It's tough to know how to narrow it down. You can't just teach federal law. There are often 1,000 pages in a volume of federal court decisions, and thousands of those volumes on the shelves. Nor can you simply teach the law of a particular state. Even in minor states, the books of laws and cases can take more than 100 feet of shelf space.
It's hard to teach even an introduction to subject areas in the law. A casebook in constitutional law, for example, might contain as many words as the Bible, and will be much tougher reading. People spend years learning their Bibles, but a two-semester, six-unit course covering that casebook will give you the equivalent of a mere six weeks of full-time study.
The simple fact is that law school could go for two years or 20 years, and unless you organized it well, you'd still be getting a mere introduction. You can't just sit down in the law library and start reading. You have to have a goal. So here's the question: What academic knowledge is law school trying to impart?
(1) What You'll Need in the Long Run?
Law schools sometimes say that they're teaching you things you won't appreciate for many years, but that someday you'll look back and thank them. You doubted your parents when they said this kind of thing to you, though, and there's at least as much room to doubt the law schools.
Personally, many think it's a crock. Look at lawyers. What entitles them all to be called "lawyers"? Certainly not something that they experience only after long years of labor. The thing that makes them all part of the same profession is that they all started the same way, with law school and the bar exam. After sharing those early experiences, they all go in separate directions. Law schools never could, and never will, have the vaguest idea of what will be useful to all those varieties of attorneys 20 or 40 years from now.
And anyway, if law school doesn't do a good job of training you in the skills you'll need during your early years of practice, the long-term training will be irrelevant. You'll never last that long. Your incompetence will ruin you long before you reach any silver anniversary.
Well, if the 20- to 40-year horizon makes no sense, how about the notion that law schools are really trying to teach you the things you'll need to be a good attorney five or 10 years after graduation?
Consider two options. In the first one, law school plants a time bomb in your brain. You graduate from law school, you enter your first job, and you feel like you've had a lobotomy. You know nothing, you remember nothing. You survive the first five years by sheer luck.
And then, after five years, shazam! Suddenly the time bomb goes off. You smack yourself and say, "Wow! Now I understand what they were telling me in law school!"
It's possible, right? Not too likely, but possible.
Maybe it does happen once in a while. But my classmates and I are now in the middle of that five-to-10-year stretch, and we don't see too many of us getting zonked with long-submerged insights. Chances are, if you haven't used it for five years, you're not going to remember it when you need it.
Besides, during those five years, while law school was becoming a fading memory, you were spending every day working with lawyers and learning all kinds of things about the law. It's asking a lot, I think, to expect a long-lost bit of knowledge from law school to suddenly arise and make itself seem half as relevant as the nitty-gritty of your daily struggle.
As far as one can tell, the only way in which law school can give you meaningful preparation is to start you out on the right foot and teach you enough to keep you going in the proper direction. If you find that things have begun to make sense after five or 10 years of practice, surely it's because you've been a good boy or girl, learning and doing like you're supposed to, and not because your ancient law school lore has miraculously sprung to life.
In short, it sounds suspicious to talk about how law school gives you long-term career training. Lawyers, of all people, know better than to talk about the distant future while neglecting immediate needs.
(2) What You'll Need in Your First Job?
When you squelch law schools from talking about the 10-year horizon and ask, instead, how well you're being prepared for the job that starts next month or next year, it's a different ballgame. Suddenly it's much easier to see whether you're getting the training you paid for. If your education doesn't match your employer's needs, you just won't fit.
Now, remember, we already noted that law school doesn't even try to give you practical training. So if you eat like a pig during a sensitive business luncheon, or don't know when to shut up, or if you alienate everyone in the office, or can't get the hang of writing a simple memo for the files, it's just your employer's tough luck. Law school is an academic matter.
So how do attorneys feel about the academic subjects that drove them to despair during the first year of law school? Well, according to that study of lawyers in Chicago, the only law school course endorsed by more than 25 percent of the attorneys as being "particularly helpful" to their practice of law was contracts. Torts? Only 24 percent. Constitutional law? Only 16 percent. Trusts and estates? Ten percent.
Ah, but there's a response. This thing of academic learning is not just limited to academic subjects. When people begin to complain that their academic courses are irrelevant to their future careers, law schools quickly offer another concept, as suggested by these words:
[Years ago,] the law schools turned inward and came to regard their educational responsibilities as complete upon imparting to the neophyte the basic education of learning to "think like a lawyer."
And there you have it: the first mention of the famous, mystical concept of "thinking like a lawyer." The basic idea seems to be that your time in law school will give you this intangible mental quality you lacked before.
To teach you to "think like a lawyer," law school has to give you two things. First, they must teach you some academic law, so that you'll have something to think about. Not much of it, because you don't know a lot of details (other than possibly in one area of specialization) when you graduate. And the academic law won't necessarily be in the same subjects as your classmates might study, except for those few courses that everyone has to take. Thus, one student of law could concentrate on tax law, and another could concentrate on the law of China, and as long as they both passed the bar exam and were admitted to practice, we'd have to call them both lawyers.
And second, law school must give you a perspective, or a set of attitudes, that help you talk to other lawyers in a way that's not so easy with non-lawyers. An example of such an attitude: the ability to accept that lawyers sometimes take positions without necessarily believing in them personally. Another example: the view that it's good for lawyers to do so. A third example: the belief that questions of emotion must not be permitted to overrule conclusions of logic. It's not that any of these attitudes are bad. It's only that you'll see how important they are when, as a lawyer, you find yourself glancing at your watch while talking to an upset client about a legal problem that's ruining his/her life.
There are a lot of those attitudes. But not all lawyers accept all of them, any more than all lawyers study all the same areas of law. Nobody bothers to do an inventory on you, to see whether you've swallowed the right ones before you'll be allowed to practice. They just take the easy way out you go through three years of law school, they figure that, in most cases, you'll have accepted enough of the basics to function as a normal lawyer.
And that's about all there is to it, on the subject of learning to "think like a lawyer." Except for a smattering of legal ethics, there's no required course in "legal attitudes." The attitudes tend to filter in while you're studying other subjects. In terms of what's explicit, the major emphasis of law school is, by far, on the substance of the law that you're studying, even if nobody really knows for sure what the hell it might have to do with your future. That substance deserves a closer look, and I will turn to it now.
