Somehow, I only recently encountered Adam Liptak’s scornful treatise of American law reviews in the New York Times (and, I must confess, my Law Street Media colleague Peter Davidson’s indignant response to it). Frankly, I agree with the criticisms of many judges and attorneys and even some law professors: law reviews really do produce far too much intellectual masturbation with precious little useful application in legal practice. It is rather odd that law reviews, unlike journals in other professional fields, are compiled and edited by relatively untutored, inexperienced students rather than by seasoned practitioners. I would add that much of the content of the average law review is—like so much else in the legal field—unconscionably dull. I remember having an easy time deciding whether to try out for a journal or Moot Court as a 1L: all I had to do was peek inside back copies of my school’s various journals and see how long it took for them to put my lights out.

Yet I see all of those complaints as reasons for law students to think twice before trying to claw their way onto Law Review, not reasons for journals not to exist (or to be edited by students) at all. Ultimately, in my mind, those flaws take a backseat to different questions. I fear that law review membership does too little to prepare students for legal practice, and that law firms are too preoccupied with journal membership as an indicator of student applicants’ potential to be great lawyers.

What, after all, do students on law reviews do? Not having touched a journal with a ten-foot pole myself, I have only secondhand familiarity with this question; but I’m confident that research and interaction with schoolmates who were on journals have led me to the right answer. Typically, journal members edit and cite-check articles that the editors have decided to publish, ensuring that references actually provide proper support for authors’ claims and that footnotes are properly Bluebooked. They also write “notes” or “comments” of their own that may end up being published in the journal alongside law professor’s contributions. The journal editors generally review submitted articles and select them for publication and supervise the editing and note-writing processes.

Perhaps such endeavors would help make real lawyers out of law students if either the content of law review articles or the process of writing and editing them bore much resemblance to what most attorneys do on the job. Unfortunately, that resemblance is scant at best. The system gives professors no incentive to write articles — and gives student editors no incentive to publish pieces — that are consistently relevant to real-world legal practice or useful to real-world practitioners. For professors, law reviews serve primarily as expositions of academic mettle in the quest for adjunct and tenured professorships. For students, journals serve mainly as signaling mechanisms to law firms, padding their resumes with credentials that they know employers want to see.

Therein lies the problem. It makes no sense for law firms to put as high a premium on journal membership as they do, especially in these times, with competition so stiff and clients demanding so much more — and more experienced — bang for their bucks. Firms seem to view the challenging process of making law review as an effective way of separating the academic wheat from the chaff, and the research, writing and editing that journal members do as critical to their development into lawyers. Yet this view is largely mistaken, if only because it doesn’t apply to all journal members. 1Ls in the top five, ten or 15 percent of their classes who grade on to law review do so due to their skill at spotting and analyzing issues in turgid and fanciful exam fact patterns, not because they are skilled at doing the kind of research, writing or editing that academia and legal practice require.

More importantly, although law review editing definitely hones students’ proofreading, Bluebooking and cite-checking skills, in terms of formatting and content, it is a far cry from the kind of day-to-day work attorneys do. Editing treatises of groan-inducing intellectual abstractions — such as “the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th-century Bulgaria, or something,” as Chief Justice John Roberts once wittily put it — bears little or no resemblance to performing pretrial discovery, negotiating plea bargains, drawing up contracts or doing real estate closings. Perhaps law firms themselves deserve much of the blame for the unpreparedness of so many law school graduates for actual lawyering. What do they expect, when they so strongly incentivize students to participate in a painstaking and time-consuming extracurricular activity that does precious little to teach them how to practice law?

Law firms would be wise to look further and wider for extracurricular experience in their prospective law student hires. Any number of other activities available to law students would inculcate real lawyering skills in them far better than editing law reviews’ tedious treacle would. I’ve already written in this blog about how my Moot Court experience disabused me with the idea of practicing law, but those misgivings were due to my own skills, interests and idiosyncrasies. Anyone who decides, for the right reasons, to become an attorney — and particularly a litigator — should eagerly welcome the opportunity to learn the vagaries of brief-writing and oral argument. Certainly no law review teaches how to format and structure briefs for maximum persuasive effect, how to give straightforward answers to judges’ questions, or how to keep one’s cool when being bombarded with hostile questions from a “hot bench” (or, for that matter, how to fill up 15 minutes of allotted speaking time in front of a quiet, “cold” bench).

Nor does any law journal editor learn experientially how to negotiate deals and mediate disputes or how to exonerate wrongfully convicted prison inmates and secure their release. Yet a number of my classmates were able to do so, through bar association competitions and clinics like Cardozo Law School’s Innocence Project. These tournaments provide the opportunity to be judged by experienced lawyers and judges and to win accolades, and clinics like the Innocence Project involve providing support in real-life cases. Such advantages only makes these activities even more deserving of prioritization over the glorified grunt work one is relegated to doing on even the most prestigious law reviews.

The moral of the story is that many extracurricular activities can prove far more valuable to a law student’s training as an attorney than journal membership. Law firms and other employers ought to take note. In this jarring period of change and adjustment, it’s not only law schools that need to think outside of the box.

Featured image courtesy of [Nic McPhee via Flickr]

Akil Alleyne

Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. Akil is also a member of Young Voices Advocates, which connects students and young professionals with media outlets worldwide to facilitate youth participation in political and social discourse. Contact Akil at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

The post Law Firms Take Note: Law Reviews Aren’t All They’re Cracked Up to Be appeared first on Law Street.

I spent much of this past holiday season mulling over a sob story about a JD who got screwed by the law school racket. Though the media landscape of the past several years is strewn with such wreckage, this particular tale of woe stood out for me. For one thing, the victim went to an unspecified top-20-ranked law school and yet is still struggling on a $45,000-a-year salary, living with his parents and staring almost $200,000 of debt in the face. For another thing, he met with this fate after spending two years working at “miserable small law firms” for one abusive, larcenous boss and for another who made him work for nothing for 3 months, for a paltry $1,000/month for the next 3 months, and for a measly $2,000/month for another 3 months after that.

Though this poor man ended the article on a self-blaming note — “At the end of the day, it’s my own fault for being a sucker” — the gist of the piece is that his dire straits are really his law school’s fault. The school fed him a slew of misleading, half-true statistics about his post-graduation employment prospects, never informed him about the demoralizing nature of much legal practice work or the non-transferability of legal skills in the job market, etc. The tireless law school detractor Elie Mystal at Above the Law agrees: “If we’re going to blame the guy for something, blame him for believing the hucksters who were selling him on legal education. It’s fine if you want to look down on the fool who buys the snake-oil thinking that it will cure cancer, just don’t forget that the real culprit here is the snake-oil salesman.”

