The Paper Chase: Chaser or the Chased?

-- By MarcusStrong - 16 Feb 2012

Two Anecdotes

At the beginning of term in law school, two small discussions of which I wasn’t even a part forced me to reassess my view of choice and academics. The first was a discussion I heard about a girl who was so disappointed by her pre-selected Torts professor that she petitioned the Registrar to completely change her schedule so she could presumably learn the law of wrongs from someone more qualified. Immediately, I was critical of her decision and couldn’t figure out why she needed to take such drastic measures. Our schedule in the second term is decided by, among other factors, what section we were in the previous term, and what elective we chose for the Spring. Should anyone be dissatisfied with their elective, one could understandable change it and potentially have a different schedule as a result. But changing a professor of a core class like Torts? I couldn’t understand it. Why couldn’t she just accept her schedule like everyone else? As it got later in the term though, another discussion in class turned my prior opinion on its head. When asked by our professor why grades matter, a student retorted, “Because…they’re a proxy for all the qualitative skills we can’t measure.” As with the prior discussion, I was also struck by what seemed to rash decision-making. This time, however, I couldn’t understand why my fellow student took grades as the norm, as the baseline, rather than some other measure, like his own self-evaluation. Given a desire for choice in one situation, I now had to reevaluate my complicity in another.

I don't understand the second anecdote. At the time, I understood the point to be that grades matter because they are a useful stand-in for a large number of qualitative measurements no one knows how to make and communicate, but which are the "real" underlying quality of a lawyer on sale in the canned meat market. (Where, presumably, such fine qualitative measurements would be even more useful, if they could be gotten and interpreted easily.)

I thought the point was unestablished by the argument presented, and I think it's still wrong when given its best possible presentation, but it isn't, in any event, displacing self-evaluation: it was about the utility of grades to other people. Here, it seems to be serving a purpose, and creating a conflict, I didn't understand to be the case at the time.

Arguments for Self-Evaluation

There are a few arguments for self-evaluation. First, as law students, we have very little that we can choose to do about the way we are educated, so why not take advantage of the little choice we do possess? Per most university’s policies, professors will still dole out grades, but students can still evaluate themselves on another metric. While students leave much up to the administration and to professors, in terms of what classes we take and the depth of the material in the first year, we still choose to come to law school in the first place. That choice isn’t merely one about the name on a degree or a vocation. Choosing to attend law school is a choice about what fields one wants to be exposed to, how much one wants to be challenged, and the skills one learns in the process. In other words, it’s not one-sided. Contrary to the contention of the abrasive Contract’s professor in Paper Chase, law students are not merely skulls of mush for professors to mold. Most students enter law school with at least 22 years of life experience under their belt, coming from disparate countries, regions, colleges, professions, and income levels. Yet when they enter law school, the system of rapid outlining before exams, eating pizza lunch at hosted talks, signing up for bar exam prep in 1L year, getting little sleep, drinking too much coffee, and grades quickly becomes the norm.

Communism and Rebellion

This situation mirrors the circumstances of any person caught in the talons of a movement or higher authority. The early 20th Century black American writer Richard Wright wrote these observations during time in the Communist Party: “An absolute had first to be established in the minds of the comrades so that they could measure the success or failure of their deeds by it” (Black Boy, 371). At the time, the Party in Chicago wanted to attack the plight of blacks in the city, but denied anything literary, intellectual, or outside of their political plan of attack. This lack of independence led Wright to later disassociate himself from the party completely. In his mind, they were living in “a fantasy that had no relation whatever to the reality of their environment.” (Black Boy, 363). Law students, of course, are not put on trial before their peers when they choose not to look at their grades or pursue an alternative course of legal study. But students year after year establish the same norms of mythologizing grades and “gunners.” And that socialization occurs without the aid of faculty or administration. That socialization could be called a culture, but unlike a living and breathing culture, it does not change much year after year.

Conclusion

No wonder the anecdote above seemed so strange to me. As first year students, we quickly exchange our eagerness to learn for an eagerness to comply. To be an outsider then is a courageous act. Choosing not to take every upperclassman’s advice at face value or petition for professors better suited to you are acts of rebellion. By focusing on the results or the standards by which the larger law school measures individuals, students deprive themselves not only of choice, but of the reasons they came to law school in the first place. Whether that reason is a life mission or a desire to learn, it shouldn’t be readjusted by a data collection and organization system that doesn’t know anything about you besides a name and a number.

Marcus, I think the central idea here is "law school induces and reinforces conformism." I don't think we need the anecdotes to understand that idea if you start out with it, unless there's something about the process by which you came to the idea which plays a larger role in what you want to make of it than I understand. I also don't think we need Richard Wright on conformism in the Communist Party, unless there's something about that particular example of conformism which tells us about your idea in a different or more generative way.

It seems to me that, once you've put that idea forward simply and clearly, the way forward then lies down a couple of possible sets of questions: How and why does law school induce and reinforce conformism? As several people have noted, those are the questions Duncan Kennedy tries to ask in his piece about law school and the reproduction of hierarchy. Why do students not only accept but unconsciously desire to conform? Why do teachers, who might be expected to fight conformity for conscious intellectual and unconscious emotional reasons, also accept and complicitously facilitate it instead? What destabilizing self-knowledge are both teachers and students fleeing? These would lead to an account with more "Freud" and less "Marx" (or Gramsci, really) than Duncan's. Does the conformism associated with legal education in other times and places as well as this one play a significant role in creating legal stability? Is legal creativity an adversary law school conformism tries to starve out?

Maybe these aren't your precise questions. One of the sources of creativity is to stop conforming to the horse-blinding millwork of arguing whether ideas are right or wrong, and instead to ask questions to which, right or wrong, they lead.