Why I wnat 2 go 2 law skool, by ME

In a couple of posts down, citizen touchmymonkey asks me why I want to go to law school. He isn't the first; other citizens have asked me the same question. So I think it's time that I directly address their questions in a way I have yet to do.

That my motives are ambiguous is not surprising. I haven't posted my reasons here much, if at all, and since dropping my personal study of the law (in preparation for actual law school, not wanting to develop bad (work-intensive) habits), I haven't had many opportunities to demonstrate, through my posts, my subject-interest in the law. And so, to my casual readers and observers, it would appear that my primary interests are in fields other than the law. They've suggested that, should I choose to return to school, I ought to do so for some other manner of graduate degree. Such suggestions pick up on an important rationale I have for returning to law school, but I have other reasons which their suggestions do not sufficiently address.



1. I have a compelling interest in issues defined and mediated by the law. My semi-professional career as a musician, which began while I was still a student, frequently brought up questions of contract, intellectual property, and labor law. In attempting to answer these questions on a personal basis, within the context of my own life, I realized that they often reverberated with broader social issues. My relationship with the union was circumscribed by the provisions of the NLRA; my right to my music performances as a student was defined by the 1976 Copyright Act; whether the University could force me to sign away my right to those music performances as a condition of being allowed to participate in a University ensemble would be an issue (I believe) of contract law. Each of my personal dilemmas reflected larger national issues. Thus: the power of the NLRA and unions is constantly being eroded by business-friendly legislation and simple corruption on the part of employers; copyright law is constantly being re-interpreted to favor big-money interests with large intellectual property holdings and imaginative lawyers; mandatory arbitration is changing the landscape of dispute resolution between employers and employees, producers and consumers, and (potentially) schools and students, with detrimental effects for (not surprisingly) the common individual.

Yet I found myself, in the context of my own life, powerless and unable to meaningfully protest. I could not know, for example, whether the mandatory waiver forced on me by the university was an appropriate or allowable thing for them to do. I didn't know how to set my objection; I didn't know on what ground I could stand. As an employee, I find myself continually unable to speak authoritatively about what my employer can or cannot do, or what recourse might be available, for example, when my employer forces me to sign up for a 401(k) plan. I am, in other words, blown in the wind of circumstance; and this is not a desirous situation in which to be.

So I went about remedying my ignorance. But I was not satisfied with ACLU and EFF pocket-cards outlining a basic distillation of the law -- I felt that I needed to examine the law, itself. I began studying the law of intellectual property independently long before I decided that it might make sense for me to pursue it as a career. I'd begun looking into pilfering texts for various introductory law courses, for my own independent study. It wasn't until a normal afternoon chat with a friend, when I was discussing some of the alarming trends in copyright law, who, claiming that she'd never heard me speak so passionately about anything else, including music, suggested that I consider actually going to law school. And I realized that she was absolutely right. I hadn't shown this kind of compelling, enduring interest in anything else before, with the possible exception of simply playing my oboe (which I would characterize as more driven by habit than passion).

2. I find the actual substance of the law engaging. Most people tend to avoid reading so-called "legalese" -- I actually enjoy reading it. Even law students themselves often go on and on about how boring this or that subject matter is. I don't mean to say that my preponderance for reading end-user licensing agreements or sweepstakes rules and conditions uniquely qualifies me for the study of the law -- the "legalese" I'm referring to is the stuff of cases, of statutes, of regulations, and even of scholarly work. The precision of the language draws me in -- its ambiguity and its slipperiness keeps me reading. In statutes and regulations, where the emphasis is on clarity and not explication, the very precision required by good law results in a fascinating cadential music and rhythm. It reminds one of the rhetorical tricks of expansion used by epic poets of pre-literate societies.