As an underemployed 28-year-old who also wonders whether law school was the right choice for him, I sympathize with my compatriot’s quandary. Yet I must confess that I’ve never felt that kind of resentment toward my law school, and never felt as if anyone were to blame but myself for the challenges I’ve faced in the job market. More broadly speaking, I’ve never joined wholeheartedly in the chorus of condemnation being directed at the legal academy.

Admittedly, it may be because I haven’t yet suffered quite the same misfortune as the subject of the article. My status as an international student (I hail from Montreal, Canada) slammed the federal student loan door shut in my face when I applied. While this had the obviously detrimental effect of saddling me (oh, hell, who am I kidding — on my mother, really) with a vastly heavier up-front tuition burden, it also required me to rely on my school for its modest financial aid grants and loans. As a result, I’m facing maybe a third of the student loan debt that the average law school graduate has to shoulder.

Also, my extracurricular activities and my post-2L summer internship plugged me into a network of public-interest and public policy organizations and foundations inside the Washington, D.C. Beltway. Those connections have so far netted me two back-to-back legal internships with nonprofits in the nation’s capital that have kept me employed since I graduated last May. I obtained the first position through an internship-stipend program that paid me $10 an hour during the summer — $1,600 a month. Last fall, I did a stint at a prominent D.C. think tank that was able to pay me a stipend of $1,400 a month. Each sum was too stingy to enable me to do much more than scrape by, especially after taxes…but scrape by I’ve so far managed to do, and without having to work for any bosses from hell, either. In those respects, I’ve been luckier so far than the hapless JD from the Business Insider article.

Yet I have a broader reason for steering clear of the “damn law schools” bandwagon. It is the applicants’ responsibility to conduct thorough research into the academic programs to which they apply and the careers to which they grant access, the better to ensure that they’re investing their time, tuition/loan money and work in the right places. More specifically, I think applicants have always borne that responsibility, since even before it became fashionable for pundits to pillory law schools for their purported racketeering.

Consider, for instance, this Business Insider interviewee’s own story. He rightly advises prospective law school applicants to “work for a law firm for at least a year before going to law school and see if it’s something you want to do.” (Sound familiar? I sure hope so.) Yet he seems to have learned this lesson the hard way, since at the interview’s outset, he answered the question, “Why did you decide to go to law school?” with “Because I wanted to be a lawyer. I also wanted greater career opportunities than my BA offered me.” Left unmentioned is the issue of what made him want to be a lawyer, or why he thought that a JD might be a ticket to any careers beyond just practicing law. It’s a pity the interviewer didn’t ask about it, for the answer might have shed some light on whether he had any business going to law school in the first place, regardless of the current state of the legal job market.

He further mentions, “I believed the legal education industry’s sales pitch circa 2007-08 that lawyers will always be in demand and that bankruptcy will be a hot practice area when the economy is poor.” Insofar as this pitch was misinformed or even downright dishonest, I sympathize — but only so much. These claims were certainly plausible and believable, especially from the vantage point of that period, when the economic crisis was just taking off and the arguable folly of law school wasn’t yet obvious. Nonetheless, these were law school officials leading our man astray — not actual lawyers. While he can be forgiven for listening to this advice, given its supposedly reputable source, it’s fair to blame him for falling for it hook, line and sinker. He shouldn’t have believed the hype without consulting some practicing lawyers who could have set him straight. They would have been much less biased sources of advice; after all, as he himself puts it, “law grads do not have an economic interest in your attendance at law school. The law school always does.”

Could he have been expected to know any of this back in his younger, more callow days? I think so. Anytime a school that mires its students in debt to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars paints a glowing portrait of its program, without mentioning any caveats or sounding any cautionary tone, one should always take its cheerleading with a grain of salt. Is his naiveté nonetheless understandable? Certainly it is…but there is a more general principle here, one that applies to the analysis of whether one should apply to any academic program. The people running these programs have a vested interest in getting you in their doors; what they tell you isn’t necessarily to be trusted. You should never base your decision entirely on their word.

None of what I’ve said here should be taken to mean that law schools themselves don’t deserve a hefty share of the blame for so many of their graduates’ predicaments. It’s only right to criticize them for their lack of transparency, which can and does have destructive consequences. Yet that doesn’t absolve applicants of their own responsibility to do their homework before jumping in with both feet. That principle holds truer than ever these days, with law school enrollment plummeting and law school-bashing so popular. I salute all those who continue to warn young people of the perils of going to law school unprepared, or for the wrong reasons, or at all; they are performing a valuable service to the public. I just hope that the intended beneficiaries of these warnings continue to be smart enough to listen up — before it’s too late.

Featured image courtesy of [Michael Fleshman via Flickr]

Akil Alleyne

Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. Akil is also a member of Young Voices Advocates, which connects students and young professionals with media outlets worldwide to facilitate youth participation in political and social discourse. Contact Akil at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

The post Are Law Schools to Blame for Graduates’ Struggles? appeared first on Law Street.

Shame on me. I only just stumbled upon the paper published in the Journal of Legal Education by University of Michigan law professor Sherman J. Clark last month, arguing that one of the perks of law school is that it helps each student “to thrive, to live a full and satisfying and meaningful life.” Through the Socratic method of lecturing, by training students to look at legal issues from the viewpoints of both parties in each case, by forcing them to confront the reality of uncertainty in both legal doctrines and empirical knowledge, and by teaching students certain ethics, law school helps students “explore the range of possible ways in which one might find meaning in or give meaning to life.”

I agree with Professor Sherman’s basic point, but I would have made the case for it rather differently. An otherwise well-written piece is riddled with highfalutin’, mealymouthed abstractions like, “Thinking well about what people care about and what things mean to them calls upon us to imagine more broadly what might matter and what it is possible for things to mean.” Upon closer inspection, these passages actually do seem to mean something, but they’ll probably strike the average prospective law school student as pretentious gobbledygook.

