How hard is 1L (law school) for a Princeton graduate?
Suffice to say I have been humbled in law school
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A bit about me: I’m completing a J.D. at Cornell after a stint in tech. I graduated from Princeton in 2021 with a History degree and no aspirations to go to law school, or even a sense of what lawyers did. (How I pivoted is a story for another time.) I now write to demystify law school and the legal profession. Some past articles include: a recap of my 2023 application cycle, the essay that got me into NYU Law, and why I chose Cornell. Some future articles include: Financing law school, negotiating merit aid, and navigating court as a non-lawyer (pro se). I hope you’ll find something of use to you, and please reach out to allisoninwonderland@substack.com if you have anything to share after reading my posts.
Before I entered law school, the 1L year had almost a mythical status. A friend then at Yale Law School said, “Enjoy this summer, you’ll need to soak it up before 1L.” I couldn’t tell whether he, a graduate of Harvard and a brilliant mind, actually found 1L to be difficult or reacted to the fact that people generally found it difficult.
Some people choose not to attend law school because its academic difficulty is just another “minus” in the cost-benefit calculation. This is my attempt to describe in concrete terms how and in what way it is difficult.
1L is time-consuming, but not all-consuming. What is most daunting is the thoroughness with which you must learn the content and think through issues. What is most frustrating is the disconnect between classroom learning and the real job.
Time-consuming but not all-consuming
My class-to-homework ratio is 1 hour of class time to 2 hours of reading, with some variation from assignment to assignment. At 15 credits a week, this means that your combined class and work time is 45 hours. You should also review materials at the end of each week, so you can add any number of hours to that total.
Contrary to what one might imagine, no one is working all the time at law school. I have always had enough time to complete all my work and sleep 7 hours a night. This is in addition to a daily 1.5-hour commute, 2 hours each night to make dinner, and taking a weekly Sabbath, meaning I don’t work from 5pm Friday until 12pm Sunday. I participate fully in only one club.
My classmates, many of whom are not Ivy League graduates but from large state schools, don’t work all the time either. Many of them are much more involved in extracurriculars than I am, find time to party, host hours-long DND sessions, travel, and watch TV or read for leisure. Granted, some of them don’t read all the readings, but I know many who do.
My only caveat is that in order for the work not to all-consume even essential functions like sleep, you have to be disciplined. The readings can spill on into the night if you don’t sit down and determine to do them within a set time. I do have classmates who regularly sleep less than five hours a night.
The tables have turned
The aspect of law school I personally struggle with is not steering my own learning. I was a history major. I had way more pages to read per night— more than 100 pages per class then, versus 100 total a night now— so preparing for class consisted of gleaning what was most puzzling, important or interesting so I could present it during discussion. I could bring anything to the table. There was no right answer.
Learning the law, on the other hand, requires parsing what someone else (a judge) has written. You don’t decide what’s important. You absolutely do not add your own “twist.” You read many court “cases” and then work out a system of interlocking rules in your head. In exams, you are given a scenario and must decide what a court will say. Given you must work within a body of rules set by someone else, and with a scenario chosen by someone else, you have no idea what rules are most important. You need to know all of them. Correspondingly, there’s less leeway for neglecting important details.
This burden on accruing highly specific information may sound similar to history, but it is not quite the same. In the exam context, history is about building a narrative— the art of pulling on threads you find most important— or remembering specific facts. History says: “Here is one way of telling this story.” The law wants you to weigh all relevant rules against another, applied to the specific scenario on the paper before you. Law says: “Looked at this way, the court could decide it ‘like this’; looked at another way, it could decide it ‘like that.’” In that process, you want to consider every possible angle of attack.
You usually have one and only one assessment that determines your entire grade: your final exam. The thoroughness required can be mentally exhausting and put a lot of psychological pressure on exam preparation. In addition to the cognitive rigor, getting good grades hinges less on building relationships with teachers than what many “good students” are used to, since your final exam is graded blind. Students like me who did well in school by socializing with their teachers feel like fish out of water.
Your understanding of the law ages like fine wine
The law is pretty difficult to abstract to a classroom setting. You are trying to gloss, in about 100 hours of class and homework time, the highlights of a vastly complex subject that literally becomes “more perfect” the more it’s tested. If the system itself grows better with age, then so does any one person’s understanding. That is why older lawyers make so much money. They’ve seen it all.
In addition, you don’t get a lot of context clues when reading highly edited cases. For instance, we read a case where a brother, at the insistence of his sister, bought a piece of land from her because she was hurting for cash. He then discovered that the land had valuable timber, and so sold it for almost a hundred times the amount he bought it for. The sister then sued the brother for the increased value of the land.
Given that the sister could have gotten a survey of the land herself, that neither brother nor sister knew of the true value of the land until the brother bought it, and that he hadn’t pressured her to sell it, and that she had agreed to the price, do you think she should win or lose?
She won. The reasoning of the court was that the case before them contained an “inequality so strong, a man of common sense will exclaim at the inequality of it.” You only get a little glimpse of what was in the court’s mind. One sentence mentions that she was a widow with no means to make money, and he was already a successful businessman.
Some courts don’t even make their reasoning overt. A law student reading the penned opinion 40 years later misses crucial nuances that a litigator or a clerk, sitting in the courtroom, watching the arguments, looking at the poor widowed sister and the surly businessman brother, see. (A clerk is a judge’s apprentice.) This is what I mean by lacking context clues.
In this case, it seemed like the court just decided what it thought was most fair, then worked backwards to provide a reason. That is more common in the legal world than not. As verified by my own professor, judges work backwards from the result they want and then try to find a rule to encourage the same kind of behavior going forward. As a clerk testified, judges make a million decisions at their own discretion visible to no one, from allowing hearings so that a lawyer can further argue his point, to excluding evidence they find unnecessary to the trial. As a clinical professor said, her students often sit in on the proceedings of a court they are about to argue in, not only because it gives them a sense of what the judge is like, but also because the judge is charmed by such behavior, which makes the students more likely to win. A visiting judge admitted that when two lawyers are arguing vigorously in front of him, he will go with the lawyer he knows better.
If result and contextual clues, not overt rationale, is how courts make their decisions, then why do we spend so much time learning how to argue with rationale? There’s a degree of artifice seeking to perform well on exams when it isn’t necessarily what makes you a good lawyer.
But since good grades open doors, you participate in the law school ritual as a means to an end. This participation feels costly when it is 9:30pm and you need to finish one more 2-hour reading. It feels futile when you came to law school from a high-paying job that let you log off at 6pm. It frustrates you when you know that time studying could be spent spending time with friends or serving your community.
Almost all law schools require students to engage in pure classroom, or “doctrinal” learning, for all of their 1L classes. Some of the negative sentiment around 1L comes from being in a classroom when you’re itching to get out into the field. As options open up in 2L and 3L (second and third) years both pedagogically and topically– you can take clinics, where you work in the field, or take doctrinal classes on topics you’re personally interested in. Also, as students get used to what law school classes are like, many students find themselves enjoying school much more. That’s at least what I hear from others. I’ll have to let you know when I find out!
Really interesting comment about courtroom context that you miss in just reading cases