Law School v. Med School

I recently mentioned to a doctor that I was in law school, and besides insinuating that many lawyers are anal, he had a sense of pity for those of us who choose the “other” career path. He went on to explain that medical schools try to make their students feel taken care of once they make it into med school. The real challenge is getting into med school but once you are there, you can basically coast. Law schools on the other-hand and still trying to weed people out. More than that, the first year of law school seems to be designed to pit students against each other. Not only do you have to be with the same students for all of your classes all year long, you are constantly reminded that each of us is only as good as we are related to everyone else. You are fighting for some number, and every step you make up the curve puts someone else below you, and every slip puts that many others above you. Add to this the pressure that this curve will someday effect which firm you work at, how much money you earn, how easily you can pay off your student loans, and on and on. The feeling is not one of cruising, and some days, the study of torts feels like a litany of what you might do to the person sitting next to you. In addition, classes are taught using the infamous “Socratic Method,” which is basically a student torture devise where a professor who has read and taught the case multiple times extracts out of your brain sometime the reasoning from a case and tries to apply it to a variety of hypothetical situations that extend to absurdity.

This all seems pretty horrible until you realize that there may actually be a reason behind the intellectual gladiatorial event of law school, and it has to do with the practice of the law itself. The nature of legal work is competitive. The courtroom is a battle arena of sorts, where attorneys use the skills developed in law school and practice to out-reason their opponents. And unlike other intellectual pursuits that can be practiced without anyone really minding the consequence, like my previous graduate studies in German literature, a judge is going to make a decision based upon your capacity to argue better or worse than your opposing council. We will continue to be “graded.” It helps to keep this in mind on the days when the battle feels particularly gruesome, as well as the fact that most of us who are in law school would rather be fighting it out against each other than to have our hands dug into a chest cavity or other such activities that med students are training to do. As for me, I’ll ride the curve and enter the ring of Socrates.