Advice for 1Ls

1. Law school will try to rob you of the ability to analyze and recognize systems of power. Lawyers are trained in nothing so well as ignoring the realities of power dynamics in society. "Thinking like a lawyer" mostly involves applying overly formal legal rules while ignoring the fact that they were designed by the powerful for the purpose of maintaining that power. 

• Law students are taught that solutions to legal problems are small tweaks to formal rules or the interpretation of those rules. The stakes of those small, ultimately inconsequential tweaks are then artificially elevated by another "legal skill," debate.
• You'll often hear lawyers say that they can argue "both sides." But the ultimate function of debate in these circumstances is to limit the scope of imagination on possible solutions. Debate opens up an artificial distance between solutions that lead to the same result.
• Instead of investigating whether proposed solutions would actually result in better, more just outcomes in reality, lawyers are taught to make "logical, rational" arguments that may well have no basis in reality. 
• All the while, they will tell you that they are teaching you to be a rational, objective person, teaching you how to “reason.” Be suspicious of this from day one because no humans are fully rational and no mode of thinking can be objective, especially one that declares itself so.
• By the way, lawyers are sneaky so it’s sometimes difficult to see all this happening in real time. Law schools and professors don’t tell you that there is only one right answer because that would be too obvious. Instead, they tell you that there is one right way of reaching the answer. It just so happens that when you apply it, you almost arrive at an answer that upholds the status quo.
  

​

2. In almost every case, your instincts (about who you are, what you believe, what has real value) are better going into law school than coming out. Find a way to preserve them: through regular self reflection, through conversations with people who know you from before, by writing a long polemic to yourself, whatever method is available to you. 

3. The law, as an institution, is fundamentally inhumane, in substance, in practice, and in form. If you’re not careful, law school will make you think that this is the way it has to be. 
​
4. The law serves as a tool for upholding social hierarchy. As a result, law schools try to socialize you to accept hierarchy. It’s in the way lawyers twenty years out ask people where they went to school. It’s in the way law firms care intensely where applicants “rank” in their class. It’s in the way flagship law reviews pick editors. 

​5. Law school exams only tests for how well you can do law school exams. They do not reflect your ability to practice. Never forget that the people telling you that these exams have value (ie professors) are simply people who were good at taking these exams. Many of them might not even have much experience as practicing lawyers.