The precise language of statutes also results in significant challenges to understanding. Particularly noteworthy in my admittedly limited experience was my encounter with the fair-use restrictions placed on the re-broadcast of television programs. What you can re-broadcast, and where you can re-broadcast it, is an extraordinarily complicated issue, one that's written into the U.S. Code (as opposed to hashed out in the courts); it is so because the law attempts to preserve certain categorical exemptions (such as non-profit use by churches and schools) as well as certain limited private, for-profit uses (such as the transmission of broadcasts within an eating establishment), while carving out a big enough space for private enterprise to promote the creation of new broadcasts, all set in the context of the FCC's regulatory framework for the airwaves. It took me some time to understand the basic outline of the law, but coming to that understanding was itself an enjoyable and engaging experience.

3. I'd like to return to school, but with the proviso that the school I "go back to" be one of high-enough academic standards that I'd be challenged, while being large and diverse enough to satisfy my many curiosities. This one is probably the most obvious and will require the least elucidation, because it's written all over my journal; indeed, it is this very motivation which seems to prompt most LJ queries as to my purposes.

But there are sub-reasons for choosing law school, under this rubric, as opposed to some other school for, say, linguistics or philosophy.

a. Law school will be easier to get into. Law programs are graduate programs which accommodate a wide variety of academic backgrounds which base their admissions on two primary metrics: undergraduate GPA and the LSAT. My undergraduate GPA, re-calculated by the LSAC, is 4.11. My LSAT scores generally have not been lower than 170 on any of the several timed, simulated practice tests I've taken, and in many cases have been significantly higher than that. I have good reason to believe that these numbers will seriously recommend me to most programs to which I plan to apply; in all but a handful of the most selective schools in the country, they very nearly seem to guarantee admission.

Contrast this with a hypothetical attempt to apply to the same schools, but for some other graduate program. I could not, in the first place, be likely to expect admission to any doctoral program outside of music performance; in the humanities, which seem to be where my various interests are clustered, it seems unlikely even that I could convincingly argue for my admission to a Masters program in a field of interest, since my undergraduate work was almost entirely focused on music-specific fields. I took one philosophy course -- in ethics -- during my entire academic career. No linguistics. An introductory anthropology course. My interest in semiotics is entirely on an amateur-basis and self-taught. The only way I could possibly argue for my admission into a graduate program other than music performance, with my current state of education, would be if I begin to publish a substantial amount of high-quality work. And yeah, that's not going to happen any time soon.

So the only feasible alternative to going to law school, while still returning to school, would be to return to school as an undergraduate. While my stats are within reach of the stats of the top applicants to law schools like Harvard and Yale, it's far from clear that an attempt to enter such schools as an undergraduate would meet with similarly-ensured success. Not only would competition be greater and fiercer, but in terms of my own undergraduate exam-numbers, I would be seriously lagging behind. But besides, the most prudent thing for me to do, if I were going to return to school, would be to return to my Alma Mater, which, while it wouldn't be the best school into which I could probably two-step, would at least retain a substantial number of my undergraduate credits and allow me to apply them to a second undergraduate degree. In the year or two I would spend finishing up this secondary degree, I could begin to groom the sorts of things I'd need to get into a top graduate school in whatever subject area I'd pursue there. In essence, I'd be starting all over, which has its advantages, but puts my entry into the professional world (of loan-repayment competency) that much later.

b. Given the previous sub-reason, law school would give me a better opportunity for pursuing my academic interests in a serious way, while enabling more productive networking amongst like-minded individuals. The characteristic feature which unifies most of my "dream schools" is that the law schools are themselves part of significant, larger universities with a broad student body and academic program. Consequently, many of them also offer a cross-disciplinary option outside of dual-degree programs (none of which interest me anyway). Students attending Harvard's or NYU's law school, for example, have the option of taking courses outside the law school. This would permit me to pursue some of my non-law interests, or even to establish some new ones (I would love to learn Chinese, for example, because the future of the law in this country will inevitably become international, and because China will likely become a significant trade partner/competitor in the several decades to come). I similarly expect to avail myself of non-law-related communities and student organizations, which I expect to be of higher caliber on campuses like NYU and Harvard, at least, than they are on campuses throughout the midwest, UNL in particular. In addition to this, most of the schools to which I will be applying will be settled in major metropolitan areas, even further expanding my social and activist options. While there are many major midwestern universities into which I could probably be admitted as an undergraduate, the social environments in which they rest will likely be very similar to the one with which I am already familiar, at UNL, and thus unhelpful when it comes to setting the roots of what I hope to be an influential career.