Nonetheless, I do find that my legal education comes in handy, and not only in, say, knowing my constitutional rights in case I get hassled by the police or knowing that oral contracts are legally binding, too. Mind you, I actually learned that last tidbit on TV when I was a child:

I think that doctrinal and practical legal knowledge proves useful in philosophical contexts, such as in discussions about what is the morally right thing to do in a particular situation. Certainly, the ability to navigate these often treacherous waters — the better to inform one’s ethical choices— is a skill that can help people to live life more meaningfully.

For example, among the basic doctrines that all first-year law students learn are the four elements of a negligence tort. In order to sue someone who’s harmed you through careless behavior, you, the plaintiff, have to prove that the defendant had a “duty of care” — i.e. that the defendant was legally required to take steps to avoid harming others. You also have to prove that the defendant breached that legal duty; that you suffered some form of harm that the law can correct; and that the defendant’s carelessness caused that harm. In later conversations and arguments with my fellow politics and philosophy geeks, the knowledge of those elements has served me in good stead. It’s a very philosophically sound way for the legal system to provide redress for people’s private grievances against each other.

Consider, for example, the duty of care requirement. It makes sense for the courts to require a plaintiff to establish that the defendant had such a responsibility before even proceeding with the lawsuit. Not every situation in life in which your behavior could affect others adversely should require you to spend resources guarding against such harm. Some situations in which people can get hurt are unforeseeable to everyone involved; sometimes it’s not within the alleged wrongdoer’s power to prevent them; sometimes the wrongdoer’s carelessness was only one factor that helped do the damage. The breach of duty criterion makes sense, too; if you’ve done everything the law requires you to do to avoiding hurting anyone, and someone gets hurt anyway, you arguably shouldn’t be liable. Similarly, if you’ve breached your duty of care, but there was miraculously no harm done, or if some harm occurred, but it isn’t clear that your carelessness actually made it happen, then the government shouldn’t force you to compensate the defendant.

The same can be said for the doctrine of “consideration,” which helps determine whether a contract will hold up in court. It basically means that courts can generally enforce agreements that involve some exchange of favors or benefits. Each party to the deal has to give up something of value to the other(s), be it money, products, services or what have you, or the court may not provide satisfaction in the event that one party doesn’t hold up his/her end. This general rule makes sense in light of nineteenth-century English philosopher John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle,” which essentially holds that the government should only restrict personal freedom when it’s necessary to prevent individuals from harming others. In the contractual context, if I make a deal with you that doesn’t require me to sacrifice anything to you in order for you to fulfill your obligations, you probably won’t make me any worse off if you break the agreement. In that case, the government has no business forcing you to pay me back.

These underpinnings of legal doctrines can be helpful in larger philosophical exchanges. In arguments over when government intervention can and cannot be justified, I often refer to certain aspects of tort law to bolster my position that Mill’s harm principle, as I understand it, is a better general rule than the more dogmatically libertarian non-aggression principle. Aggression, as I understand it, involves inflicting harm on others on purpose, whereas negligence entails mere carelessness rather than intentional harm. Yet people can do a world of damage to each other without going out of their way in order to do it. In my view, government has a role to play in trying to prevent negligent as well as deliberate harm.

It’s not only legal rules and doctrines that can serve useful purposes outside of a purely legal context. The nitty-gritty realities of legal practice offer their own useful insights to non-lawyers. My 1L Civil Procedure professor had the whole class read the novel A Civil Action, about a 1980s toxic tort lawsuit in Massachusetts gone tragically awry. One point that the novel drove home for me was the fact that personal-injury lawyers like the protagonist in the book are not charity workers. They’re profit-seeking businesspeople who earn their bread and butter by suing defendants with deep pockets, ones who can actually afford to cough up large sums of money in damages. This issue came up in a recent Facebook discussion, when I threw cold water on an intriguing proposal to abolish criminal law and leave the righting of interpersonal wrongs to civil courts. I pointed out that many heinous acts are perpetrated by low-income people whom ambulance chasers are not exactly in a hurry to sue. And anyway, what restitution could even willing lawyers hope to extract from poor defendants?

Of course, it’s no secret that legal knowledge and training can be helpful in any number of obvious public policy-related ways; Professor Sherman seems to have had a different set of advantages in mind. Nonetheless, although lawyers aren’t exactly known to the general public for being great philosophers, legal education does teach certain ways of thinking that should be appealing to anyone seeking to live a rational as well as a moral life.

Featured image courtesy of [Pedro Szekely via Flickr]

Akil Alleyne

Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. Akil is also a member of Young Voices Advocates, which connects students and young professionals with media outlets worldwide to facilitate youth participation in political and social discourse. Contact Akil at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

The post Law School and the Unexamined Life appeared first on Law Street.

Remember the advice I always give younger friends and acquaintances of mine about whether they should go to law school or not? Well, one of those very same people recently announced on Facebook that he’s submitted his first two law school applications. In the comment thread, he went on to explain that he’s only applying to five or six schools in all, since he wants to stay in Colorado, where he currently lives and works. Needless to say, I was devastated at the news, not to mention ashamed of my own failure to dissuade my young, callow, impressionable friend from taking the broad and crooked path of legal practice.

I kid, I kid…as I mentioned in my earlier article, I never tell advice-seekers that law school is an absolute no-no, only that they should think long and hard and do a lot of research before taking that plunge. As demoralizing as the profession can be, the world does need some people to enter it (alas), and for all the talk about the wrong people going to law school, a great many students are right to go there. I suspect that my friend will fall into the latter category once he starts 1L — but why? How does one distinguish people who are cut out to be lawyers from those who have no business even taking the LSAT, let alone actually attending law school?

My friend, as it turns out, got a few very important ducks in a row before even applying to law school. For one thing, when we first became friends while participating in the same internship stipend program two summers ago, he actively sought out my advice on the law school question. If this approach sounds like a no-brainer for any freshly minted college graduate considering his academic and career options, it’s because it is — yet not every college grad takes it. While I got plenty of advice as a youngster about what I should do when I grew up, that counsel was all unsolicited. My friend was savvy enough to sound out people who’d been through the law school crucible before trying to enter it himself. Smart boy.

Second of all, he’s currently in the midst of a several-year-long gap between college and law school. Since graduating in the spring of 2012, my friend has worked for several organizations that do advocacy in the field in which he wants to build his career, namely drug policy. A staunch opponent of the so-called “War on Drugs,” he has interned or worked with The Colorado Marijuana Initiative of 2012 (where he helped stump for the legalization of marijuana in that state’s Amendment 64 ballot initiative) and the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. He currently works at a law firm that represents legal marijuana dispensaries in the Centennial State. As a result, he’s getting priceless hands-on training working with lawyers and gaining at least some solid experiential idea of what to expect from the lawyer’s life. What’s more, he’s building an extensive list of contacts and potential future clients in the field of law in which he’d like to practice a few years hence, which is all but guaranteed to make him maximally employable once he graduates from law school. (Thanks to his work, he was also able to give me some very helpful advice on a marijuana policy-related research memo I had to write in my current position. Sweeeeeeeeeeet.)

