The Law Student From Hell

I quit the School of Law at Willamette University within days of submitting this paper. The end of the first semester. And periodically over the next forty-five years I might’ve querulously kicked my own ass about killing that childhood dream. Felt like a failure.

I forgot you can’t get a big round peg into a little square hole. And there are some dogs too wild to live among men.

Original title – Legal Education: A Polemic. For Prof. E. Abramson (Law, Language & Ethics (December 3, 1975)

PREFATORY NOTES

Arthur Kinoy utilized the first personal pronoun in The Present Crisis In Legal Education, 24 Rutgers Law Review 1 (1969), and justified its usage by quoting the late Judge Frank. Since I too am utilizing this pronoun, I thought the Judge’s words might be illustrative: “In some earlier writings, seeking to avoid a show of egotism I used the impersonal approach, saying ‘the writer’ when I meant ‘I.’ I have come to believe that the first person pronoun is less egotistic, for it abandons the impersonal disguise and frankly reveals the personal character of the statements.”

This essay somewhat exceeds the 1500-word limitation placed on the assignment. Since such a limitation is but another manifestation of the topic discussed herein, an apology seems extraneous. An alibi of sorts does exist in that these prefatory notes are not to be included in the essay. I have quoted extensively throughout my discussion – primarily to demonstrate that the content is not simply the delusions of a solitary paranoid – I should like also to exclude the quotations from the proscription.

Various titles to this essay arose. For numerous reasons, I discarded: 1) Legal Education In America: Another Gulag Archipelago; 2) Law School Is To Education As Death Is To Life; and 3) Law School: The Intellectual Lobotomy. My only defense to the title used is personal cowardice, and that is obviously invalid.

While I am not (truthfully) attempting to assuage you personally, I should like to emphasize that I am aware my remarks are not accurate in all cases. Frankly, I am more than desirous that my observations and interpretations are erroneous regarding not only you, but all persons implicated.

Lest my words be misunderstood, I should like to express the fact that any discernible levity in this essay is a personal response to what I perceive as a pervasively contra-creative milieu. Additionally, I must note this paper perhaps could have been more entertaining and of greater educational benefit to both you and I, but I felt too insecure vis a vis the grading system to take any further liberties.

LEGAL EDUCATION: A POLEMIC

Amidst all the “controversy” regarding legal education – grades/ranking, competition, curricula changes, bar exams, practical vs. academic training, et cetera – it seems that there would exist a greater awareness that these concerns are only manifestations of an infinitely more oppressive force, i.e., societal indoctrination. And one need not be unusually perspicacious (or so I hope) to discern, as did Francisco Ferrer, that education is the “most powerful means of enslavement in the hands of the governing bodies today.”

It is my contention that the very lack of recognition of this enslavement by the legal education system is merely an indication of the general success of that system. So long as members of this community are concerned only with such cosmetological ameliorations as minimizing pedantry, the deep malaise, boredom, frustration and dissatisfaction which Arthur Kinoy denominates as the surface symptoms of the crisis in legal education can only enlarge.

Traditionally, it has been the function of legal education to train skilled technicians for American business and government positions; traditionally, law students have become the mechanics, the footsoldiers, of capitalism and the status quo. Robert Borosage has written that law schools serve a definite channeling function in society, training “legal professionals,” preparing students for entrance into corporate law firms and the managerial elite. According to Borosage, “Nothing better illustrates the bankruptcy of legal education than the pride with which the law school has accepted such an inherently limited role.”

David Rockwell declares that “… the law school is one of the primary institutions for the defense and preservation of those economic and political interests which control American society.”

The National Lawyer’s Guild, admittedly not the most impartial of commentators, has stated the purpose of legal education thusly:

Law school is designed to teach us more than just the law and its application. These years of schooling provide the system its last opportunity to program us into aggressive and competent apologists for the status quo. Law school is designed to permanently destroy the humanism, idealism and rebelliousness we have managed to salvage from the dehumanization process known as undergraduate education. Our law school teachers often seem to have the same goal our grade school teachers had, to teach us to stand in a straight line…

Or, as Jerry Farber, in Student As Nigger, summarizes – “When you go to school, you do society an enormous favor: you give it the opportunity to mold you in its image, stunting and deadening you in the process.”

