Law School Stories

Distinguishing Good from Bad Law School Advice

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When new students arrive at law school, they receive a ton of advice from upper-level students.  2Ls and 3Ls love giving advice to new students.  If they can do it at an event where alcohol is being consumed, a state close to nirvana is achieved.  But how do incoming students distinguish between good advice and bad advice?  Here’s a tip I give in 1L of a Ride.  After mentioning that upper-level students sometimes give really good advice, I say:

But upper-level students also give some really bad advice, much of which involves ways to cut corners, so be wary of what they tell you. Although it will be socially awkward, if an upper-level student starts piling on the shortcut advice, ask the person about his or her GPA or class rank. You could phrase it like this: “Thanks for all the advice. Did it work for you?”

Last week I received an email from an incoming student at another law school.  She complimented the book and added a funny postscript referencing the above passage:

P.S.  Since your interest in humor is apparent, let me tell you a story from the second day of reading your book. I was with my parents before dinner and discussing the tips involved in your book.  My father is a practicing lawyer who went to Ole Miss Law School and graduated in 1961. I haven’t considered him much of a resource due to the changed role of technology in that intervening period.

I mentioned two conversations I’ve had with friends who are already in law programs across the country and clarified that they gave excellent advice. I repeated your recommendation that you ask any student giving bad advice or shortcuts about their GPA to help evaluate its validity.

Some time later my dad started a sentence, “What you need to know about law school is …”  When he finished I said, “Hey dad, that sounds like that really worked for you! May I ask what your GPA was?”

I’ll be listening to his fatherly advice, despite his C+/B- grade point average.  🙂  He’s more convinced than ever that repeating “You’ll go to law school and become a lawyer” beginning at the cradle was a good idea.

Love it.  Seriously, folks, I was just looking at a law school page where an incoming student was asking for advice on a specific topic.  The best answers came from the top students.  Most people will make it through law school.  If your goal is higher than that, carefully sift through all advice, from students, professors and, yes, even dads.

Legal Trivia Question: Largest Arrest in U.S. History

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Just as doctors need patients, lawyers need clients.  One can surmise that local criminal defense lawyers got plenty of business during the largest mass arrest in U.S. history.  How many people were arrested and where did it occur?

  1. 140 in Peoria, Illinois
  2. 1500 in Boston, Massachusetts
  3. 12,000 in Washington, D.C.
  4. 17,500 in Los Angeles, California

ANSWER: In May 1971, more than 500,000 anti-Vietnam War protesters descended on Washington, D.C. with the intention of shutting down the federal government by blocking the streets.  As of that date, 45,000 American soldiers had died in Vietnam and more than 250,000 troops were still stationed there.  At least 12,000 protesters were arrested from May 3 through May 5, including Daniel Ellsberg.

Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst, had helped compile a report on the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from 1945–68 for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.  The study, which became known as the “Pentagon Papers,” exposed controversial, previously hidden truths about the scope and purpose of U.S. participation in the Vietnam War.  Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, which began publishing them in installments.

The Nixon administration sued for an injunction, which resulted in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), where the Court ruled in favor of the newspaper by a 6-3 vote, a major victory in troubled times for the First Amendment right to free speech and a free press.  Publication of the Pentagon Papers helped turn the tide of public opinion against the war.  It took until June 2011, forty years to the day from the original publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times, before the U.S. government officially declassified and released the papers.

The answer, therefore, is C.

Law Teacher Has Low Opinion of Legal Profession

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–From Tony Arsenault, Laval University (Quebec), Date of event: Spring 2013

One of my friends took Legal Philosophy, a class whose teacher is known as a bit of a jerk and a little dismissive of lawyering as a profession.

They were discussing how to write the essay that was to be their final exam. Someone in the class asked: “Should we consider that the essay’s intended readers have any knowledge of law at all?”

The teacher said that they should write the essay as if a member of the Bar would read it.

The student drew a logical conclusion and asked if that meant the exam-takers should assume the readers were knowledgeable about law.

