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< | The Contrived Path to Lawyering | >
> | Stumbling Upon Law School
(Revised on May 29, 2024) | | | | |
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< | -- By EllisaKim - 23 Feb 2024 | >
> | Music, my past lover | | | | |
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> | Thoughts race. Fingers scuttle across the keyboard. I am sitting at a Steinway & Sons piano, feeling the damp weight of the silent audience. The frigid spotlight on me seems to be the only source of light in the concert hall. The awareness of my surroundings becomes more acute, as the wooden keys repel the slimy sweat of my throbbing fingers. Fingers walking on a tightrope, I can’t fall, I can’t fall, keep the thought at bay. It is contained in a buckling box before bursting out, forcefully, you will fall, you will fall. The keys merge and the fingers forget their proper place. I stop, confused.
I was trained as a classical pianist until the age of 17. I quit almost a decade ago; the memories are a distant past. Classical music to me is a past lover that I refuse to get over by not ever thinking about. One nearly traumatic memory with music is that I would forget what to do and abruptly stop on stage. There were many things that didn’t work out between music and me, but performance anxiety played a salient role in closing off the path.
It may sound strange that coming to law school to some extent felt like revisiting that past. Lawyering involves words and wits, and language and music are more alike than first appearance allows us to think. They both involve internalizing a system of rules and ultimately transcending those rules to communicate something essential and personal.
Generating sound that is pleasant to the ears requires a high degree of control over the instrument. Music, contrary to popular belief, is not free from the imposing laws of physics and mechanics. The fingers have to strike the keys from certain angles and the regularity of intervals between the notes makes the occasional irregularities special. The indication of mastery is when the rules and controls that are required of a pianist become second nature to them to the point where they can transcend those limitations, much like in language where you operate within the manifold rules until you get comfortable enough to break them and create unconventional—creative—use cases.
One difference, however, that has prevented the two experiences, playing the piano and going down the path of the legal profession, from bearing the kind of semblance that is hurtful is whether I let myself be vulnerable. Performing on stage required radical vulnerability. There was no shred of anonymity or excuse I could hide behind. Contrarily, there have been plenty of excuses available in law school, especially that this is just what I do for work, and that I have more important things that enrich my life. | | | | |
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< | How can you commit before you know | >
> | Stumbling upon law school | | | | |
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< | The path to the legal profession appears contrived and inorganic when compared. Use the language of romance to describe how jaded 3Ls become first-year associates at law firms with their minted licenses, and the contrivance is thrown into sharp relief. | >
> | I stumbled upon law school. For someone with musical and linguistic aptitude who is fond of reading and writing, going to law school seemed to cross off the boxes, although I am still not certain what I have committed to. I scrambled to find reasons why it had to be law to get my foot in the door and then go around telling people that I don’t have a lofty reason for coming to law school—not a great cause to fight for that led me down this path.
But more recently, I started to wonder if I was the one preventing myself from being invested in any cause. Not wanting to experience the existential frustration that I once felt with music, I have been compartmentalizing and categorizing law school work as impersonal, irrelevant, and unessential to personal fulfillment. The story that I have been telling myself, that I feel indifferent about the decision to come to law school, that I came only because it was one among many paths that made sense to me at the time, started to feel like an avoidant defense mechanism. This may be true to some extent, but is it helpful? | | | | |
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< | A vast majority of folks who once described themselves as aspiring lawyers in their law school personal statements, leave school with a big law job. I wager that the authors of these personal statements didn’t know what lawyering meant or felt like but for the fact that they were a paralegal, had a lawyer in the family, loved language (and lawyers fight with words apparently), or perceived some sort of injustice in the world and was purportedly inspired to singlehandedly fix it with a piece of paper that authorizes you to practice law in certain states. But the process from applying to law school to graduating and to entering the legal profession feels like a masquerade—an awkward social dance. | >
> | Creating my own path | | | | |
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< | Imagine you had to know for certain that you wanted to marry someone before deciding to date them, that you had to know you wanted to date them seriously before asking for their number. You might’ve formed preconceived notions of what dating or marrying this person would look like based on anecdotes, but you haven’t yet talked to this person. This is practically a stranger. You muster up your courage and walk up to this person, in the hopes of initiating a conversation. They are surrounded by potential suitors and mostly ignore you, but when you finally grab their attention for a fleeting moment, they ask: Are you certain you want to marry me? Do you know what your life with me will look like? You have to know what you’re getting yourself into before asking me out.
This is what law school demands: that you know before taking out a six-figure loan to pay tuition. Are you certain you want to be a lawyer? Do you know what kind of lawyer you want to be? You have no idea how to answer these questions since you’ve never been a lawyer or gone to law school. Another catch is that law school may teach you what the law is but puts much less emphasis on how to lawyer, and the two are apparently very different.
The drama around a candidate’s commitment to law school and the legal profession is due to the inordinate amount of cost to pay upfront to even start on the path of becoming a lawyer. The horror story used to scare off rookies entering or attempting to enter the world of the legal profession is that you go to law school only to realize five years later glaring into the monitor that you never wanted to do this and that you still have student loans to pay off. Get your foot in the door; but if the cost of getting your foot in the door is three years of your life, hefty student loans, plus heightened insecurity from being a straight-B student, is it worth it? Law school admissions demands you know your answer to these questions before applying since the years to come after your foot is in the door are more grueling. But how can you commit to law school and lawyering if you’ve never done either and have to decide based on your far-fetched notions about what they are?
We are complicated animals
Another troubling assumption deeply ingrained in the law school application and hiring process is that most of us have a clear motive for starting on this path and that there was an identifiable moment that gave rise to the reason we applied. Law schools and employers alike ask students to convince them of how dedicated they are and for what reason as if there could ever be a coherent narrative about why people are drawn to things they are. Answers to the “why law” question are often deceptively simple, although applicants and interviewers alike find comfort in the sweet simplicity.
As complicated animals, we are pulled in many directions and drawn to things for reasons that are difficult to recognize, identify, or articulate. The supposed moment of clarity when the light bulb should’ve gone off in my head and when I should’ve realized I wanted to go to law school to become a lawyer never happened to me—the decision was rather a culmination of feelings and thoughts over a long time.
The bread-and-butter argument
For the most part, I don’t have a lofty reason for coming to law school—there wasn’t a great cause to fight for that led me down this path. Perhaps our culture takes the dreamy notion of ambition and career slightly too far. Not to dismiss the importance of enjoying what one does for a living and feeling the sense of contributing to the lives of others, for me, and for many others, the primary function of lawyering is a job that provides financial stability and, freedom (if you’re lucky). If I sound jaded, I am very excited about my internship this upcoming summer which will give me the opportunity to work in a Juvenile Right’s Practice trial office. But let’s be clear: although I screamed in excitement when I got the offer, thinking I would be able to gain litigation experience and work for a cause I deeply care about, protecting children’s rights in court was not the reason I decided to come to law school. The reason is too amorphous, broad, and centered around livelihood that it’s not captured by one exciting summer opportunity. | >
> | One thought that has been helpful in thinking about whether I should feel invested in law is that the idea that there are cookie-cutter paths is an illusion. Many people happen to go about their careers in similar ways, but that doesn’t mean I can create a path that suits my calling. I already knew this, but this is the first time I am internalizing it. That I didn’t have a strong reason to come to law school in the first place is fading in its significance: my task is to personalize what lies ahead of me. | | |
This does well what a first draft needs to do: it gets the topic defined and offers the material from which the essay can be shaped. |
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