II

The means by which I perceive legal education most specifically its purposes, i.e., the production of “foot soldiers”, is the suffocation of creativity and imagination. Savoy describes why the denial of creativity is so important for society:

Our present educational processes do more to affect thought reform than to offer instruction in logical analysis. Teaching how to “think like a lawyer” is closer to building character than it is to constructing syllogisms. That captivating phrase defines not an intellectual process, but a process of putting students through some form of suffering and aimed at the production of reliable and predictable people who will be readily assimilated into the Bar Association.

Society has long (always?) feared the creative individual whose imagination will almost necessarily lead to questions which the power structure cannot answer and would prefer remain unvoiced. Such imagination must be deemed deviant and suppressed to ensure the continuance of the status quo. One problem which arises lies in the fact that often those very persons who are sufficiently intelligent to aid the maintenance of the society are also those who are endowed with creative minds. Society must then establish some method by which to retain the native intellect while winnowing out any excessive imagination – this social structure has depended upon the “educational system.”

Jonathan Kozol says that “the function of public education… has been overtly stated as state indoctrination to form a strong, homogeneous, harmonious nation.” And the National Lawyers’ Guild describes law school as “…like a magnet that sucks from us our individual identity and creativity and impresses us with the importance of performing like and conforming to our predecessors.” Edgar Friedenberg opines that the purpose of a school is to ensure that those persons “… who get ahead are the kind who will support the social system it represents, while those who might through intent or merely by their being subvert it are left behind as a salutary moral lesson.” (Emphasis mine.) Lastly, Professor Savoy writes that the “… roads to creativity have been traditionally regarded as anathema to the legal mind and are systematically dynamited in the classroom.” The list of such commentaries is not long, but its content is persuasive.

How can legal education justify grades, ranking, and the rest of the tightly-structured pedagogic methodology, unless its purpose is to systematically diminish the creativity of its victims… oops, its students. Such academic delineations are arbitrary at best, and clearly counterproductive to the learning process; grades are not accurately reflective of the individual’s knowledge nor his potential. Competition inhibits the acquisition of knowledge and serves primarily to ensure faculty control. The oppressive atmosphere created by the practical necessity of chasing some elusive criteria artificially imposed by those euphemistically referred to as “teachers” can only deny the student’s potentiality for creative expression. Albert Einstein, who name might come to mind first regarding creative thinkers, wrote that “this coercion had such a deterring effect upon me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any problem distasteful for me for an entire year.”

It would seem apparent that my arguments will fall, for the most part, on deaf ears, as the system, if not efficient, is at least effective. Those who would teach the students are themselves selected for their academic success, that is, their absorption of society’s indoctrinating message. The revered case method and the Socratic “teaching” style, the bar exam, course requirements, the traditional exclusion of minorities, are so much a part of legal education that they define it. Even course titles such as “Creditor’s Rights” are means by which the students’ minds are focused, tunneled, in a particular direction. The cynical wo/man might even suggest that the very length of law school has been somehow determined to be the optimal number of years for culturization. Similarly, ranking could be viewed as a safety precaution ensuring that only the best indoctrinated, most perfectly socialized students are advanced to pre-eminent positions in the economic and governmental structure.

While perhaps unnecessarily caustic, one might contend that the law review exists solely as insurance that the already most successfully indoctrinated students are more certainly safe to assume important positions in the ongoing preservation of the status quo. Savoy expresses the obvious:

We deliberately and systematically create an environment in which autonomy is discouraged; where there is little opportunity for students to make decisions that affect their lives; where risk-taking is discouraged; where they become exquisitely insensitive to each other and eventually to themselves.

There exist forces in our law schools that tend to confirm or produce certain personality traits that are basically inimical to democratic values. Submissiveness to authority, dependence on external judgment, contempt for idiosyncrasy, distrust of feelings, excessive control of impulses, a predilection for formalism, and an intolerance for ambiguity – these are some of the qualities that are fostered by our traditional forms of legal education.

Probably the final words on this matter should be left to Warren Seavey of Harvard (The First Temple of Societal Indoctrination):

I think teaching law is rather like herding sheep. You run around behind the students and bark at their heels and head off the start for the hilltops, and after a while, if you create enough commotion, they move down the valley and arrive at the destination, without ever knowing how they got there.

