent LSAT prep course companies who are happy to take your money. Of course, you can always choose to "go bare" and take the LSAT without any prep course at all. People who have done this in the past are called "nonlawyers."

You take the LSAT in a stifling room crammed with five hundred sweating people. It is immediately apparent that none of them has ever watched a deodorant commercial in his or her entire life. Through a strange quirk of fate, you have to sit right next to some moron who chomps loudly on Corn Nuts throughout the whole exam while wearing those artillery-range ear protectors that make it impossible for him to notice anything less than 7.5 on the Richter scale. They also make it impossible for you to tell him what an inconsiderate imbecile he is. Notice your feeling of panic and nausea as you take the LSAT. Get used to it.

After you take the LSAT, they send you your score and a statement explaining which "percentile" you are in. The "percentile" is the inverse percentage chance you have of spending your life doing something honest.


Look for more to come tomorrow!

Launch of a Law Search Engine

So I started something I think could be really neat. It's a search engine geared specifically to law school. Anyone can join and help moderate the search engine. I would love for this to take off and hopefully be a very useful tool for law school fun, help, and survival.

Check it out here - Law v. Life - Law School Search Engine

Also for all those that were wondering. I feel like my interview went really well. It was much more like a conversation then an interview which I think typically means a good interview. We shall see though.

Big Interview Tomorrow With a Law Firm

So tomorrow is probably one of the bigger steps towards my career as a lawyer. I have an interview downtown with a fairly small but well known law firm. Luckily, through personal contacts I was able to send in my resume so that I could even get the interview. I think this will have to the path I go down to get most, if not all my internships and eventually my first job at a firm. Career services at the law school don't seem to do all that well in placing students with these firms.

Anyways, I should probably be sleeping right now. Wish me luck and cross the fingers. Five lawyers each get their own personal chance to knock me out tomorrow.

A little funny law humor for the holiday season

This comic is pretty good.



Again, you see how I am spending my time on my break.

Very Helpful Site for Law School

Again, I spent another night surfing the web looking at various legal stuff. It is really funny how much law school information is out there. I know during the semester I looked around for various sources to help me with exams and just something that would help me kinda find my way.

Anyways, I think I found probably one of the best informational sites for exam help, legal analysis, etc. so far. It even had some information on grand ole IRAC and other helpful tips.

If you're interested or looking for law school help on exams or analysis then read up on this site.

InLawSchool.com - Law School Exam Help, Legal Analysis

Hope it helps!

Law T-Shirts and More

So I ran across these law school t-shirts. For those that haven't seen these then this is a must.

Personal favorites are:
- You Down With the UCC - Yeah You Know Me!
- You Got SERVED! FRCP4
- I Use Your Mom So Often I Should Have a Prescriptive Easement.

Funny Law School Tees

I thought these were much better than the typical jokes like "Why did the Shark not eat the Lawyer? - Professional Courtesy"

Enjoy!

Another one of those law blogs

I have recently finished up my first semester of my 1L year and probably one of the most unenlightened ideas popped into my head.

Why don't I start a blog to ramble about lovely law school?

I mean whether I'm a law student come February is still to be determined but I figured that I'm invested 40k into law school already so why not throw a blog in to add to the pile.

Christmas break comes around so you go home to your family and friends then realize you are struggling for conversation topics. I mean who wants to hear about TJ Hooper, Eastern Gulf, or about some doctrine that is Erie.

I really once was a pretty big talker. My father loved to call by the nickname "Motor Mouth" but now it seems I'd rather sit still and listen then try to argue two sides to some issue. The best is when I dive into a conversation and start off stating an issue (whether this...) and receive the most perplexed looks in return. I mean give a 1L the hypo 1+1=2 and they'd probably try to argue that it is a very complex legal question by using 3 and 4 word jumbles (insofar) or just some cool Latin speak (res ipsa loquitor). It is hilarious though, hearing res ipsa said by a good country boy or being written on the board by your prof as a kid rambles on about why you should vote for him for honor court justice.

So far, I've enjoyed law school. I have found my passion and have worked harder then I ever imagined possible. I have probably read more in the past six months then in my life time but it for the most part has been interesting topics. Sorry but sometimes Civ Pro is painful. I learned that undergrads will most likely kill 1Ls in flag football but felt redeemed by the us beating the 2Ls in the Battle for the Chattel (Law School speak for Super Bowl).

Anyways, I do hope to write much more about legal issues then reflections but I guess it is that time of year.