When Eben talks about the fear and anxiety created by law school, grades, and dwindling firm jobs, does this resonate with you? How about fear that you won't find something that you are passionate about, that fulfills you, and that allows you to support yourself and your family?

I wished that Eben had spoken more to that fear and anxiety today in class, and more specifically, what to do about it.

Fair point. Let's take some time on this Thursday. There was too much to do today, even without opening the conversation on Jerome Frank, and I too was dissatisfied with the allocation of time.

I have never found an educational experience to be so stressful before. As an undergraduate, I felt that my education was an incredible luxury. To sit in the library and read work that inspired me and then to get to discuss it and write about it was a liberating experience - I understood for the first time what it was to have a life of the mind. I think my legal education is also an incredible luxury, but I haven't felt the same sense of freedom of inquiry. There are right ways and wrong ways to approach a legal problem, it seems, and they don't have much to do with artistry.

Maybe. Or maybe—inasmuch as the experience of the first semester was really just language acquisition, as I've mentioned—it's just that there are right and wrong ways to speak the language. In fact, as I keep trying to get people to consider, the actual legacy of our recent intellectual history as American lawyers is that there are no right or wrong answers, just political outcomes. In which event, if you take seriously what our realist interlocutors came up with, the stress you have is not about learning the one right way at all, but rather learning how to be just as creative in your thinking as a law student and lawyer as you were as a literary critic. Such creativity may be a little more difficult than slinging around cultural theory jargon, but it does more work in the world, too.

Maybe I've still got too much of the English major, too little of the lawyer. And don't get me wrong - I have enjoyed my classes so far and am excited to have a law degree.

I've also never thought much about grades before law school, and now you can't walk through the lockers without hearing something about them, can't apply for jobs without talking about them, and can't sit in class without watching the person in front of you compulsively check their grades on Lawnet every five minutes. That has been a strange phenomenon.

Yes. It's literally insane. Induced paranoia. As I started to say in class today but never got a chance to finish, I had no grades in my first semester of law school, in fall 1980. In the second term, spring 1981, I took four courses, including two law school legal history courses that were crucially important to what I understood to be my future because I was also beginning the PhD program in history next term; Criminal Law; and Political and Civil Rights. My Crimes teacher had literally torn up my work in my face the first term, so I deliberately enrolled in his Crimes course. The work was important to me in every way, and so—I suppose you could say—were the grades. I took the exams in May 1981 at the end of the term, and went about my business, working at IBM and going to school. The first time I checked my grades (which at Yale back then required going into the registrar's office to look physically at a transcript card) was the following Christmas.

The belief that anything requires you to pay frequent or apprehensive attention to your grades is utterly false. But the illusion is very strong. It requires more presence of mind than most of your colleagues have to press against the point apparently held to their chests and discover that it's nothing but empty air. (Hence the symbolic importance of such a moment in the ritual of induction into Freemasonry: men are prevented from attaining freedom by their substanceless fears and the deliberate illusions created to hold them captive.) Whether it is good for society to have its leading law schools training people who are too timid to be contemptuous of grades I leave for further discussion.

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this kind of discussion, but I'd really like to know what you guys think about this process.

Your questions are good ones. I too hope they will be throughly discussed.

-- CarolineFerrisWhite - 03 Feb 2010