The first day of orientation for night program participants at $CITY_SCHOOL consisted of two events: an hour long "program overview" placed in a ninety-minute long time slot, and a dinner, replete with guest speaker and forced socializing. (An event I have as of this writing not yet experienced, and have a surprisingly small desire to experience; guest speakers and forced socializing would thrill few people I know. Even without the lack of sleep). The program overview was done by a soft-smoken man with a cautious and somewhat soporific voice; it was amazing that it carried across the room. (Did they spend a fortune on acoustics, I wonder?)

He began with a rhetorical question: "what are you here for?" - that is to say, what do you hope to get out of this experience - and he continued with the note that the two most common answers to that are "to get a JD degree" and "to prepare for the practice of law". (Neither of these would be my answer; degrees are less important to me than knowledge, and I have no clue if I will end up wanting to practice law. What I want is to understnad the law, and through that understanding, to enable myself to be a better citizen; an idealistic answer I suspect would find few takers in a profession reputed to be as lacking in idealism as the law). He continued with an ancillary question: what do you expect law school to be like? Are you excited, or do you expect it to be a long, difficult hurdle? (I'm somewhat excited, and i'm afraid it will be a long, difficult hurdle --- not because of the classroom experience per se, but because of the demands it places on my time, and the stresses it places on the rest of my life). He followed these questions up with an unpleasant clip from the Paper Chase, which made the already tense audience even tenser (a feat I would have thought impossible had I not seen it done).

He then assured us that while we would end up getting law degrees, we would not be prepared to practice law -- a concept I had encountered before, but which he did not fully explain. He spent the rest of the time explaining what a legal education is, and what we should get out of it; but how that education is insufficient to prepare us to practice law, he did not explain.

I'm not convinced he was the best man for the job.

Legal education is not about learning the law, he insisted; for, while we will learn some of the law, it is impossible to learn all of it: there's just too much. The key is learning how to find the law, and having the context to understand and apply it once we've found it. Ok, that makes sense -- and is, in fact, somewhat banal. Of course knowing how to find information is more important than having the information itself; of coure there is more information to be had than can be remembered by anyone. Perhaps this is because i'm a child of the internet age, but this isn't surprising in the slightest; this is normal life, in my world.

He then went off on what it means to 'think like a lawyer', and how this is different from how everyone else thinks; and, to demonstrate this, he explained that many people think law is sort of like math, with well defined formulas which can be applied to get a concrete result -- but, really, it's not; it's possible to have multiple correct answers, obtained by following the same processes after starting with different assumptions. His example of this, drawn from mathematics, was 1 + 1 = x, where x can be either 2 or 10 depending; I laughed (nobody else did).

This is, based on what i've read and what he was saying, a big problem: people come to law school looking for answers and have a hard time accepting that there can be multiple right answers, or none; this doesn't map onto the world as most people interact with it, and it doesn't map onto the education most people get as an undergrduate. (But, again, I find it somewhat normal: of couree answers are different dependant on your starting presumptions, and of course you can solve a problem in multiple different ways and get, potentially, different results. What is the surprise here?)

He then moved on to a discussion of professionalism. It was clear that the school places a high emphasis on "social responsibility" as an outgrowth of ethics and professionalism; this is all to the good, in my book -- although he gave no examples and quickly moved on to his core point: everyone's professional life begins now, and it is important to begin conducting yourself as a professional now ... followed by a list of things that represent professional conduct:  honesty, punctuality, preparation, engagement.

OK, fair point, but can I be forgiven for feeling like I'm on the receiving end of a lecture I don't need? I've been conducting myself as a professional for well over a decade -- admittedly in a different profession, but the things he emphasized here really do apply elsewhere. The difference between a change-of-profession student and a student just out of college really shows here: the things he was holding up as professional behavior that we have to start exercising now are things that have long since been trained into me just by trying to keep people happy and conduct myself ethically in a corporate environment.  And i'm not even sure the lecture would be needed by people fresh out of school, except that if they didn't have experience with people needing it, they wouldn't include it.

He followed the lecture with a reminder that "respect everyone" includes respecting yourself, too, and a reassurance that everyone has something to contribute and not to be too hard on ourselves when we fuck up. (My words, not his). And he reminded us of a point I think is too easily forgotten: at the end of the day, we are responsible for our education, not our professors.

Now, I guess, it's off to dinner.