How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School

Kathryne M. Young

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781503605688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Legal Education
• Index: Law

Each year, over 40, 000 new students enter America's law schools. Each new crop experiences startlingly high rates of depression, anxiety, fatigue, and dissatisfaction. Kathryne M. Young was one of those disgruntled law students. After finishing law school (and a PhD), she set out to learn more about the law school experience and how to improve it for future students. Young conducted one of the most ambitious studies of law students ever undertaken, charting the experiences of over 1000 law students from over 100 different law schools, along with hundreds of alumni, dropouts, law professors, and more.

How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School is smart, compelling, and highly readable. Combining her own observations and experiences with the results of her study and the latest sociological research on law schools, Young offers a very different take from previous books about law school survival. Instead of assuming her readers should all aspire to law-review-and-big-firm notions of success, Young teaches students how to approach law school on their own terms: how to tune out the drumbeat of oppressive expectations and conventional wisdom to create a new breed of law school experience altogether.

Young provides readers with practical tools for finding focus, happiness, and a sense of purpose while facing the seemingly endless onslaught of problems law school presents daily. This book is an indispensable companion for today's law students, prospective law students, and anyone who cares about making law students' lives better. Bursting with warmth, realism, and a touch of firebrand wit, How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School equips law students with much-needed wisdom for thriving during those three crucial years.

PART I

Getting a Handle on Your Situation

1

YOU ARE NOT ALONE

LET’S ACKNOWLEDGE THAT LAW SCHOOL KIND OF SUCKS

If you hate law school and find it difficult for a whole host of reasons, academic and otherwise, you are not alone. Much of the time, law school sucks. Sure, it has its moments—some riveting professors, some fascinating ideas, and the Hairy Hand case. But facts are facts, and right now, the facts of your life likely include two or more of the following:

• You often feel like you are back in high school, down to the lockers and gossip.

• At least a few of your professors—maybe all of them—employ the Socratic method, which instills in you copious amounts of fear, loathing, and/or resentment.

• You have little or no free time.

• You have more debt than you can wrap your head around.

• Some of your peers are the most irritating people you have ever met.

• You would like to get decent grades, but cannot force yourself to slog through your eye-glazingly dull casebooks.

• Reading has never taken you this long before, and you are starting to wonder whether there is something wrong with you, or whether law school is actually making you less intelligent.

• Spending so much time staring at books and your computer screen makes your back and neck hurt. Your eyesight has worsened. You are developing a preternatural understanding of the phrase “old before your time.”

I am not listing these facts to make you feel bad, but to confirm that despite your off-and-on feelings to the contrary, you are neither crazy nor alone. There are many things in law school that merit annoyance and displeasure. If you experience annoyance or displeasure, there is no need to feel guilty or inferior about it.

Not only is it totally normal to hate law school a good deal of the time, but hating big chunks of law school does not mean you will hate legal practice. Sure, you might hate legal practice—more on that later—but practice is sufficiently removed from law school training that you should not equate hating law school to hating law.

The reason I am making such a big deal about law school’s propensity for inducing discontent is that it is easy to get trapped in the law school vortex and start seeing everything through law school’s lens. Your professors become cult personalities you need to impress, your lackluster grades confirm that you were never that smart to begin with, and you stress over every decision from skipping law prom to splitting your summers. This kind of obsession is neither healthy nor necessary.

If law school sucks, and you see everything from within the law school bubble, then other things in your life become dysmorphically stressful. With an outlook like that, it is no wonder so many law students are disgruntled, sleepless bundles of anxiety. This whole “law school vortex” phenomenon is one of the reasons law school is such an effective breeding ground for depression (more on that in Chapter 11). But you need not fall prey. You can be in law school without being of law school. You can get what you came for and hang onto enough happiness to see yourself through to the end. That, my friend, is the point of this book.

Exercise: Make a chart with three columns like the one shown here. In the first column, write something about law school that you dislike. In the second column, write how it makes you feel (I know this seems cheesy, but do it). In the third column, write about whether this hated thing existed in your life before law school. I have filled in one row as an example; you fill in the rest.

1. Look for patterns in the second column. Do you hate things that make you feel unintelligent? That make you feel insecure? That bore you? For some reason, these aspects of law school are poking at the unresolved crap floating around in your skull. That’s okay—we’re all carrying around unresolved crap. The trick is identifying it and seeing how various aspects of your law school life affect and provoke it.

2. Look at the third column. I’m guessing most of the things you listed were not issues for you before law school, right? That’s because the pre–law school version of yourself probably had more autonomy and interacted with a wider variety of personality types. This will likely be true after law school as well. In the grand scheme of your life, law school is the aberration, not the norm. Overall, your life does not suck, and after these three years, you will never have to deal with 80 percent of the things you find so unpleasant. Ideally, this is a reassuring—if not altogether revelatory—piece of news.

IT IS NORMAL TO FEEL LIKE THE WORKLOAD IS IMPOSSIBLE

Your law school workload may be the biggest workload you have ever had, and if you are like most students, it feels like a bigger one than you can handle.*¹ I hate it when law students complain about the workload and people respond, “Hey, welcome to the profession.” Don’t get me wrong—being a lawyer is a huge amount of work, and in some ways, law school is great preparation. But when students lament the workload, they are usually lamenting the stress caused by the combination of workload size, type, and environment—in other words, a confluence of factors, only one of which is the sheer amount of work.