III

Let us be so audacious as to propose fundamental ameliorative change in legal education. Regardless of the rather farcical nature of that proposal, a few cogent perceptions can be offered. Abe Fortas believes that “there is one, perhaps only one, really essential ingredient for greatness in an educational or training institution and that is excitement, intellectual excitement that is so vital that it is emotional.”

Sidney Cox feels that “top accomplishment is reached when we care a lot and still have fun. Far from being a function of frivolity or indifference, grand fun has to do with guts. With confidence, complete commitment, and a kind of fatal preference for the slim chance.” It would seem then that such excitement and fun, its creation and usage, would be mandated; I would aver that only the fostering, the cultivation, of the individual student’s creativity would arouse intellectual excitement and grand fun of the magnitude desired, though simple non-interference might suffice.

Robin Yeamans propounds that “a considerable body of evidence indicates that when the school does not consciously create an atmosphere that is receptive to creative ideas, creative answers… will not be given by the students.” Ergo, the conscious creation of such an atmosphere becomes the primary concern. Traditional pedagogic concepts must be swept aside. Students must be given the opportunity to question, fail, experiment, take chances, grow. School must no longer be, as it is described by Postman & Weingartner, “…the last place any of us can expect to learn anything important about the realities we have to cope with in our wistful pursuit of life, liberty and happiness….”

I am consciously avoiding more specific suggestions, e.g., elimination of grades, because they are entirely presumptive upon the recognition of the actual purpose of legal education. It is the nature, the essence, of the system which must necessarily be altered, and the system feeds on itself. If law schools can somehow become centers of humanism and imagination – if the impossible occurs – the graduates will themselves become the solution to this problem and, I submit, to possibly all societal quandaries.

The sheer, inevitable potential for harm to our very existence inherent in the educational system seems beyond refutation. Years in an environment in which persons are evaluated numerically and identified numerically could hardly serve to enhance a sense of self, or community, or human life as a whole. Undoubtedly, the most important point is Professor Savoy’s caveat: “Until lawmakers start understanding the nature of the rules they make for themselves that stifle their own growth and impoverish their lives, they will never stop making laws that confine and deform the lives of other people.”

The penultimate page showcased two poems, center page.

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas.

-T.S. Eliot

***

What did you learn in school today,

Dear little boy of mine?

I learned that policeman are my friends,

I learned that justice never ends,

I learned that murderers die for their crimes

Even if we make a mistake sometimes,

And that’s what I learned in school today,

That’s what I learned in school today.

-Tom Paxton

Then there was this. Apparently, I did some research.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Borosage, Robert. “Can The Law School Succeed? A Proposal.” Vol. I p.92. Yale Journal of Law and Social Action, Spring 1970.
2. Griswold, Erwin N. “Intellect and Spirit.” Vol. 81 p. 292 Harvard Law Review, December 1967.
3. Johnstone, Quintin. “Student Discontent and Educational Reform in the Law Schools.” Vol. 23 No. 2 p. 255. Journal of Legal Education.
4. Kennedy, Duncan. “How The Law School Fails: A Polemic.” Vol. I No. I p. 71. Yale Journal Of Law And Social Action. Spring 1970.
5. Kinoy, Arthur. “The Present Crisis in American Legal Education.” Vol. 24, p. 1. Rutgers Law Review. 1969.
6. Leleiko, Steven H. “Legal Education – Some Crucial Frontiers.” Vol. 23 No. 2 p. 502. Journal of Legal Education. 1971.
7. Mohr, A.J. & Rodgers, K.J. “Legal Education: Some Student Reflections.” Vol. 25 p. 403. Journal of Legal Education. 1973.
8. Reich, Charles A. “Toward A Humanistic Study of Law.” Vol. 74 p. 1402. Yale Law Journal. 1965.
9. Rockwell, David N. “The Education of The Capitalist Lawyer: The Law School.” Law Against The People, Robert Lefcourt, ed. Random House, New York, 1971.
10. Savoy, Paul N. “Toward A New Politics of Legal Education.” Vol. 79 p. 444. Yale Law Journal. 1970.
11. Yeamans, Robin. “Creativity and Legal Education.” Vol. 23 No. 3 p. 381. Journal of Legal Education. 1971.

I apologize for quality of the writing. Think I was trying to compose lawyerishly.

Why I Quit Law School