I have to say, I found my first year of law school (at Duke — go Blue Devils!) like getting off the plane after a twenty-four trip to South Africa: profoundly disorienting.   Current 1Ls, I hope your orientation group was better than mine (I called my Mom and cried), I hope that you understand your reading somewhat, and I hope that you have gone out a least once with the one nice person in your orientation group.  So, now that stuff is over, what else do you need to know?

I divide this up into two sections:  How to Orient Yourself as a Human and How to Orient Yourself as a Law Student.

How to Orient Yourself as a Human

1.    It gets better.  Well, kind of better, in a relative sense of the word:  You will understand what your teachers are saying at some point.   You will know how to write a legal memorandum well.  You will be able to speak clearly when a judge is impatiently looking at you.   It may not happen your first year, but it will happen.   

Kristin Scheuereman’s thoughtful post on legal education mirrors a debate that has broken out on the law blogs on the nature of legal education and its relationship to what lawyers really do. The critical stance is represented by a forthcoming piece in the South Carolina Law Review entitled Preaching What They Don’t Practice: Why Law Faculties’ Preoccupation with Impractical Scholarship and Devaluation of Practical Competencies Obstruct Reform in the Legal Academy.  The author, Brent Newton (an adjunct at Georgetown) argues that law schools are populated by faculty that have very little practice experience and are far more interested in theory and the more esoteric and sexy elements of the law than in the day to day practice that most of their students will be concerned with. (Even at schools like Harvard, most students do not go on to specialize in constitutional cases of the first impression or international regime change.) An elaboration of the critique is that most law faculty could not – because they never have – first chair a complicated civil case or corporate acquisition.

In response, the argument is that law school is not trade school and the extensive practice experience does not necessarily correlate – in fact may be inversely related to (because, among other things, one can no longer remember what it was “not to know”) – with the ability to teach. Those who have been absorbed with the law as it is may have a hard time engaging in scholarship about the law as it should be.

While I agree with Ed Fallone that Marquette does better than most at teaching skills and at reaching a the right balance between theory and practice, I think that we all can benefit from attending to the debate. Both perspectives have merit.