In the first draft of my first essay, I lamented what I found to be a deficiency in the way top law schools present the law to their students. That deficiency is the lack of a practical focus; in the few instances where lawyering, encompassing all aspects of being a lawyer including and beyond legal application, is being presented, it is as an elective. The assigned passages of Theory of the Leisure Class posed an explanation to just that deficiency. In those passages, the author traced the emergence of the upper class called the ‘Leisure Class’. He explains that in a struggle to prove morally uprightness in the quasi-peaceable time of a human population, those of the leisure class will engage in ‘conspicuous leisure’ to evidence how little they need to produce for themselves.

It seems that this practice of the so-called leisure class still manifests in higher education, an institution which the author avers was founded by the leisure class with at least the peripheral motive of engaging in conspicuous leisure and the successive mode of proving ones moral uprightness, ‘conspicuous waste.’ Thus, it should come as no surprise that once these leisure class instruments of conspicuous leisure undertook the task of educating students in the law, they did it in such a way that maintains its foundation of materially unproductive thought. The author explained that even in the physical sciences, institutions of higher education were slow to adopt externally accepted truths, failing to incorporate them until their usefulness waned. Why, then, should the law be any different? Of course, it would not. This is especially so, given that whereas the physical sciences are independent from the mind, the law is a product of the mind. What that means is that legal questions and their answers are created by the leisure class. Now, I’m stuck. Where is the place for practicality in a thing which was created by a class which is morally opposed to engaging in productive activity? Well, the author says that present in the leisure class mindset, even in the midst of their engagement in conspicuous leisure and waste, is workmanship. So, it seems there is tension in the mind of the individuals of the leisure class. On the one hand, they value efficiency and gaining pecuniary wealth, but on the other, for the sake of their own self-esteem, they must engage in inefficient conspicuous leisure and waste in order to evidence their status to their peers.

This is eye-opening and will certainly influence the next draft of my first essay. Creativity in law school, or the legal profession more generally, may involve playing to both poles of the leisure class mindset. This is probably the key to leisure class success. The author of the passages didn’t speak on rulership and power acquisition in depth, but it is clear that from among the practitioners of conspicuous leisure and waste were the rulers and those who had the most vassals. To attain such status, I will assume that some strategy (i.e. productive thought) was certainly involved. Thus, in engaging in leisure class activities, success seems to lie in productive thought which manifests in well mannered form. Depending on the context, there is different etiquette which is required for well manneredness. In the context of the law, that etiquette may be what the focus of top law schools are.