Thoughts From A 1L
Law School: Hazing Ritual Or Educational Process?
Brian Hollar
Issue date: 3/25/08 Section: Features
The second semester of our first year of law school is nearly done. It's been an interesting
year so far and we have certainly been exposed to a broad range of legal topics, but
I sometimes can't help wonder if law school is more about learning or more about making
us suffer? Law is the third professional academic program I've studied (the other two
being engineering and an MBA) and law seems to be the least oriented out of the three
towards actual application and practical learning. Certainly the practice of law differs
from these other two fields, but in talking to many of my friends who have sat for the bar,
they feel that what they learned in law school classes only gave them periphery preparation
for the bar. Most of what they do professionally, they learned on the job. I can assure
you my engineering classes directly and specifically helped prepare me for passing the
fundamentals of engineering exam. I earned my MBA while working for Mitsubishi and
was able to immediately apply the business principles I learned in school to my work
while I was going through the program.
We have had several professors tell us that the legal profession is currently in a state
of crisis and I can't help but wonder if that starts with how law is taught in law school?
Certainly many of the classes have been good and there is some tremendous insight to be
gained, but in several of the classes students come out feeling absolutely confused by the
subject matter and have no idea what the professor wants them to learn. While this may
not be completely unique to law school and may be due to unique features of the study of
law, this confusion seems far more common in law school than elsewhere. How much is
really gained by forced grade distributions, strong (unhealthy?) emphasis on class rankings,
assigning us more reading and writing than we can keep up with, and a grading system
that even many professors admit is often indistinguishable from randomized grading?
year so far and we have certainly been exposed to a broad range of legal topics, but
I sometimes can't help wonder if law school is more about learning or more about making
us suffer? Law is the third professional academic program I've studied (the other two
being engineering and an MBA) and law seems to be the least oriented out of the three
towards actual application and practical learning. Certainly the practice of law differs
from these other two fields, but in talking to many of my friends who have sat for the bar,
they feel that what they learned in law school classes only gave them periphery preparation
for the bar. Most of what they do professionally, they learned on the job. I can assure
you my engineering classes directly and specifically helped prepare me for passing the
fundamentals of engineering exam. I earned my MBA while working for Mitsubishi and
was able to immediately apply the business principles I learned in school to my work
while I was going through the program.
We have had several professors tell us that the legal profession is currently in a state
of crisis and I can't help but wonder if that starts with how law is taught in law school?
Certainly many of the classes have been good and there is some tremendous insight to be
gained, but in several of the classes students come out feeling absolutely confused by the
subject matter and have no idea what the professor wants them to learn. While this may
not be completely unique to law school and may be due to unique features of the study of
law, this confusion seems far more common in law school than elsewhere. How much is
really gained by forced grade distributions, strong (unhealthy?) emphasis on class rankings,
assigning us more reading and writing than we can keep up with, and a grading system
that even many professors admit is often indistinguishable from randomized grading?
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