Law School: You Got Served

 So tomorrow is a big day for me.  After a year’s respite in the Arts department, I return to Law School.  This morning I wandered into the kitchen clutching a 1000 page textbook called Land Law by someone called Butt (which incidentally is where I’d rather shove this book than read it).  My mother smiled and tried to reassure me.

  ”Look at it this way – you only have two years to go!”

  The cyanide tooth option is looking pretty good right now.  But, I am nothing if not an optimist.  So in the hope of inspiring myself, I called a lifeline – one of my favorite law friends, who is almost completely not-crazy (although her eye does occasionally twitch when she’s studying for exams).  Expecting that reminding myself of the many friends I’ve made over the years in the grips of contracts and torts, I asked her if she was looking forward to going back to law.  

“We have like 127 pages of reading to do for the first class, so we’re probably going to be behind as of the first day.”

That didn’t quite do the trick.  So, I turned to another important ally in my attempt to procure a law degree without becoming a drug-addled, caffeinated, twitchy freak: Facebook.  

The I’ve Thought About Dropping Out of Law School At Least Ten Times Today group has always given me a laugh during those late nights in the library, so I decided to revisit those forums discussing such scintillating topics as: “Have you brought up the dysfunction of law school with professors?”, “Back-up Plans”, and my personal favorite: “arson”. I am sincerely hoping that they are talking about the offense and not planning to commit arson any time soon.  

Scrolling through the posts under “Addictions I picked up in law school to help me cope”, it occurred to me that there is something profoundly twisted about shoving a hundred toweringly ambitious, competitive, and high-achieving people in one building.  Surely there is some kind of critical mass of insanity that just causes the world to implode if it is met.  Take some of the following posts, for example:

My small section hit the bars after our first exam was done. One of my friends (who I hope doesn’t mind my telling this story, if he’s reading this) came along and he wasn’t drinking. Can’t, because of all the meds he’s on to counteract the pummeling law school is giving his brain and body. The rest of us were merrily boozing it up. I told my friend that his meds are a coping mechanism-precedent, while booze, for the rest of us, is a coping mechanism-subsequent. Yes, we’d just finished our contracts exam.

So it is not the alcohol abuse that throws me as it is the threats of personal injury, such as this upbeat fellow, whose coping mechanism consists of:

Starving myself for many hours a day.

As well as the more balanced approach:

I take adderall daily…..and smoke weed nightly. It is the best way to get my appetite back, and fall asleep after drinking coffee all day.

Riiiight.  To that person I simply endorse the highly therapeutic effects of a Big Mac and say no more.  To be honest, my bigger peeve is this sort of person:

 

Doing things I would normally hate to do just to see if I can do them. Making sure I kick all of my fellow students’ asses in tutorials by preparing far too much and not allowing there to ever be a silence

  It’s one thing abusing yourself, but making the rest of us listen to your over-zealous questions is just cruel.  I personally favor more expansive approach of this little law school-er:

Coffee. Coffee to the point where I live on it for three days without actually eating solid food. Coffee to the point where the people in the campus coffeeshop know me by name and start getting my order ready for me while I’m walking through the door. I’m practically paying rent on a couch in there. By the end of this semester I think I’ll own shares in the place.

Pot. Screw short-term memory loss. Maybe not an addiction, but I’ll get high a couple times a week. Never before class, though. I have my standards.

And sex. With my professor.

  See – what’s nice about that is that everyone wins: the children of the coffee shop owner who are being put through school, the friendly, neighborhood doobie-seller, and most of all, the hard-working professor.  This girl is just a class act.

  So basically, it leaves me wondering: is it worth it?

 

The future father of my children

  And so I rummage through my mind and consider why it is we go through the stress and time.  Certainly, some people are driven by the competition of it all.  A recent Sydney Law Review appointee was speaking sincerely about the calibre of his friends who have also been appointed.  

  ”It will be so nice to work closely with your friends.”

  ”Yes, it will,” he said contemplatively.  ”Before the blood-bath starts and we try to kill each other for the two High Distinctions.”

  Of course, we are all competing for different things.  For those hoping to study at higher levels, those grades are vital for future scholarships.  But even those of us who want to work in the law have an acute awareness that our employers will put us on the rejection pile if our grades aren’t up to standard.  Add to that particular stress the necessity of doing x-number of extra-curricular activities in order to make ourselves stand out to those recruiters, judges, barristers, partners, professors that we one day hope to impress – one application among one hundred other law school graduates.  

  So yes, the competition can be stimulating.  But it also obscures the reason that most of us want to go to law school in the first place: because however naive it may be, we think that the law is a noble profession – an area of academics that is worthy of our neurons (and at times our sanity).  And so I choose to draw inspiration from the Ben Sauls of the world who teach law between brokering peace in the Middle East.  Or the Geoffrey Robertsons of the world, who still find time to be charming in between fighting for justice as a United Nations judge and a world-class barrister.  I suppose that in an ideal world, we would franticly study not because we hope that one day our salaries will be so obscene that it will actually make you want to vomit, but because we have open to us the opportunity to access knowledge that has the potential to change the world. 

  I hope that I don’t forget these musings tomorrow, when I have my first of what will undoubtedly be five coffees.  Yes.  Caffeine is my coping mechanism.  So sue me.