It’s easy to worry about everything going totally wrong when you take the LSAT. Take a break from studying (and from checking out our rundowns on Logic Games, Logical Reasoning, and Reading Comprehension) and check out this list of things that could go wrong and exactly how to fix them.

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Happy studying, and don’t worry, if anything goes wrong, remember this list. Because we here at Law Street totally have your back!

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Anneliese Mahoney (@AMahoney8672) is Lead Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [Firesam! via Flickr]

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Countdown to LSAT: Worst Case Scenarios & How to Fix Them 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.