Four and a half years ago, back when I started this blog, I knew I would be changing. That's why I wanted to blog; I wanted to track the change. But I'm not sure I really understood just how I would be changing.
I thought the change would be purely intellectual. They say one should never watch laws and sausages be made, so I thought that after I'd seen just how the sausage factory works I would become hardened and cynical. I also expected my mental processes to change. I kept hearing people say that law school trains you to think like a lawyer, and I was really curious to see what that entailed and how my thinking would therefore be changed.
On retrospect, I think I do now "think like a lawyer." I'm not quite sure where the change kicked in, but a comparison of my early-law school and pre-law school posts against later ones suggests that my thinking did get - how shall I describe it? - more deliberate. Thesis, plus support. Good lawyers don't just throw out global assertions and hope that others' intuitions will step in to justify them; good lawyering requires nuanced analogy and substantiation, and the training teaches you how to think in a way where generating it becomes second nature.
Furthermore, as I became more aware of the actual mechanics of how the law works, my thinking about it got more precise. Battlecries of "That's not fair!" and "It's unconstitutional!" generally drained from my vocabulary as I learned to more precisely identify exactly what was unfair or what might truly be unconstitutional. It's one of the more alarming realizations I made about law, actually, that there is a disconnect between how laypeople think the law is to work and how it actually does. They may be right in their intuition that something is unfair or unconstitutional, but without understanding why it ends up being beyond their capacity to fix it. I feel this is a very unhappy state of affairs, but instead of becoming hardened and cynical by my new-found x-ray vision of how the law truly works, I instead became more resolute to explain it so that everyone may now know.
Which is not to say I didn't become hardened and cynical as a result of law school. I did, just not because of that.