Paper Title

A better title could be found, perhaps....

For it?

An insight of limited utility. It would be difficult, even in seven times seven months, to prepare young people, incompletely, for an activity it requires experience as well as sagacity to perform well. As someone who practices law, every day, with young lawyers, I feel certain that I cannot, as teacher, given any amount of time, prevent young people from making mistakes. Probably this has something to do with the fact that in a quarter century practicing law as well as teaching it I have not been able to prevent myself from making mistakes. I make them, as my young lawyers make them, all the time. But we practice together, having complementary strengths and weaknesses, and we do a very good job.

The question isn't whether law school fully prepares you for law practice. It cannot, so it evidently doesn't. The question is whether law school prepares you to have a practice, and to benefit yourself and your community—intellectually, economically, professionally, socially—as much as possible by your experience in it.

The law we encounter in the classroom—mostly in the form of appellate judicial decisions—is largely formal, normative and often presented as the inexorable conclusions of the judges’ rational weighing of things like precedent and interpretative canons. However, as one professor once reminded me, the cases we read in our casebooks are essentially “freaks”—that is, a tiny, unrepresentative percentage of legal problems that manage to batter their way up to appellate court. Moreover, justice does not always come from the courts or even a lawyer’s knowledge of the law. Robinson, for instance, is able to secure a shorter sentence for his Serbian-Fujianese client because he knew how to manipulate others and use extralegal methods to achieve his objectives. Reading about how Robinson dealt with his client starkly drove home the point that the actual practice of law shapes and is shaped by the attendant peculiarities of human behavior, whether they be clients, third parties, judges, or lawyers. Unfortunately this is a fact that I find myself overlooking when dealing with doctrine and abstract legal theories in class.

Well, you don't have to overlook it just because you are also giving a higher priority, for the moment, to the formal materials and linguistic habits of legal behavior. Realism, a commitment to the primary importance of what things do rather than what they are called, is perfectly compatible, as Homes and Felix Cohen both showed, with very precise understanding of technical material. In fact, being a lawyer means mastering both the materials of legal "science," and the realities of social action.

Sure. That's the easy part. But if it's just an hour of experience before the Bar exam instead of after, it doesn't mean much. Turning that experience into more than an hour's work of learning depends on the teaching that surrounds it. This is the overwhelming importance of the clinic, which is a form of law practice designed for teaching, so that an hour of experience and hours of preparation and an hour of reflection can produce knowledge and maturity of judgment worth years. The best externship, the best clerkship, or similar apprenticeship relations, are also founded on the master's skill in teaching. But the teaching is inherently more diffuse, because only the clinic is built as a practice to put its highest priority on the utility of its processes for teaching.

But it's not clear that law clinics or externships are a particularly effective way of studying the breadth of humanity. Assuming for the moment, arguendo (as they say in law school), that your previous stock of human knowledge gained in Vancouver is totally inapplicable in the different universe of the United States, surely one could devise better means of broadening your social circles.

The advantage of the first first draft was its effort to employ imagination. The replacement of that draft by this one deprives us pretty much of your imaginative effort, which is too bad. This essay has a less lighthearted, perhaps even slightly sinister, feeling. You swear by the value of externships. You will spend more time cultivating your network. You will do less fretting over grades. You are going to be a good, socially-minded, young person, and become a thoughtful kind of lawyer. It's all very earnest, but it's not got your irony.

Now let's do what neither draft has clearly done so far: state the idea you want to convey to the reader. Both drafts are coy in different ways, which is inefficient even in the cases where it is charming. If we take the central proposition of the present draft, it is that you are too sheltered, by background and current environment, to understand the society in which your lawyering occurs. Much might be said about this proposition, not all on one side, and with more imaginative energy, it could be more fun for the reader, and for you, to think through.