With graduation approaching, I've been reflecting on this class's continued influence on my life. Actually, I doubt whether things would have been much different if I hadn't taken the class. I came to law school with the figurative "eggshell skull" -- a head full of intellectual and professional and personal insecurities. These were inevitably going to sabotage my law school performance, under any conditions. So I can't truly be certain about this class's continued influence on my life.

What motivated me to write is this: I am applying for jobs. I have accumulated three years of terrible grades. And now I am learning that my grades foreclose me from countless paths that would have appealed to me -- clerkships, academia, additional graduate school, government, nonprofits (oh yeah, and private practice). For three years, this horror story has slowly been spreading out and blotting out my future -- a situation of my own making.

I thought it would be worthwhile to supply this information, as an example that challenges the categorical claim that "grades do not matter." In fact, to the extent that you are not capable of detaching your self esteem from society ("the consumers of grades"), grades matter. Also, if you think it's OK to aspire to be comfortable (i.e., to aspire for some configuration in which you aren't "afflicted," either by circumstances or by interlopers), grades matter. Finally, if you don't want to look back on your graduate school experience and remember it as wasted, grades matter.

"Modern Legal Magic" remains a wonderful essay. But people use heuristics all the time to substitute for precise measurements, knowing that they're heuristics. Grades can be heuristics and still matter.

-- AndrewGradman - 14 Nov 2010