Why is law school so stressful? For one, even if you had a hefty workload as an undergraduate, there were deadlines along the way. You turned in papers or problem sets and studied for quizzes or midterms. For each intense burst of learning or work, you had to show something for it. But in most law school classes, nothing is due until the final. Sure, there is assigned reading, but you do not turn anything in. You are not accountable, except during cold calls, and even if you ace those, in most classes it does not help your grade. The disconnection between your day-to-day preparation and traditional outcome measures feels disconcerting. It is not necessarily the amount of stress that impedes people’s happiness in law school; the types and causes of stress are the bigger problem.¹

In addition to a lack of gold stars for demonstrating your knowledge and work ethic as you progress, most law school courses provide no helpful feedback before the final. As an undergraduate (and in the workplace), your demonstrations of skill or knowledge are usually assessed by people with expertise. They offer feedback, which allows you to recalibrate. Not so in law school. Did you do well when you were called on last Thursday? Who knows. No matter how you perform, the professor will not say anything, your friends will encourage you, and a few assholes will shoot you glassy, judgmental looks. Are you applying the Administrative Procedure Act correctly? Who knows. You will be offered no chance to have your practice answers critiqued. This all leads to constant uncertainty and perceived (and actual) lack of control, which causes more stress.

By most measures, the usual delayed assessment, one-final-at-the-end method of law school evaluation is lousy pedagogy. It makes you feel like you are laboring in a vacuum. Unless you have worked on a huge solo project, like writing a novel, you may never have experienced such an untethered feeling. Imagine if you began at a company and your boss piled your desk with work and said, “I’ll check back in with you in four months.” That would be nuts—it would risk setting you up for failure and give you no guidance for improving. But that’s exactly what’s done to law students.

Still, until you can opt out of classes that use teaching methods you do not like, you will need to adapt. I’ll talk more about how to do this, but for now, just know that it is normal to feel like you are trying to sip from a fire hose that’s turned on at full blast.

YOU ARE NOT THE CRAZY ONE

“There was a red button on the wall labeled EMERGENCY, but no button labeled BEWILDERMENT.”

Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things

Law school and high school have an unsettling amount in common. You are assigned a locker, gossip spreads like the flu, and you use honorifics to address your superiors. Everyone chuckles about the infantilizing weirdness, but most of your peers eventually settle into it—even seem to embrace it. I remember feeling like a mouse that had been dropped from a great height and was lying stunned, trying to figure out what had happened. Was everyone from a completely different universe? Why were they acting like it was okay when a professor verbally abused a student? Why were people snickering and instant messaging each other when another section member had trouble fielding questions in Torts? Who were these people?

The sense that I had landed on the wrong planet was compounded by a feeling that I was not appropriately internalizing the significance of what seemed to be the Big Goals of Law School: firm jobs, law review membership, and associated desiderata. I didn’t think these things were bad—I just didn’t understand why we were supposed to want them. It was strange to see people I knew and liked become so obsessed over things that, weeks earlier, they might not have known existed.*² Classmates I considered sensible began spending inordinate amounts of time on Vault.com. I found a few comrades who felt similarly unsettled, which helped a lot. But I think most of us were secretly ashamed, assuming something was wrong with us for not “getting” it.

As law school progressed, more people seemed to become consumed by its goals, norms, and idiosyncrasies. They gossiped about professors, speculated about law review elections, and obsessed over who got which clerkships. I’m not suggesting that these aren’t valid things to think about—they are—but hearing only about these things depressed me. I was more interested in discussing the merits of the substantive law. Was anyone else bothered by DeShaney v. Winnebago? Did social class or political affiliation determine how people reacted to Kelo v. New London? For this kind of conversation, I had no idea where to look.

After a while, I decided there was something wrong with me. Maybe law school was a poor fit. Maybe I was not smart enough. Maybe I was not learning to think like a lawyer. Maybe my self-esteem could not handle grades below an A. Eventually—and later than I should have—I realized that none of these things was true. I just didn’t fit in. I was too absurd, too introverted, too quirky, too sullen, too silly, too obsessed with social justice, and too interested in non–law school pursuits for law school to fit me like a glove. And not only was all that true, but (1) it was still okay that I was in law school, and (2) many of my classmates were quietly experiencing something similar.

YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO FEELS OUT OF PLACE

You may think you are the only 1L who hasn’t done a lick of reading since the semester started, or the only one in your class who is outraged by experiencing constant sexism or racism, or the only 3L who still has to consult a law dictionary, or the only one who doesn’t want to practice, or the only depressive, or the only one who isn’t adapting, or the only one who loves the substance of the law, or the only one who hates it. You are wrong. All around you, your classmates are suffering from debilitating anxiety, considering dropping out, and having personal crises. But law students work fervently to hide things they fear others will perceive as weaknesses, which makes everyone feel more alone than they really are.

A law student’s misery can have manifold causes. I asked law students and alums to name their biggest source of law school stress. Here are the most commonly recurring themes:*³

Not fitting in socially

• Feeling like I need to pretend to be someone else in order to not be totally ostracized.

• The most stress I’ve faced is finding frie...