1L “Selfnessless” and Its Implications on the Law Student

-- By MaxKingsley - 15 Feb 2023

Introduction

Selfness is commonly understood as a person’s essential individuality; it is a framework through which we evaluate our individual characteristics to distinguish ourselves from others. In almost every way, selfness is tethered to our own humanity- it enables us to find value in our uniqueness and to establish a sense of personhood. This perhaps explains why integration into law school can feel particularly jarring to first year law students. The 1L curriculum largely requires that we suppress our individual passions and idiosyncrasies to morph into the ideal law student. This idea, of course, is rooted in logical considerations. As Judge Celia Day pointed out in Lawyerland’s “All Great Problems Come from the Streets”, it is not a judge’s job to make the law but rather to discern it: “Our commission is to keep our personal predispositions under control”. This is because to reinforce the law’s legitimacy, our society has perpetuated the notion that the law is objective. However, as we have seen through history and experience, it is almost virtually impossible to separate our own sense of individuality from the law that is created and enforced. This essay, therefore, will be an examination of law school’s tendency to promote “selfnessless” and its implications on law students.

Lack of Agency

By choosing 1L classes for us, the law school administration strips us of our own agency and requires us to take courses that are litigation focused. For many, like myself, who have no desire to pursue a career in litigation, this presents several challenges to selfness. The curriculum forces us to adopt a unilateral conception of the law by making those students who are not interested in litigation feel like the law has no place for them. It requires that we abandon our interests and aspirations to absorb content that will likely never materialize again. Those interested in pursuing transactional law, for example, will leave 1L without an ounce of actual knowledge pertaining to negotiation. Most contracts professors will spend an entire semester covering case law but will never actually teach their students how to read (or even draft) a contract. Thus, students may find themselves questioning their decision to come to law school, wondering whether they would have been better served pursuing a career that makes them feel included, not alienated.

Grading

In law school, our worth is determined primarily through arbitrary grading mechanisms, which further promotes selfnessless. Each year, students are pitted against each other by the grading curve. These grades provide employers with an apparatus through which to rank us by dividing us into numerical averages that are wrongly fastened to our propensity for success. Thus, we are judged and valued not primarily through a lifetime of personal achievements, interests, and experiences, but through our ability to regurgitate, in three hours, exactly what each professor wants to see on an exam. Our value as law students is therefore not rooted in personal passion, improvement, or intellectual cultivation, but in test-taking. Law school’s fixation on numerical ranking encourages students to abandon their own interests. It makes students feel like the unique facets that comprise their personalities are not valuable. It causes students to desert their hobbies, to cease to do the things which make them happy, to quit cultivating their passions. Instead, it encourages students to spend their free time studying for an exam, which they think will define their future success.

Cold Calling

The socratic method also decays students’ sense of selfness. Proponents of the socratic method claim that it fosters deeply analytical classroom discussion by teaching students to think critically. However, in my experience, the socratic method achieves the opposite effect. It does not foster valuable classroom discussion- It requires students to meet professors where they are. It discourages students from contributing to discussion when they have something meaningful to say and instead forces students to discuss issues which they may not feel comfortable discussing. Classroom discussion does not flow naturally through the socratic method, nor does it incorporate students’ differing ideas and conceptions of case law. Instead, conversation flows solely in the direction the professor wants it to flow. Students thus tend to feel like their own perspectives are not warranted. For example, when discussing cases like Bowers v. Hardwick in constitutional law, LGBTQ+ students are rarely encouraged to share their own perspectives. Instead, they are forced to view the case through the lens of an “invisible” attorney, one with no identity. Professors may ask them to recite the moral justifications that underly the court’s holding without allowing students to criticize, confront, or even denounce the very reasoning that denies their own right of existence. This further leads to alienation and selfnessless.

What do we do?

The 1L curriculum ultimately leads students to feel like the law has no place for them, like their value should be determined through grades, and like their voices are not warranted. This makes students feel alienated, invisible, and self-less. I propose that a good start to restore selfness in law school would be to allow students the freedom to choose their 1L classes. While foundational courses may still be required, students should be allowed to take these in conjunction with the classes they have interest in. Thus, students would see the bigger picture more easily, not to learn to “think like an attorney” but to learn to think like the attorney that they want to become. Additionally, we should extract the fangs that the socratic method has sunk into the law school system and instead allow students to make their own contributions to class, to direct the discussion in a way that leads to broader understandings of the processes, and people, that comprise the law. Finally, we should stop focusing on grades as an indicator of success and instead focus on students’ individuality. These steps, in my opinion, would not completely eradicate the feeling of selfnessless and alienation that law students feel during 1L, but they would be a start.

One route to improving the draft would be to put it in contact with some (indeed, any) source of information or analysis you don't owe entirely to your own seventeen weeks of experience in law school. Sources, influences, external perspectives, data—all have their place and their place right now isn't here.

Here you are writing on a subject you chose, in a course you chose, where the grading system is devalued and methods of interactive evaluation are applied, complaining that law school isn't like this. You aren't wrong, except when you are, and—respectfully—tell me about it. If this is the opportunity you want and the change you wish to see, then how about we use it? Why not write about what would matter under what are in fact our conditions here?

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