In my meandering through cyberspace to find interesting blogs, I happened across this one where someone pen-named "Publius" has been waxing poetic about deep Constitutional issues.
I am filled with envy that someone could have the time to immerse themselves so thoroughly in Constitutional inquiry, wrestling with policy ideals and practice. Studying, thinking, learning, writing, innovating. How I would love to do that.
In the context of doing it here on my blog I'm limited by the other demands of my life. Finals loom, and I don't have the resources to devote to diving as deeply into some of these incredibly important and fascinating issues as I'd like. I try to as much as I can, but I sense I will have to scale back even what I've managed so far in order to focus on the tasks at hand.
But in the longer view, I would love to be able to do that kind of scholarship for a career, to be able to bathe in the luxurious waters of legal inquiry. But it will be no small task to get that kind of job, and even more difficult thanks to the milquetoast-y performance of last year. And of the choice of school. I love BU, but it's not Harvard, and even though most of my professors came from Harvard and many do extraordinary work well respected by their peers, it still may not be good enough.
It seems that if that's the kind of life I want I may have needed to make different choices far earlier in this process than now, and far earlier than I would have even known to have made them. If there was ANY additional stone I could have turned over to get into Harvard, I should have turned it over. If there was ANY additional thing I could have done my first year to elevate my grades (gotten rid of the roommate?) I should have done it.
The conventional wisdom that had been available to me had recommended getting into the best school I could and doing the best I could gradewise. But the true import of this advice was not obvious before it all may have become too late.
It's not to say that if only I'd known what was at stake I would have worked harder. I worked as hard as I could. But it would have been nice to have had in mind what the ultimate goal was, and then been able to systematically prioritize and achieved the intermediate steps in order to attain it. It is only being in the middle of the process that from the process itself I've begun to figure out what it is I'd like to do.
Therein lies a fundamental problem with the law school process: there are so many aspects to the law one could cloak themselves in, but how is one to know the one most preferred until it has been attempted? I do think you could have some inkling beforehand, but I maintain there is no way to know what studying the law is about until you've actually done it. Until you've read case after case and case-reading becomes as second nature as reading street signs. Until your vocabulary has incorporated the new terms necessary to convey the kind of analysis you've now learned to make. The Great Change needs to take hold before you can even contemplate what you'd want to do with it with any sort of accuracy.
And with trial there often is failure, maybe because something isn't a fit or maybe because it's hard to achieve perfection the first time you've tried it. It seems therefore that the institution of law does itself a disservice by keeping score so early, before the student's worth as a future practitioner can really be measured. And before the student can possibly know to what end they wish to apply their education.
Backdated to 12/4 when this was begun. Actually posted 12/6.
Edit 12/8: Another law student on grading (with links to even more law students on grading).