The Slacker's Guide to Law School

The Slacker's Guide to Law School

Most law students are, well, terrifying. The intensity with which they treat every day of law school may well be the cause of global climate change. Whether its endless reading and rereading, daily study sessions, or law review writing contests, these students push their limits so that, if lucky, they will one day be able to work even harder for a corporate law firm.

But there are some law students who are there just for the degree and not the grades. There are some who, when confronted with the potential of spending 40 hours a week checking citations on legal scholarship, decide not to apply to the law review. In a world of students viciously aiming to get ahead, they are the few who are perfectly content just getting by.

This article is for them - a slacker's guide to law school. If you don't care about getting on law review, being in the top ten percent of your class, and working for a top five corporate firm, there are many ways to make law school significantly more pleasant than it is for most.

Ducking the Socratic Method
To the utter dismay of slackers and gunners alike, most 1L classes in most law schools are conducted using the Socratic Method. Professors cold call students from a seating chart, asking question after question until that student has been sufficiently stumped. In an environment that is hilariously competitive, making a fool of oneself is part of the daily routine. For slackers, this aspect of law school can be especially loathsome. Few law students want to be caught completely dumb-founded by their professor, especially in front of their peers.

And yet, the solution is so simple, so genius in its simplicity, that by choosing to slack, you can already begin to feel smarter than everyone else around you. It goes a little something like this: Don't sit in your assigned seat.

There are no participation grades in law school. So if the professor calls on you, and then looks up at your empty seat, you won't be penalized. Instead, you can rest assured that he/she will call on you again the following day. You're golden. Go home that night and do your reading, sit in the correct seat the following day, and you'll be fully prepared when you're called on.

Grade Inflation
As soon as you arrive at law school, find out what the grading scale is. Most schools publish their scale. At a number of schools, those grades are enormously inflated. At Columbia Law School, for example, first year students are graded on a forced curve, with B- as the lowest required grade and A as the highest. Lower grades, (C's and F's), can be awarded at the professor's discretion, but they are exceptionally rare. (And a C is still a passing grade.) Find out your grading policy - if it's like Columbia's, consider law school a very expensive vacation.

Case Briefs
For a slacker, there are few things more annoying that having to read cases. And law school is almost exclusively about reading cases.

Luckily, your law school has accidentally given you a way to cut corners here, too. Once you have a Lexis-Nexis account, you can type the citation of any case into a search box and pull up a brief of the case. Rather than reading the twenty page opinion, you'll have a 200 word explanation of the important points. Jackpot!

Scaring Everyone Else
A slackers best weapon in law school is that the hard-workers don't realize the slackers exist. They spend all of their time in the library, cavorting with the hardcore crowd, completely oblivious to the outside (read: outside of the library) world. They are in an extremely competitive environment and each one of them is hoping they are the best prepared. During the run-up to finals, their intensity reaches a fevered-pitch.

Keep in mind, you're being graded on a forced curve. You don't have to do as well if you can get the other players off their game. This of course is not to say that you should do anything unethical. But try something like this:

In the hour before a test, students gather outside the exam room, frantically reading their notes and outlines, hoping to glean one last bit of knowledge. Arrive an hour before as well, but instead of reading your notes, sit in plain view and read the newspaper. When other students notice you, and trust me they will, they will wonder why it is that you're so prepared that you aren't studying. How could you have time to be reading the paper? What do you know that they don't? Sit back and enjoy.

As a final point, remember that your ego need not be damaged by choosing the path of the slacker. With an air of quiet condescension, think of those hard-working law students as cute, their pursuit of top grades as quaint, and their desire to be in the top ten percent to be beneath you. You're a slacker. Fly your flag.

Article by Dylan Loewe, currently a 3L at Columbia Law School. Article edited by Trent Teti and Jodi Triplett, founders of Blueprint Test Preparation.
www.blueprintprep.com