Lessons 1Ls Either Should Have Learned or Should Be Prepared For…

First of all, congratulations to all 1L’s on finishing the first 1/6 of your legal education.  To all those 3Ls who are one semester away from it being over, my condolences ahead of time.

Here I will impart to 1Ls (and really slow 2Ls and 3Ls) a few things about law school that you will likely learn on your own someday, but will help you much more if you can grasp early on.  For some people, these ideas never sink in.  These people are determined to define life as a struggle.  I cannot reach these people.

First, the classroom.  By now you have probably experienced the much ballyhooed “Socratic method”.  Look, it is complete bullsh*t.  It need not cause anyone an ounce of anxiety. The sharp ones out there have already figured this out: if you get cold-called in class and proceed to make an absolute ass of yourself, there are ZERO consequences for your grade.  Sure, maybe you feel embarrassed or disappointed in yourself, but these stem from your own vanity and conceit and have nothing to do with your grade (do away with those and you will be forever better off, but that is another story).  Behold, the beauty of anonymous grading!  Your grades in almost every class in law school will be 100% the result of a the mixture of your final exam plus randomness (see below).  So enjoy the opportunity to make crap up on the fly when you are cold-called and generally unprepared.  This will much better prepare you for real practice, when you will frequently have to act way more prepared than you actually are, than will investing way too much time preparing for class by boning up on useless case law.

Second, reading.  If you are really hung up about doing the casebook reading, you are wasting your time. If you don’t know this yet, you will once your grades come out (see below).  For certain classes maybe it is helpful…but for the most part, you can read a case brief, get the gist, and then go enjoy some free time.  There is nothing wrong with reading assigned case law, if you can, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking it is necessary and making yourself crazy in order to do 100% of it.

Third, grading.  You will find out your first semester grades sometime before you graduate.  Maybe even before March.  Your grades are, for the most part, random.  Professors will read your exams with varying degrees of attention.  For the smaller classes, sure, they will scrutinize more, and good work is likely to get rewarded.  But for the huge 1L classes, here is what will happen.

The professor will read your exam and quickly recognize it as one of three types.  The first type is the really well written, reasoned, top-notch law exam.  That exam will be considered for an HH, depending on how many others fall into this group. 

The second type is the really poor exam, missing important issues; lacking facility with legal reasoning; and poorly organized.  However, this is not a “sub-P”; rather, as long as there is SOME evidence of the student having attended class, this student will get a P. 

Then there is the third group of papers falling in the middle.  Not superb, not brilliant, but quality.  These will be all so similar, that the professor will give them a very cursory reading and have little ability to rank the exams against each other.  Most of the papers will be P’s, but some will creep into the H range depending on the size of the first category. 

So, the professor will either (a) throw the papers down the stairs and rank them according to how they fall; (b) have his/her 3 year old decide how to rank the papers; or (c) ask Zoltar how to rank each paper.  (Option (c) is unlikely, because of the required investment in quarters).

I know some of you will find this incredible.  Others of you are going to write exams that fall into the first category.  But for the rest of us, the results will demonstrate my point here.  You will either believe it, or you will resist it and keep overworking and stressing about your grades as if they really correlated to your stress level and work ethic.  But if you can take this lesson to heart now, don’t find it despairing.  Do not be disappointed; be uplifted, for it is a blessing.  You do not need to worry about your grades, because you are mostly going to be in the random category anyway, so find fun and productive and edifying ways to spend your time in law school.  Get involved in a clinic.  Get into yoga.  Make moonshine in your bathtub.  Organize the 2nd Annual Unofficial Boalt Hall Paintballing Extravaganza (for those who were at it last year, you know it was freakin’ amazing, and you’re welcome; carry the torch, and I promise to show up).  Try and get laid for once.  Do something interesting for once. 

The randomness of grading, and thus the insanity of really investing much hope in good grades, also allows you all to focus on the classes that really matter.  Anyone who has taken the bar exam and/or worked in the field can tell you most of your classes are largely irrelevant to either the bar exam or working as a lawyer.  Of course the 1L classes are on the bar exam, but you will be re-learning these subjects in whole for the bar exam, and especially for criminal law and property, they will be very different beasts.  Your success on the bar exam will have almost no correlation with how hard you worked on those subjects as a 1L.  To the contrary, your success at a job will be related to how well you can write.  So you probably don’t want to blow off LRW or WOA.  Yeah, they are undervalued, unit-wise.  But your other grades are random, and those classes don’t matter for sh*t, so you might as well give a little more attention to LRW and WOA. 

(In my opinion, beyond 1L year, the most bar-helpful classes are evidence, civil procedure II (you be a fool if you don’t take it), and criminal procedure.  A bonus is that these subjects are not especially difficult.)

Two important points are worth mentioning here.  First, if you want to clerk, my comments about grades not mattering do not really apply to you.  Grades definitely matter for that.

Second, some of you might be wondering whether grades matter more today because of the economic clusterf*ck in which we are mired.  I think there is some merit to this, but it should not be overstated.  Firms are hiring fewer people right now, and will naturally gravitate towards students with better grades.  That said, there are counterbalancing factors here.  First, law firms may have a better idea of how they are faring by next August, when they will start looking at your transcripts.  Hopefully things will look better by then.  Second, whether you care about your grades or not, your grades are most likely random…this is in beautiful harmony with the utter chaos of the universe in general.  Learn to love it.  If you do, besides being more attractive to nihilists, the energy you can divert to other interesting activities (both school-related and otherwise) will also make you seem more interesting to law firms.

DZ, OUT!