Third, he’s already used his college experience to acquire expertise in fields outside of law or conceptually similar fields like political science. Having studied economics in university, he has a certain advantage over a great many lawyers — and even judges — that will serve him in good stead when he begins his desired career as an attorney representing legal marijuana businesses and otherwise advocating for drug decriminalization. His knowledge of economics will give him a perspective on legal issues that many (perhaps most) of his competitors in law school and legal practice will lack. I still remember reading a U.S. Supreme Court case — I forget the name — in my Federal Courts class a year ago in which then-Justice John Paul Stevens argued in dissent that anytime the government gives a business a tax exemption, its operations will be stimulated and society will end up with more of whatever it produces. I asked my professor whether that argument didn’t assume too much, such as that the market demand for the firm’s output was relatively price elastic (meaning that people will buy more of it when its price falls and less of it when the price rises). A good or service with relatively price-inelastic demand (they do exist, apparently) would not necessarily become more popular in the marketplace even after being subsidized. My professor — who was no economist but, like me, had taken an econ course or two over the years — smiled, nodded, and admitted that I might be on to something. Yet this possibility was lost on one of the most brilliant minds in the American legal field.

In all, my young Padawan learner seems to be doing it right: developing a broad practical and intellectual skill set, working immediately after college to discern what he wants to do with his life, working at a law firm to find out what lawyers really do and whether it’s right for him, and networking in the field of law in which he’d like to practice. There’s no better way to approach going to law school, believe you me.

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Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, Canada, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. In his spare time, Akil enjoys reading works of historical fiction and watching crime dramas.

Featured image courtesy of [TempusVolat via Flickr]

Akil Alleyne

Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. Akil is also a member of Young Voices Advocates, which connects students and young professionals with media outlets worldwide to facilitate youth participation in political and social discourse. Contact Akil at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

The post Applying to Law School: This is How You Do It appeared first on Law Street.

Leave it to an actual lawyer to give decent advice to young people thinking of applying to law school. On the U.S. News & World Report website, Shawn P. O’Connor, a Harvard-trained attorney and the founder and CEO of a test-prep and admissions counseling company, has penned a bang-up article about how prospective law students should decide not just whether, but when to apply. When I stumbled upon this article through a link over at Above the Law, I almost cheered out loud when I read the four main questions that Mr. O’Connor says would-be applicants should ask themselves before taking the plunge: 1. Will time off between college and law school hurt my odds of getting in? 2. Am I ready for law school classes? 3. Should I take my parents’ advice? And, 4. When should I take the LSAT? Having gone through the whole brutal, three-year slog myself, I was especially gratified to see people in the know encouraging college kids to consider questions two and three in particular.

Of the four questions, the final one is of the least interest to me, but I’ll happily defer to Mr. O’Connor’s advice — that it’s a good idea to take the LSAT while still in college — which rings true enough. If you’ve followed my commentary here at Law Street Media at all so far, you already know my answers to the first and third questions. So let me turn my attention to the question that I found most important, and that I think has gotten nowhere near enough attention in the recent discourse about the wisdom of law school: the nature of law school classes. Think of my existing advice as the “Alleyne doctrine” — people should learn as much as they can about lawyers’ work before applying to law school — and of the following as the corollary: People should learn as much as possible about the law school curriculum before applying.

A recent article at Salon.com has put American law schools on blast for adopting a “hyper-capitalist” approach both to the law itself and to teaching it. I don’t buy the piece’s central thesis, if only because of my own law school experiences (but that’s a story for a later article). Author Benjamin Winterhalter did, however, have me nodding through most of an early paragraph that describes the Socratic method of lecturing as “a mode of instruction whose sole discernible purpose is to torture students through the elaborate belaboring of obvious points” and that bemoans “the end-of-semester exam, a three-hour rite of passage that is graded anonymously, covers an entire semester’s worth of material, and counts for 100% of one’s grade.” These are two critical aspects of law school classes that distinguish legal pedagogy from most other forms of higher education, and for which many law students (most definitely including yours truly) are insufficiently prepared.

Actually, I’m not sure where or when Winterhalter attended law school, or what else possessed him to write about “three-hour” final exams. The briefest exam I ever took in law school — my 1L Torts final — lasted three and a half hours, and it was obvious that the professor only cut it that short to make it artificially harder, thus making it easier for him to grade it on a curve. (Bastard.) Otherwise, in 3 years of law school, every in-class exam lasted either four or five hours. I remember my Property professor saying that he used to give his students six-hour exams until the Registrar made him stop. Three hour exams seemed long and torturous to me in college, all right, but law school certainly disabused me of that delusion.

Then again, as much as I dreaded each four-or-five-hour ordeal beforehand, once in the classroom I found myself wishing the exams were actually longer. Many law school exams, you see, are based on lengthy, implausibly convoluted “fact patterns” — which is weird legalese for “hypothetical” — full of countless juicy legal issues just waiting for you to spot them and sink your teeth into them. Skilled professors, however, are adept at hiding these issues in fact patterns in ways that make it hard to spot them, to do them analytical justice within several hours and to avoid second-guessing one’s own analysis of them. (This is especially difficult for naturally ungifted test takers like me.) Combine these factors with the incredible dryness of most of the subject matter involved and the fact that each single exam will probably count for the entirety of the respective course, and you’ve got quite a challenge on your hands.

I’ve always strongly doubted the wisdom of this approach to teaching law. The competitiveness of the system isn’t the problem; legal practice is a highly competitive field, and the more law schools prepare their students for the struggle to stay ahead of the curve, the better. Yet I do question the intellectual usefulness of the byzantine hypos to which many of my professors subjected us. The facts in real-world cases, mind you, are often very complex, but in all the legal research I’ve done, I have yet to encounter a case with a factual history that approached the pretzel-like contortions that characterize law school exam fact patterns. Real-life lawyers certainly don’t have to decipher these cases and judge the legal claims within them in a matter of several hours. And at the end of the day, making an entire course grade dependent on one exam is a recipe for inaccurate evaluations of each student’s true lawyering potential. Test-taking aptitude is one thing; lawyering skill is another. The insistence on assessing the latter according to the former may very well contribute to the inadequate preparation of students for legal practice that plagues law schools today.

