Nor do you point out, which one might have expected, that the New York requirement has no effect on you at all, because Columbia already requires you to perform 100 hours of pro bono legal service, under supervision, before graduation. You are therefore arguing, with great solemnity but not much novelty, that there is educational value in what we require more of.

Your first graf says that the educational effect of required pro bono work "will contribute to legal expertise in ways very similar to the traditional lecture method." In graf three, you "safely assert that my pro bono work contributed to my legal expertise in different but similar ways to traditional lecture," but you don't show either differences or similarities, or explain why differences cropped up between the grafs.

I don't understand this in graf four:

It would be a vast oversimplification to suggest that, like most other pro bono projects, RCP benefits indigent criminal offenders. RCP offers a unique perspective because it allowed us to work with clients who had formerly interacted with the criminal system, successfully completed their sentences, and were now working to expunge their names. Most young attorneys likely have not worked with criminal clients who have successfully completed their sentences.

So what? I don't understand why the "vast oversimplification," even comes up: who said something about indigent criminal defendants? Most pro bono work is done for people who can't get lawyers, and in the US, indigent criminal defendants are provided lawyers at public expense. Why is the difference "vast" between working with criminal offenders and working on purging the records of ex-offenders? Why is filling in these particular forms for people "a unique perspective"?

I am mystified by the comment that "as a prospective client, I would hope that my attorney had early experiences with clients so that she approached her legal education having been informed of its practical importance." Grammar aside, why the hell would you be thinking about your lawyer's first year in law school, which has no relevance at all to you, rather than your lawyer's subsequent experience and present fitness for the work you need done? Do you really think that the "practical importance" of client service escapes the working lawyer unless she did some form-filling for clients in her first year?

Essentially, this feels to me like the pro bono activities report you filed when you got back from spring vacation, with a paragraph at the top saying you're going to talk about it in relation to something in the news, and a conclusion saying you're not going to discuss the issues raised by the news.

This is not a revision of your first essay, but rather a complete substitution. So no self-editing has yet occurred. This draft feels, as the first did, like a beginning requiring much work until ready. The first decision is whether this about what you did on spring vacation, about requiring pro bono service of law students rather than providing civil legal assistance to the poor, or about why live-client representation is educationally valuable for first-year students. You can't make all three work in 1,000 words.

The first path, which the current draft primarily treads, can be successful if you toss out the "activities report" bureaucratic language and the uncritical tone. Is your activity beneficial because there is an actual client, in some way that a simulation would not be equally beneficial? Is it the editing under supervision that is good for you, or some other aspect of the workflow? Are you better off doing the extremely limited work your actual development so far prepares you to do, with live clients your mistakes may injure, or simulating more sophisticated work under the supervision of teachers who can help you in a setting where there's no actual client, whose interests professional ethics require them to put before the educational value of your experience?

The second path requires you to ask why we don't give the poor real lawyers, rather than law students, to serve their needs, and whether requiring law students to perform pro bono service is really a way of letting real lawyers off the hook.

The third path requires you to explain why doing something before you're ready to do it is better than getting ready to do it, or why (on Deweyite grounds, for example) there's no distinction between doing something and learning effectively how to do it. I believe strongly that people should be taught in law school how to be lawyers when they leave. I don't believe, equally strongly, that having them represent clients in their first year contributes at all to that exercise. So I'd like to read a careful, thoughtful, powerful argument about why my second belief is hampering my first.