-- GabrielleKloppers - 12 Mar 2020

I just wanted to take the opportunity to write a note on something we were talking about in class several weeks ago - about how being in an "environment of risk-averse over-achievers" affects law students as a whole. Having this unprecedented week away from school (I personally am out in the middle of nowhere where not a soul can cough on me), I have thought a lot about distance from the law school environment and how we, as prototypical law students, change within that.

I have realized that although we continually decry the presence of our peers as the influence that makes us unoriginal and uninspiring, our lack of originality does not seem to change once removed from their continual presence. I read a lot of the first essays - which overwhelmingly focused on the law school environment - with a strange distance. As someone who uprooted myself from my home country to the US, I have no traditional support system here. I can't go home to my family during this trying time, as many of us have done. Instead, I clung to my peers (perhaps a bit too much - I did accidentally call Mona "Mum" at one point). So when my classmates said that their interpersonal relationships at law school were making them conform, I looked a bit askance. I understood it intellectually, but I could not connect.

Now that we are mostly apart, the idea that "being in a law school environment" makes us unoriginal because we are surrounded by similarly-minded peers seems to compute even less. Most of us are going about the same routine, save with a little bit of family-time thrown in. We aren't thinking deeply about what we want from our futures, or working on ourselves as people. We're simply seeking to, in the words of a classmate, "Git 'er done." This suggests to me less that we become uncreative from our environs, but rather that this is a natural resting place for many of us. In fact, I found that when I was with my law school classmates, the social drive probably made me more creative - the heady stress environment made us, after all, conjure a lot of fanciful thoughts out of thin air.

I suppose the point of this thread is to ponder on where the drive to the middle comes from: others, or ourselves. Having identified that, how can we work on it? If it is inside us, it won't come from simply leaving law school or the legal profession - after all, we are all spread out, and it seems much the same. Also, I miss all of you and the environment we shared far more than I thought I would.

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Thank you for posting this. First, I'm writing to say that you're not the only one who is yearning for human attachments right now. First semester, I probably spent a little too much time in the library instead of meeting people, but this semester I had been making a greater effort to spend time with my peers (and professors) outside of class. I still have those relationships and plan to cultivate them in any way that's still possible, but, like you, I am quite disappointed and lonely given the current state of affairs. Law school doesn't feel like law school anymore. I can't quite explain how it feels, but it is definitely unsettling.

I also wanted to respond that I think there's a key difference between the relationships we have with our classmates on the one hand, and on the other, the environment that law school perpetuates through things like grades, job networking, starting salaries, etc. (i.e. all the things that our classmates--and myself--wrote extensively about in our first papers). Obviously, online law school has taken away the former, which was in my opinion, and as you intimate, the very best and most important part of law school. And what's left is the latter: the uninspiring "git 'er done" mentality that makes us unoriginal and uncreative. Where I don't agree is that I don't think our classmates were writing about being surrounded by their peers as being a catalyst for conformity, homogeneity and self-perpetuating stress. In fact, I think the opposite is true: that our classmates view non-school-related interactions with friends and professors to be the only way to avoid becoming completely sucked into law school's toxic environment. When people complain about the other students in law school, I think they're upset about what the environment has done to those students, not what those students can provide in terms of companionship.

Either way, I agree that the online law school is a devastating way to finish up this already stressful time in our lives. Please let me know if you ever want to talk more about this, or anything else. -Jason