I don’t have much to say about Socratic dialogue, other than that I greatly appreciated my Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure professor’s practice of not calling on students at random in class. I forget his rationale for that policy, but I agree with Benjamin Winterhalter’s criticism of Socratic dialogue for its “belaboring of obvious points.” While I sympathize with professors’ desire to maximize class participation, Socratic interrogation generally consists of professors asking students for answers that are obvious to the questioners but painfully elusive to the hapless respondents. Undergoing the exercise often feels like being asked to read professors’ minds, a process that encourages students to second-guess themselves even when they actually know the right answers. That sort of professor-student interaction works splendidly in class discussions in which there is room for debate about what the law is or should be. In the context of larger lectures designed to teach basic, indisputable legal doctrines, however, students could probably do without it.

All of this advice may be wasted on the legal academy, of course. God alone knows how likely professors and administrators will ever be to change their ways. For the time being, at least, the law school curriculum as we know it is probably here to stay (with modest variations, of course, from school to school and from professor to professor). As long as the status quo prevails, anyone thinking of becoming a lawyer should first try to learn not only what it’s like to practice law, but also what it’s like to study it. Visit law schools, sit in on lectures, ask current students or graduates for copies of casebooks or old exams — do whatever it takes to make sure that once you walk through those doors, you’re not flying blind.

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Featured image courtesy of [George Serdechny via Flickr]

Akil Alleyne

Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. Akil is also a member of Young Voices Advocates, which connects students and young professionals with media outlets worldwide to facilitate youth participation in political and social discourse. Contact Akil at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

The post Law School Classes and Their Discontents appeared first on Law Street.

My most recent assignment at my current think-tank internship was to write a report on the 2008 book,The Execution of Willie Francis: Race, Murder, and the Search for Justice in the American South. In it, journalist Gilbert King told the story of Willie Francis, an African-American teenager who was convicted of the murder of a Caucasian man in the small Louisiana town of St. Martinville and survived a botched execution attempt in 1946. The book recounts the dark history of race relations in southern Louisiana, the murky circumstances surrounding the murder of popular local pharmacist Andrew Thomas, and the gross travesty of justice that was Willie Francis’ trial (particularly his lawyers’ refusal to provide him with any real defense). After Francis was scheduled for a second date with the electric chair, an idealistic local Cajun lawyer and a crusading Creole civil rights attorney intervened to try to save him. In the end, the Supreme Court affirmed his sentence, and the boy was finally put to death in 1947.

Frankly—and sadly—I found the most sensationally sordid aspects of the Willie Francis tragedy, namely the ugly racism and nauseatingly biased criminal justice system of mid-twentieth century America, to be old time religion. As an African descendant myself, I’ve been spurred by both upbringing and personal interest to familiarize myself with Black history in the United States and worldwide. Nothing about Francis’ treatment at the hands of the courts surprised me. As a student of the law, however, I was most struck by the middle section of the book, which detailed the backgrounds and deliberations of the Supreme Court Justices who ultimately put Willie Francis back on the path to his demise. What really seized my attention was the lamentable fact that when Willie’s case—Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber—reached the Court, the nation’s highest tribunal had not yet seen fit to “incorporate” the fundamental constitutional freedoms entrenched in the Bill of Rights against state and governments.

The law graduates among you will remember “incorporation” as the process by which courts have ruled that portions of the Bill of Rights constrain the states as well as the federal government. If this development has been a “process” rather than an obvious tenet of American constitutional law from the beginning, it is because the Framers drafted the Constitution with a view to limiting the power of the federal government, not the states. (Mind you, the Framers didn’t make this especially clear in the text of the Bill of Rights. Of all the pre-Civil War individual-rights Amendments, only the First explicitly targets Congress.) Yet the bloodshed of the Civil War and the intransigence of the former Confederate states in resisting equality for the freed slaves revealed the need for limits to the state governments’ powers as well.

One might think that the Fourteenth Amendment’s ringing declaration that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” would have addressed this problem adequately. Alas, one would be mistaken. The Supreme Court’s 1873 decision in the Slaughterhouse Cases held that the above-mentioned Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to the rights of U.S. citizenship and not of citizenship in particular states. This effectively foreclosed the use of the Clause to prevent state and local governments from riding roughshod over fundamental individual constitutional rights, right up to the present day. (Notably, Justice Hugo Black argued in 1947’s Adamson v. California that since the Slaughtehouse Cases addressed the unenumerated right to economic liberty, the cause of incorporating textually enumerated rights through the P-or-I Clause actually could have survived Slaughterhouse.) Although, as Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has written, “Virtually no serious modern scholar—left, right, and center—thinks that [Slaughter-House] is a plausible reading of the [Fourteenth] Amendment,” the Supreme Court has never mustered the gumption to overturn this misbegotten precedent.

Some may dismiss this nicety as negligible, especially since the Supreme Court did eventually get around to incorporating most of the Bill of Rights through other, due process-based means. The story of Willie Francis suggests otherwise. As author Gilbert King writes, “Not once, not twice, but many times, the U.S. Supreme Court had held that the Bill of Rights did not apply to states. Thus, most of the rights in the first ten amendments to the Constitution, rights citizens decades later would take for granted, simply did not exist for litigants in a case originating at the state level—cases like Willlie’s. In other words, one’s right not to be tried twice for the same crime, for instance, could only be invoked if one was being tried in a federal court.”

So when Willie Francis’ lawyers prepared to argue his case before the Supreme Court, they had to face the daunting prospect of urging the Court to reconsider and overturn its previous rulings—rarely a promising strategy. The legal deck, then, was heavily stacked against the hapless youth from the beginning. Had the Court not stood the Fourteenth Amendment on its head a mere five years after its ratification—even in the face of statements from Congressman John Bingham, its principal framer, to the effect that it did incorporate the first eight Amendments to the states—Willie might have stood a real chance. Yet thanks to the obstinacy of the Slaughterhouse Court and the cravenness of succeeding generations of Justices, Willie Francis and countless others like him were subjected to grotesque miscarriages of due process—and suffered the ultimate injustice as a result.