The teacher answered: “No. You should write as if your audience doesn’t know anything about law, doesn’t care about law and is probably intoxicated on various substances to boot.”

No Socratic Method to Liven Up Class? No Problem. Use Sex.

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–Law School Story from Tony Arseneault, Université Laval’s Faculty of Law (Quebec, Canada), Date of event: 2011

In 2011, I was at my first session at Université Laval’s Faculty of Law, when I had the pleasure to meet the teacher that changed my perception of constitutional law forever: Patrick Taillon.

I come from the province of Quebec, Canada. As you may or may not know, Quebec is a civil law (French law) province when it comes to private law, and common law (English law) when it comes to public law. Essentially, all subjects like Contracts, Civil Liability or Property Law are in the realm of civil law, with everything that entails.

Since these classes are based around the mastery of the Civil Code, there is really no place for the Socratic method. Classes are taught for the most part with long lectures and minimal student intervention. This way of teaching law, common in purely civilist countries, bleeds over to the teaching of common law subjects. That means there is also no Socratic method in our common law classes, like Constitutional Law.

Thus, since teachers can’t entertain themselves at our expense through Socratic dialogues, and since teaching law in the civilist manner is, frankly, pretty boring, some of them choose to go the other way around: they entertain us.

Mr. Taillon has a pretty … unique way to do that for such a learned legal scholar. He laced his classes with sexual references to drive home points in a memorable way.

Two examples:

—Trying to teach us about the separation of powers (which is much less defined in Canada than it is in the United States) and checks and balances, his explanation went like this: “Essentially, the three branches are brothers and sisters and they have an incestuous triangle going on. They screw each other all the time.”

—Teaching us about article 56.1 of the Canada Elections Act, a disposition that removes the power from the Governor General to choose the date of the elections while saying that nothing in the article removes power from the GG: “This is like a rapist yelling ‘THIS IS NOT A RAPE’ while he’s doing it.”

All the while, he kept telling us what a “crappy country” we live in, because a huge part of the Constitution is unwritten and how our constitutional system is “done very badly” and “makes no sense.”

To this day, I only have to remember the sexual innuendo of the class to access everything he taught in class, filed neatly in a mental drawer. His enthusiasm for the subject is contagious. He always gave us a ton of laughs in a subject that really isn’t straightforward. He made me decide to focus more on Constitutional Law in the future.

Backfiring Joke in Corporations Leads to BFFs

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–Law School Story from Thomas Walk, Wake Forest University School of Law, Date of event: fall 1979

Our Corporations professor had the annoying habit of ending a lot of his sentences with the phrase “All that jazz.”

Midway through the semester, my classmate who sat immediately to the left came to class with a notepad she bought at the mall. It had musical notes floating around the pages and the “All That Jazz” phrase.  She wandered to the front of the classroom before the prof arrived and put the pad on his rostrum.

The professor walked in, examined the pad with a confused look, and laid it to one side.

Later that day I was walking through the hall and saw the All That Jazz pad lying on a couch. I picked it up.

The next day of class my classmate found in her chair the pad with the following message I printed on the top sheet:

“Ms. Jones (named changed to protect the victim), please see me after class. Professor Telly.”

I let her suffer in fear for a few minutes before I confessed I was the culprit and that she had not been busted by our prof. To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart, that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Marine Toughs Out Socratic Exchange with Hair-Drying Excuse

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From Tom Walk, Wake Forest University College of Law, Date of event: circa 1980

One of my classmates was in a Marine Corps program and kept his hair in a buzz-cut. One day our Trusts professor called on him to recite a case. After about 30 seconds it was clear that the student had not read the case.

The prof stopped him and said “You are not prepared today, are you”? He responded “I’m sorry, Professor. I washed my hair last night and had to blow it dry.” The sheer ludicrousness of the answer left the professor just shaking his head as the rest of us rolled in the floor laughing.

