Friday, December 29, 2006

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!

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