When I was still but a lowly law student, I diligently read the online evaluation feedback for every course I contemplated taking before enrolling in it. I remember reading one evaluation from a student who opined that all constitutional law courses should be elective. The Execution of Willie Francis has reminded me why I have always held such attitudes in the utmost contempt—and why I carry a pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution with me in my bag daily. No matter what field of legal practice one wishes to take up, constitutional issues—including seemingly arcane matters of constitutional interpretation—affect all of us as citizens of a democratic society. It’s not only a matter of right and wrong, or of justice and injustice; sometimes it’s a matter of life and death.

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Featured image courtesy of [Nesnad via Wikipedia]

Akil Alleyne

Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. Akil is also a member of Young Voices Advocates, which connects students and young professionals with media outlets worldwide to facilitate youth participation in political and social discourse. Contact Akil at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

The post Why Constitutional Interpretation Matters appeared first on Law Street.

Seeing as how I’ve already argued that law schools should put more emphasis on teaching law students how to practice law, it’s only fair that I respond to a certain contrary viewpoint circulating on the interwebs. Above the Law blogger Elie Mystal—whom I’ve seen speak and whose commentary I enjoy—has dismissed as a “myth” the idea that students can graduate ready to practice sure-footedly right out of the law school gates. “I think the pedagogical infighting over ‘theory’ courses versus ‘practical’ courses,” Mystal writes, “is irrelevant when people are graduating from lower-ranked law schools with $100,000 (or more) in student loan debt.” In this critique, Mystal echoes University of Maryland law professor Robert Condlin, who in a recent research paper called the practice-ready concept a “millennialist fantasy.”

As Professor Condlin writes in the abstract to his paper, post-graduate job placement “is a function of a school’s academic reputation, not its curriculum, and the legal labor market will rebound only after the market as a whole has rebounded (and perhaps not then).” It’s the shortage of legal jobs out there that has got current law students and recent graduates (like me) at such a disadvantage, he points out, and “producing more ‘practice ready’ graduates will have no effect on the supply of jobs.” At any rate, “legal practice” itself is a multi-faceted thing, one that cannot be fit into a simple package that law schools can teach to all comers: “There are as many different types of practice as there are levels of readiness for it, and proponents of the proposal do not say which of these various possibilities (and combinations of possibilities) they have in mind.”

The problem with Mr. Mystal’s and Professor Condlin’s position is not its substance, which seems pretty sound to me. Rather, they go wrong in their choice of target: the notion that training law students to have at least some clue of how to practice law is meant to be “a panacea to the problems with legal education,” as Mystal puts it. Now, I’ve done a great deal of (highly worrisome) reading on this and related subjects over the past three-odd years. (Warnings about the follies of law school—including a lot of pretty snarky and entertaining ones—have been circulating widely through media both old and new since at least my 1L year.) In all that time, I’ve never heard or seen anyone suggest that more vocational legal schooling will be a cure-all for the problems in the legal job market.

Perhaps one shouldn’t blame Mystal, Condlin and their sympathizers for thinking otherwise. Many observers calling for law schools to operate more like trade schools don’t make it clear enough that they’re only addressing one particular problem with legal education, not all of its problems. Yet even if correcting this systemic error won’t boost the post-graduation employment rate by itself, that correction is still an inherently worthy goal. I always remember with amusement the early scene in the 1992 blockbuster My Cousin Vinny in which Joe Pesci’s titular character tells his long-suffering fiancée that law school teaches you what the law is, but not how to make use of it in the courtroom. As John Marshall Law School professor Alberto Bernabe has written, “Vinny is terrible at the things we do teach in law school, but very good at the things we don’t…[such as how to] interview clients, to gather facts, to prepare a theory of a case, to negotiate, to know when to ask a question and when to remain quiet, to cross examine a witness forcefully (but with charm) in order to expose the weaknesses in their testimony.”

Without exactly being an expert on the subject myself, I gather that Mystal and Condlin are essentially right on the facts. Common sense alone suggests that no greenhorn can emerge from any school already knowing exactly how to get the job done. At least some experience is a must for success in any position; there’s no reason to think that lawyering would be an exception to that rule. Even professional schools that focus on teaching practical skills can do only so much to prepare their students to hit the ground running after graduation day. As for law specifically, there are also many different kinds of legal practice, and law schools would be logistically hard pressed to teach all of the skills that are needed for work in all of those fields. Moreover, Mystal is right when he caustically points out that “Seton Hall could produce the most ‘practice ready’ graduates in the country, and those students still aren’t going to do as well as Columbia law students.”

Nonetheless, too many students nowadays graduate not really knowing how to be lawyers—including many who actually get jobs after graduating as well as the ones who don’t. This fact is problematic for overcharged clients and overworked attorneys who need even rookie associates to be able to walk and chew gum. Even if more practice-oriented education won’t magically conjure up a cascade of new law jobs, the legal academy should still adopt a more vocational approach, if only for the sake of productivity. It may not be possible to prepare students to practice with 100% competence when they’re hot and fresh out of the law school kitchen, but they can be made readier than they typically are today. Newly minted lawyers should not be put to shame by a Vincent LaGuardia Gambini.

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Featured image courtesy of [UBC Library Communications via Flickr]

Akil Alleyne

Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. Akil is also a member of Young Voices Advocates, which connects students and young professionals with media outlets worldwide to facilitate youth participation in political and social discourse. Contact Akil at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

The post So What If Law Schools Can’t Produce “Practice-Ready” Graduates? appeared first on Law Street.

This morning, I opened up my Facebook account only to be swamped by a flood of bar-exam-passage-celebrating statuses from my former law school classmates. What better occasion can there be to reflect on my own decision not to take the bar exam (at least not yet) and to pursue a career outside of legal practice — as well as the idea of going to law school?

As my blogger spotlight hopefully shows, I’ve never been completely sold on the idea of being a lawyer. My experiences in law school only solidified my goal of putting my substantive legal knowledge to use in another field — legal analysis at think tanks and media outlets, if I have my way. If your life experience is anything like mine, then this goal should remind you of another piece of advice that you’ve probably heard a million times: “You can do lots of things with a law degree.”

It’s hardly a myth that law degrees are versatile; Lord knows plenty of lawyers go on to make their marks in business, politics, banking, and sundry other occupations. The question is whether this versatility makes it a good idea for someone who would rather not become a lawyer to go to law school.

