Things that Make Law School Cool

~ admin

Invisible Strings

Experiencing a great novel (I’d recommend Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell) for the first time can be very exciting.  Each plot twist fuels a need to turn the page and find out what happens next.

But once a person has had that first-time experience, he or she may have hard time recapturing that thrill by re-reading the same book.  All those invisible strings that tied the plot together have now been revealed.  The mystery, the illusion, and the naïvete have been stripped away.

One reason why law school is cool is its inherent process of similarly stripping away illusions and revealing how things really work.  The invisible strings that attach to each and every person are made plain, never to be re-concealed to those who have been initiated.

Constitutional rights are a good example.  Before law school, one’s next-door neighbor appears to be just a person who likes to grow tomatoes and to play with her three cats.  But after law school, her appearance has changed:  she wears  plates of armor and carries a sword and a shield wherever she goes.  The law student asks himself or herself, “How did I never notice all that stuff before?”

That formerly invisible armor includes a right to free speech that was designed by some of the brightest thinkers of the last millennium; was embodied in a document that describes one of the longest-running, still-active governmental structures on the planet; has been defended by millions of soldiers, guns, tanks and planes; and is excercised every day of the latest political campaign, protest, demonstration, or debate.

Other such armor includes a right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure by police; to trial by jury; and so on.  These mechanisms—just abstract and theoretical to the student entering law school—have become palpable, real, and unmistakable to the student exiting law school.  He or she can never go back to the way things were, back to viewing his neighbor in the same way, any more than he or she can re-readHarry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets for the first time.

And that’s one thing that makes law school cool.

(Original publication date:  July 19, 2011 (LEX))