Welcome to Law School
Published: Mar 10, 2009
I knew something weird was going on, but it didn't crystallize for me until a few weeks ago. It was a Thursday, the night all the law students at my school meet at a different bar every week to pretend we have social lives. That night, while chatting with some classmates over a beer, a thought struck me mid-sip: we are law geeks.
Law and the discussion of it pervade the lives of my fellow 1Ls and me with a frightening completeness. We discuss class work at breakfast, lunchtime, passing time, anytime. We've started reading those endless small-print Terms of Agreement parts of websites instead of blindly clicking "Agree" just to get to the good part. We recognize contracts everywhere; we see negligence lawsuits waiting to happen at every turn. And give us a little liquor and we'll start bustin' out the law jokes.
Well, we think it's funny
"Hey, Jim, watch it," one guy says as his friend scoots past him to get to the bar. "I could nail you for battery."
"No way, man," Jim retorts with a grin. "I got implied consent 'cause a bar is by nature a crowded place where people get pushy. Ha ha."
And all the rest of us are laughing with them, not at them.
To be fair, we have a right to be a bit dorky about our new knowledge. Law students are superstudents: we're not just learning a whole new subject, as one would learn Russian history, for example, from the very beginning with no prior knowledge. We're learning a new language as well, one in which the law is made, read, and taught. After all, most people probably think all considerate people have "consideration". Law students know better. Studying law is like your average American learning all of Russian history in Russian.
The first case we briefed -- eons ago at the end of August -- was two pages long and relatively simple, yet the first time I read it my eyes moved over the words until the letters twisted together like barbed wire. I was certain almost all of the individual words were in English, but the sentences seemed incognizable. Now looking back, we laugh at how long we spent trying to crack that first case.
~At the end of the film The Matrix, Keanu Reeves is standing in a hallway, squared off against the Agents, and suddenly he doesn't see the scene as a regular hallway with doors, but as a construction of flowing codes of the Matrix. Like Keanu saw through the images to the code itself, we see through the words, through the citations, the formulaic phrases and the Latin (thanks, Black's!) to the letter of the law.
It takes a village
When I mentioned my Matrix theory to some classmates, a couple of them had never heard of the film - a fact I found surprising, since it is somewhat of a cult hit in my age group. But here at law school, for the first time, one is not in class with same-age peers. For the most part, the majority of my class worked for a couple of years and returned to school to change or further their career paths. But there are also some people with kids (young and older) and some who are married. There are the just-graduated kids. There are foreign-born students, Valley Girls, and Midwesterners. There are people who scraped and stressed to get here, there are those who are here on someone else's agenda. All reduced to the lowest rung, all potential targets in the roving crosshairs of the Socratic shotgun, all vacillating between moments of brilliance and moments of imbecility.
Our fumbling with this vast amount of new information and unfamiliar concepts humbles us all. But beyond the fact that we are all beginners, our differences in background, age, and experience give us widely varying perspectives on the meaning and application of law. That's what makes all our perpetual law discussions so interesting that we can't seem to get off the subject, even at the bars.
For example, one of my friends was a police officer before coming to law school. Another of my friends was and is an activist, regularly attending and participating in protests. Suffice it to say that they both have strong and opposing views on issues like how law enforcement authorities handle large public meetings like protests. Both of them can read the same case for homework and come to class the next day with completely divergent views on how well the case was argued and decided and the value of its effect on society. And they can certainly get animated about it over a couple of beers on Thursday nights.
But that's okay, because someone will probably make a joke about their bickering causing intentional infliction of emotional distress on those who have to overhear it, and then someone else will say that that rule of law totally doesn't apply and the case should be dismissed by a 12(b)(6) motion, and then, again, we'll all bust out laughing.
Annika K Martin is a first-year law student at the University of Southern California Law School in Los Angeles, CA. She earned her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University. She loves tuna fish sandwiches.