I’ve already gotten a very blunt answer to this question from an actual lawyer, and an Ivy League-trained one at that. Almost three years ago, I met a fellow alumnus of my alma mater who had graduated from Harvard Law about six months earlier and was working — surprise, surprise — as a highly-paid corporate lawyer in Manhattan. When I inquired as to how work was going, he said, “It’s funny you should ask that. I actually just gave my two weeks’ notice last Friday. I can’t take it anymore.” Taken aback, I asked why, and was treated to a litany of the horrors of corporate practice: the grueling (billable) hours, the grinding tedium, the office politics, the pressure to make it rain. Having gotten just a taste of the lawyer’s life, he already wanted out.

Presently, the conversation turned to my motivations for going to law school. I explained that, while I still considered public-interest litigation a goal of mine (I was still a 1L, young and foolish), I was exploring career options outside of legal practice as well. I mentioned that I had gone to law school in large part out of sheer intellectual interest in legal issues, primarily constitutional and international ones. With a rueful laugh, he interjected: “That’s a terrible reason to go to law school. If you’re smart, you’ll go to law school only if you really, really want to be a lawyer — period.”

Other 1Ls, faced with this advice from this high-achieving graduate of one of the two or three best law schools in America, would have seen the handwriting on the wall and left law school for sunnier climes. Though I wouldn’t have blamed them, I saw it through to the end, since I knew that much of the politically-oriented analysis that I wanted to do professionally would require firsthand familiarity with the laws of the land. As a general principle, however, I eventually had to concede his point — for the most part, at least — based on what I learned during the rest of my legal schooling. Given the stress and hard work that it entails and, above all, the sheer cost of enrollment, law school generally really is best suited to those who go through it in order to do the one kind of work that one absolutely needs a law degree to do: lawyering.

As law schools gravitate toward more practice-oriented instruction, traditional J.D. programs are less and less appropriate for people who want to know what lawyers know without necessarily doing what they do. Yet as University of New Mexico law professor Carol Parker recently noted, legal knowledge comes in awfully handy for people throughout the whole workforce. Law schools are now churning out thousands more new graduates than there are new legal practice jobs each year, with countless graduates ultimately putting their legal knowledge to use without actually practicing law. This development is unsurprising given the overall climate in the country. As the regulatory state continues to grow and governments and courts continue to pile rule on top of law on top of regulation, there is less and less reason for familiarity with this tangled web to be the exclusive preserve of attorneys, judges, clerks and law professors.

Professor Parker advocates “creating exciting programs that combine legal information with the arts, sciences, and other professional programs.” This idea makes sense to me. I would have been delighted to find a non-J.D. academic degree program — in a political science department, for instance — that would have focused on a more intellectually-oriented study of the law. The deal breaker for me, however, would have been that the program provide the same depth of familiarity with constitutional and international legal doctrines law that actual attorneys have. The ideal setup would have taught me fundamentally the same material that I learned in the constitutional and international law-oriented courses that I took in law school, but in a very different style, one more similar to the kinds of study — independent as well as course-based — that one finds in graduate school programs. There should especially be less emphasis on courses in which the entire final grade is based on one final exam result (a topic on which I plan to comment at greater length in the future).

In my last post, I argued that J.D. programs should focus more on training students to practice law and less on teaching them abstract values like “educated citizenship” and “leadership for the future.” In addition, either law schools or grad schools should consider offering “Master of Law” programs that would take the approach I advocate above. Let those who want to be lawyers learn just that, and let those who want to learn about the law for other purposes do likewise. To each, his own.

Featured image courtesy of [Marc Baronnet via Wikipedia]

Akil Alleyne

Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. Akil is also a member of Young Voices Advocates, which connects students and young professionals with media outlets worldwide to facilitate youth participation in political and social discourse. Contact Akil at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

The post We Need to Educate Non-Lawyers in the Law, Too appeared first on Law Street.

About four years ago, one of the professors who gave me recommendations for my applications to law school described the institution to me as “trade school.” I imagine that my professor completed his legal studies quite some time ago (a hunch supported by his shock of white hair), because fewer and fewer legal beagles out there seem to share that assessment these days. Consider, for instance, the American Bar Association’s ongoing Task Force on the Future of Legal Education. The ABA formed the Task Force in the summer of 2012 to ascertain how law schools, and the Association itself, should address recent problems in the economics and the delivery of legal education. In comments submitted for the Task Force’s consideration, legal practitioners have frequently raised the issue of whether law schools presently do a good job of preparing students for legal practice. A consensus seems to be emerging that the answer is no.

As The Economist magazine recently noted, American law schools don’t exactly strive to teach practical legal skills, since firms traditionally train new attorneys themselves. Many in the legal academy believe in principle that the doctrinal approach that law schools generally take is a positive good. Syracuse University law professor Kevin Noble Maillard, for example, has argued that “law school is not a trade school,” that “people go to law school, pay tuition and graduate to become many things: educators, business leaders, politicians and, yes, attorneys,” and that law school “prepares people to become leaders in our society, which makes it imperative that they be rigorously trained as thinkers.”

Yet in these belt-tightening times, law firms are increasingly loath to pick up the academy’s slack (if only because clients are getting tired of footing the bill). I, for one, can’t say I blame them. My application referee may not have been quite on the money when he described law school as “trade school,” but more’s the pity. The constant refrain I hear from practicing attorneys is that they learned little or nothing about legal practice in law school, which defies common sense. Lawyering involves a lot of hands-on work that can’t be taught in the abstract, from drafting contracts to persuading clients of the right pleas to enter or claims to file. Given that an increasingly expensive legal education is almost universally required of anyone who wants to enter the profession, it’s only logical that law school should put greater emphasis on practical skills.

Professor Maillard’s position strikes me as rather misguided. He tellingly prefaced his statement with “at the risk of sounding ‘liberal artsy’”—which is exactly the point. There is no logical reason why law schools should consider it their mission to “emphasize educated citizenship.” That goal seems much better suited to undergraduate programs, which in any case cast a much wider net than law schools do and will thus reach more of the societal leaders of tomorrow. Training those leaders to have certain knowledge and to think in certain ways is desirable—but not all such budding public figures go to law school, and American law students have to go to college first anyway. It would make more sense to let them learn “educated citizenship” while earning their bachelor’s degrees and learn how to practice law in law school.