Kid Figures Out Torts, Wants Dad to Explain Why Casebook Is So Long

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–From David Barman, Florida International University College of Law, Date of event: circa 2005

My son saw my first-year law school casebooks and picked up my Torts book. His first comment was: “Twelve hundred pages. That’s more than Harry Potter!”

Then he asked me, “What is Torts?” He’s a bright boy, but he is only nine. I asked him: “If you park your bike on the sidewalk, and a man hits your bike with a car, who did something wrong?” He said the man with the car. I asked why. My son answered “Because I’m allowed to put my bike on the sidewalk, but he isn’t allowed to drive on the sidewalk.” I said “Correct.”

Then I asked him: “Does the man in the car have to pay for the bike?” My son said yes. Then I said, “What if you get off your bike on the street and you leave it there just for a minute, and a man in a car hits it?” My son said, “It’s my fault.” I asked why, and he said,  “Because I shouldn’t have left it in the street.”

Then I asked him if the man in the car has to pay for the bike. My son answered, “No.” I asked him why and he repeated, “Because I shouldn’t have left it in the street.”

I told him good job, that’s what Torts is. He said, “Is that it?” I told him “Yes.” Then he looked real confused and said, “Then why does the book have twelve hundred pages?”

 

Thunder Saves Student in Labor Law

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–From Jerry E. Stephens, University of Kansas School of Law, Date of event: Spring 1975

I had labor law at the University of Kansas under Professor Ray Goetz in the mid 1970s. Goetz was a truly outstanding teacher. He was able to refer to some momentous labor arbitration—particularly involving major league baseball—to spice up his lectures. But Ray Goetz could also be intimidating, particularly when he would look over the top of his reading glasses at students giving inane answers and comments.

He did have one redeeming virtue: he would call students for class recitation in classroom seating order. That gave students a rough estimate of the likelihood of being called on that class day and the next, and saved on some class preparation at times.

As it happened one rainy Saturday morning, the majority of those ahead of me skipped class. That left only two classmates ahead of me for class recitation that day. Neither did very well and Goetz was getting particularly exasperated.

Then he called on unprepared me. Just as I opened my mouth to answer there was a huge clap of thunder. Goetz probably sensed that I was unprepared. He looked directly at me and said that the thunder might have been the best answer I was going to muster that day. So he skipped me and turned to the next student in the row, who was much better prepared than I was.

 

Time Is On My Side

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–From Bert Jones, University of Oklahoma College of Law, Date of event: 1956

Your Palsgraf piece in the ABA Journal took me back to my Torts I class at the University of Oklahoma in 1956. When we got to THE CASE, we stayed on it for what seemed like a very long time. One day the professor, Harold Wren (one of the best teachers I ever had at any level), commented that the case had obviously had considerable influence nationwide. He began discussing a Wisconsin case as an example of how courts were following what Cardozo and Andrews had done. I sort of blurted out “Couldn’t have influenced Wisconsin.”

Whereupon Professor Wren had me rise and asked “Why not, Mr. Jones?” I said, “Well, sir, Palsgraf was decided in 1928 and the Wisconsin case you mentioned was in 1924.” He quickly checked his notes, turned and made a large number 1 on the blackboard, turned back and said, “One for you, Mr. Jones.” Thankfully, he did so with a smile!

Was the Plaintiff in Hawkins v. McGee Master of His Domain?

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–From Jon Avery, Georgia State University College of Law, Date of event: 2006

I, like every other 1L, got to take Contracts. And, like every other 1L in Contracts, we studied Hawkins v. McGee, aka the “hairy hand case.”

Someone asked the professor, “How do we know it was the surgery that caused the palm of the hand to be hairy? The guy could have genes that gave him a hairy palm, right?”

The professor responded, rhetorically, by asking, “What is the first thing we should ask when trying to determine whether the surgery caused the hairy palm?” The professor apparently was trying to get the student to think about what part of the body the skin was taken from to graft to the palm.

The inquiring student sat open-mouthed, unable to think of an explanation when someone in the back piped up: “Was he blind, too?”