"you come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer"

[justin gosling]

With the semester wrapping up and exams looming, it's a perfect time reflect on my law school experience rather than do any real work.

The biggest shock of the experience is the difference between law school lore and reality.  When I researched graduate schools, law school had a reputation akin to educational torture, but I'm not convicted this is 100% accurate for my generation.  Movies like The Paper Chase,  with the tough and intimidating Professor Kingsfield, set the tone for society's then-view of the legal education system.  My experience is that professors are much less adversarial.  Even my property professor happily reminds the class that it could be worse: we could have had a former professor at UC Hastings that required students to stand while taking their Socratic Method beat down.  Well, Professor Kingsfield and his evil ways died long ago.  I'm not saying the modern law school experience is like the one portrayed in Legally Blonde, but it sure isn't The Paper Chase.

I'd like to think that as former students became professors, they saw the limited value of humiliation.  Really, it does not matter why the face of legal education has changed, just that it has changed.  I'm sure there are still some geezers that love to pick students apart, but it is your class grade, not classroom performance, that really matter.  And the best part is that exams are blind-graded.  When the professor reads your final exam he or she won't know that this is the same person that couldn't make a simple connection between Rule 51and Jury Instructions (despite it being clearly laid out in the syllabus, whoops).  Sure, you looked unprepared in class, but it only hurt your ego, not your grade.

So which system is better: instruction through fear or anonymity?  Frankly, you play with the cards you are dealt and I'm not sure there is significant difference in terms of results.  Look at historic bar passage rates in California.  In July 2007 the bar passage rate was 56.1% while in 1973—the year The Paper Chase was released—the bar passage rate was 54.7%.  Looks like day to day class preparation can take a backseat to a four hour exam in December.

And a quick P.S. to future law students: don't let law school lore cloud your judgment.  Seek out a current student or sign up to visit a live class if practicing law sounds interesting.

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