Some schools have already begun getting with the program, establishing practical skills courses and requirements. The ABA’s own Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has received a petition to amend law school accreditation standards. In addition to requiring J.D. students to earn 15 academic credits in experiential courses, the proposal would also require each student to take at least one law clinic or externship in order to graduate. This seems like an eminently wise proposition. Every time I’ve heard a lawyer tell me that he or she didn’t learn anything about legal practice in law school, I’ve wondered, “Didn’t you do any clinics?” Lawyers themselves seem to agree that clinic work is one of the main means by which law students can learn how to be attorneys while still in school. In a 2004 ABA study, lawyers who had been practicing for two or three years rated clinical courses their third most useful law school experience—behind legal jobs during summers and the school years, and ahead of legal writing courses and internships and traditional doctrinal courses.

So if clinics have so much potential to prepare law students for legal practice, then why are so many of them graduating from law school so operationally clueless? After a bit of digging, I found that—as I suspected—clinical training isn’t as widely accessible as it could or should be. According to data from the ABA and the Law School Admission Council (LSAC), only 15% of law schools presently require or guarantee legal clinic experience to all students. Yet according to Robert R. Kuehn, a professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, the same data indicate that 84% of law schools have the resources to offer clinical opportunities to all of their students at little or no additional cost in higher tuition.

So I look favorably on the proposal made by the aforementioned petition submitted to the ABA. Requiring all law students to get at least a taste of what lawyers actually do on the job will help make sure that graduates are ready to do what they are studying to do. It can also help give prospective law school applicants a better idea of what they may be getting themselves into—when they still have a chance to avoid it.

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Featured image courtesy of [walknboston via Wikipedia]

Akil Alleyne

Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. Akil is also a member of Young Voices Advocates, which connects students and young professionals with media outlets worldwide to facilitate youth participation in political and social discourse. Contact Akil at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

The post Should Law School Be More Like Trade School? appeared first on Law Street.

As luck would have it, the nonprofit work I’ve done since graduating from law school last spring has situated me among hordes of college students and recent graduates a few years younger than I am. The question I’ve gotten from them most often has been “Should I go to law school?” Without answering the question definitively for anyone, I gladly offer the advice that I wish I’d been given as a youngster. “Whatever you decide,” I tell them, “know this: being a skilled communicator or arguer, by itself, does not a lawyer make.”

I’ve had a knack for writing and oratory since I was young, excelling in public speaking and debate competitions and Model UN conferences throughout high school. In law school, I joined the Moot court Honor Society, participating in tournaments that simulated oral arguments before appeals courts. Over the years, I also became a decent writer (though of course, you can be the judge), contributing to student newspapers, opinion journals and online blogs. I’ve also been a history and politics buff since childhood, and many of the issues that enthralled me required legal knowledge to do them justice.

So what career development advice did I get from countless grownups around me? “Do law,” they said. “You’re good at speaking, writing and arguing; you’re into politics and history; you want to make a difference in the world. What better career could you have?”

From a young age, then, I leaned toward law as the most sensible career path for me. The fact that I developed a genuine interest in constitutional and international legal issues in college only further steered me in that direction. So after struggling to find other decent work for two years after graduating, I bit the bullet and went to law school.

A rude awakening awaited me. I found most of the course material—particularly during 1L—mind-numbingly boring; the four- or five-hour final exams, punishing; and the overall cost, staggering. What I learned about legal practice in summer internships and Moot Court didn’t shine much light at the end of the tunnel, either: demoralizing Bluebooking; poring through reams of cases, statutes and regulations written in stultifying prose; the endless formatting that goes into any halfway decent brief. Scandalously for me, even oral argument proved a letdown. You have no idea how aggravating it can be to argue with someone who outranks you and can crack the whip over your head at will. After years of debating my peers, I balked at the almost slavish deference that lawyers have to pay judges in court.

I also found that making losing arguments perfunctorily is not my strong suit. I know, I know—debaters are supposed to be good at that, no? Unlike academic debate, however, the law straitjackets its practitioners with binding rules that may have little actual merit. Together with real-world facts, these rules often require lawyers to make downright ridiculous arguments on their clients’ behalf. I still remember with annoyance my last Moot Court tournament, in which I had to argue with a straight face that my client, a fictional Pacific country, had somehow not violated international refugee law by apprehending boatloads of people who had gotten lost at sea while fleeing a series of natural disasters, detaining them for years without processing in an overcrowded, grimy facility with asbestos in its walls, and then transferring half of them to a neighboring country with a horrific human rights record. In the real world, although such lawyering is a dirty job, someone has to do it; I just increasingly doubt that I am that someone.

Once disillusioned, I remembered the days when elders urged me to study law because of how articulate and argumentative I was. Only then did it dawn on me that none of them were lawyers; none of them were especially qualified to recommend it as a career. I also realized that none of the actual lawyers I had known had ever encouraged me to follow their lead. Although they didn’t mention what a stressful, expensive bore law school is, none of them ever suggested that because I was a skilled writer, speaker and debater, law was the way to go. They knew better.

It’s not the fault of the first group that my decision to go to law school was so uninformed. They gave me the best advice they could (deluded as they were by television and films, which conceal the sheer mundanity of lawyers’ work). What’s more, I have no excuse for not contemplating the humdrum nuts and bolts of legal practice from the beginning. In the eleventh grade, my high school let me spend a day shadowing a high-powered attorney while she and her colleagues defended a tobacco company in a civil trial. The experience didn’t get my juices flowing. A bailiff had to admonish me to stop slouching and sit up straight; later on, I actually dozed off and had to be nudged awake by one of the attorneys. Yet I unforgivably missed this chance to learn a critical lesson the easy way. One necessary attribute for success as an attorney is, quite frankly, a very high tolerance for tedium—a quality I’ve never possessed in abundance.

The moral of my story is that students should find out what lawyers actually do daily before deciding to become one. Succeeding in law takes a lot more than an argumentative streak, a golden pen and a silver tongue, and not all attorneys even need those qualities. Drafting contracts and wills, doing real estate closings and other transactional legal tasks don’t require a gift for the gab. Moreover, lawyers aren’t the only ones who get paid to write, speak and argue well, or to advocate for deserving causes and people. The earlier prospective law school applicants are alerted to this reality, the less the workforce will be plagued by the scourge of mismatch—and the happier and more fulfilled a lot of people will be.

Featured image courtesy of [Flickr]

Akil Alleyne

Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. Akil is also a member of Young Voices Advocates, which connects students and young professionals with media outlets worldwide to facilitate youth participation in political and social discourse. Contact Akil at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

The post Law School Daze appeared first on Law Street.