These are the major three reasons I feel that I am prepared and suited for the study of the law. But touchmymonkey inveighs against the possibility that I should "lose [my] soul". So I should probably address some of the negative expectations of the law-school plan; these possibilities contribute a dis-utility that I cannot properly ignore.

-1. Law school will effect the "losing of one's soul". I see no problem in this, metaphysically, because I have no soul to begin with. While this is not a serious response, it does touch on the truth.

It is not for nothing that I often refer to and think of myself as a "robot". While I am, of course, not a robot, it is true that I have difficulty understanding what is meant when one speaks of "wants", "desires", "dreams", or even "fun". For me, there is the goal worth attaining, and the goal not worth attaining; life's decisions are made with such goals in mind. Which goals to choose is largely an arbitrary process; generally I aim toward consistency between goals. But there is no inherent value of one goal over another, except perhaps in that I tend to value goals including some measure of "accomplishment" more than goals which focus on "constancy", or the status quo. Generally, the goal is simply something to keep myself occupied, so long as I breathe. It makes little difference what that goal should be, although it helps that the goal not be boring.

This strange diversion actually means to address the warning: because how is it that law school students "lose their soul"? In what ways is it damaging? I would speculate that many of the ways that law school is purported to be harmful for its students have to do with those students' own goals, which generally (as it happens with most humans) include some measure of "fun" or "companionship". By being unable to pursue these goals they nevertheless maintain while attending law school, such students find their psyches misshapen and their actions spiteful. They become emptied shadows of real human beings -- soulless, in other words. Alternatively, students can go into law school with goals enough in agreement with going to law school that this kind of sapping does not occur; it could be said that they become "soulless" insofar as the law school makes them into unfeeling, unthinking machines of the law, rewarded by success and desirous of triumph. They are not "soulless" in the first sense, because this is what they wanted to become; they are soulless, rather, in that they differ from the general population, which is not so single-mindedly bent on such matters -- or rather, it is the general population which is single-mindedly bent on goals of little consequence, like "fun" or "companiaonship". It should be obvious by now this latter sense of "soullessness" poses no threat to me, as well, but for a different reason -- I have already reached this state.

-2. If you go to a law school, you should go to the best one you can get into. But the best school you can get into will likely not offer you much in the way of scholarships. Therefore you will be forced to take out significant student loans, which will further compel you to take jobs that you don't want, which will cause suffering in the long term. A legitimate contention, but one made absent any knowledge of my actual current situation. I do not now work 70-hour weeks, but my work is no more mundane than the sort of work the 70-hour-a-week associates working for BigLaw seem to be doing. If we take into consideration the amount of time I typically spend away from my home, minus any time I might be said to be doing something "fun" in the conventional sense (like hanging out with friends, going to movies, etc.), it would seem that my "work" keeps me occupied well in excess of the hours spent by grumbling, red-eyed associates. While my current situation admittedly allows for a great deal of latitude in what I atually do, and when, the time-occupation itself does not seem to be a crushing weight on me now, nor was it so necessarily when I was occupied most waking hours of the day either working or practicing or working on reeds. This answer, as you can see, ties in well with -1., above; part of my ability to do this stems from the parallel direction of my goals with the circumstances in which I find myself. I expect that, supposing I should ever become an associate at some BigLaw firm, I will have the mental tools necessary to deal with the significant demands placed upon me.

Those are the two most significant drawbacks I can think of presently. A complete analysis would also consider the dis-utility of staying in my current situation, indefinitely, but by now I've gone on long enough. I hope it's somehwat answered your question, touchmymonkey.