Stumbling Upon Law School

Music, my past lover

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.

Stumbling upon law school

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?

Creating my own path

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.

Extended metaphors are dangerous: they take valuable space, and they render the thinking indirect, as everything must bounce off the comparison, which tends to reveal its weaknesses, like bubble gum, as it is stretched. Vocation is like marriage, for maybe six or eight dozen words. Then it isn't.

People go to law school for many reasons, not all of which can be captured in the net you've woven here. I thought law school was an ancillary discipline: intending to write legal history, I saw it as the language of the sources. Had it taken me less than five years, I probably would not have been a lawyer at all. Most of my colleagues had, as you say, hazy ideas on the way in that did not reflect the extraordinary variety of practices and disciplines they acquired in later life. The same is true of most of the thousands of students I have taught over the intervening decades. But the presence of growth, magnificent and unpredictable as it is, doesn't seem to me in and of itself any criticism whatever of a system of education, which literally brings out of people (or cultivates, if we can switch roots) that which at the beginning they didn't know was there.

I grant you the importance of debt, but writing about money by writing about marriage is a fraught business. People as smart as those around here can earn what they need to repay their debts, or not repay them, in a variety of ways. Although fear of their debts has harmed many of my students over the decades, those for whom the actual gravity of the debt turned out to be life-limiting are a much smaller cohort. The debt, like law school itself, is an imagination test; those who have failed it have, as I have said in class, mostly did so by not showing up for the exam. Thoreau is right that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, but law school (even when it does not take, when people wisely walk away) tends to administer antidotes to both the quiet and the despair.

Of course a first-summer job is not the reason we went to law school. It shouldn't be. Despite all the bullshit broadcast at you, you'd be as good a law student, as great a lawyer, as happy and fulfilled as a professional, had you not taken one at all. Because I had a skilled trade whose wages were what paid my tuition, I did not take lawyer jobs the first two years I was in school. Working at what I loved while also studying law and earning my way was better for me: by the time I did start taking lawyer jobs I had a better idea of what I wanted to do and why. The actions of others in my cohort—what they did and didn't do, how it did or didn't work for them, what they learned or forgot along the way—also helped me, while following my own road helped me to ignore the pressures of conformity that are tugging at you. In the end, the practices I built and the social changes that I sought through them owed at least as much to my life in software as to my life in law.

I think the best route to improvement here is to open the box, both around law school and around yourself. Rather than trying to build a critique of law school after a few weeks in it (which you do perceptively, but with an inevitable paucity of information gained through experience) you could ask instead how your learning—an ongoing process, not a completed one—is helping you change, and towards what still uncertain goals. Rereading that next draft, five or ten years hence, will be an invaluable inexperience for you, helping you to see how you became who you then are. I look forward to reading that draft very much.

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