Law School: Behind The Scenes, Part 1

Courses

Okay so for those of you who aren’t aware, the first year courses are the same at every law school:

Contracts
Civil Procedure
Criminal Law
Torts
Property
“Lawyering skills”

What most people aren’t aware of is that this means that during your first year, you’re going to learn the same stuff no matter what law school you go to. What sets the “top tier” schools apart from the “lower tier” schools isn’t the quality of the material; oftentimes, the casebooks are the same (Tyler (at Penn Law) and I have the same CivPro books, for example). Rather, it’s the prestige of the faculty (how often they get published) and the specialty research in specific fields of law. To some extent, the prestige of the school will also affect you chances at working for spiffier, more exclusive law firms and the like.

This uniform approach to legal teaching was invented by some dead white guy at Harvard in the 1800’s, and the idea isn’t so much to teach the material, as to teach students how to think like a lawyer (as I’m sure many of you are aware from Legally Blond). The most interesting thing about this setup is that all our courses the first semester are already set. On the first day we got here, they handed us our class schedule and that was that. This semester, I’m taking Contracts, Civil Procedure, and Criminal Law, and the first part of my lawyering skills class. Next semester, I get to take Torts, Property, lawyering skills, and an elective.

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So what are classes like? What's this about the "Socratic Method"? What the hell are "lawyering skills"? Stay tuned for Part 2!