1L

I remember my law school orientation. I was seated in an unfamiliar classroom, surrounded by other first year students (“1Ls”), peering down at a panel of professors that would come to know me only as “Mr. Zicherman” when they cold-called me from a hundred feet away.

It felt like a scene out of the Paper Chase, that campy 70s show that misled a generation of would-be lawyers about the realities of a law degree. This was the actual opening credits sequence:

“You teach yourself the law,” says Professor Kingsfield at the start of each episode, “but I’ll train your minds.”

And this is essentially what we were told in that orientation, and in subsequent lectures, and in preparation for final exams. Despite its name, law school was not about learning the law. It was about learning how to think like a lawyer.

That’s also why, after graduating, we all spent an entire summer learning from scratch 95% of the material that would be covered on the bar exam. The bar exam covers actual legal rules and statutes, virtually none of which we learned about while getting the degree.

An odd system indeed.

The Upside

I never practiced law. I began programming while in law school and loved it enough to work as a software engineer instead.

Yet, when people now ask me if I regret going to law school, I always reply, “Definitely not.” I learned invaluable skills, not the least of which was how to approach drafting and reviewing contracts, a critical skill in my own startup days that saved us from paying our attorneys for countless billable hours.

Plus, had I not gone to law school, I would never have spent a summer working at NASA’s legal office, and would therefore never have become interested in programming, and would therefore never have decided to do it full time, et cetera, et cetera.

The Downside

About a year ago, I wrote an article for this newsletter called Rough Drafts, in which I explored the impact of kids being taught that finding the right answer is more important than learning from mistakes.

Legal training takes this educational approach to an extreme. I reflect on this fact now, thirteen years after earning my J.D., while our world becomes increasingly polarized and divided. Watch any biased media any night of the week, and you’ll find pundits retroactively rationalizing anything. It’s an astonishing skill, to be able to take real-world events and then reverse your train of thought to explain why they align with your thinking (rather than the more rationally, ethically, and morally correct approach of aligning your thinking with real-world events).

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” I’m not so sure that’s true anymore.

Being right at all costs is precisely how young law students are taught to approach problems. I vividly recall the mock trials in which I participated. The sheet of facts I had to bend to support my case. The strategy of weakening those facts that hurt my case. The need to find excuses when facts didn’t jive with my end goal. Sound familiar?

Being trained to be “right” is precisely the opposite of the scientific method, and is—in today’s world—increasingly a dividing force among us. And while it’s a symptom of legal training, the problem is hardly restricted to law school. As I’ve written before, this goes back to early K-12 education, when students are told to write but never to edit, to solve but never to correct, to persuade but never to compromise.

I’m not suggesting it’s objectively bad. Most things aren’t bad in moderation. But it’s a phenomenon that, unchecked, grows wildly beyond our control.

In high school, I served as president of our Model Congress club. I remember the thrill of being given a position to argue and then finding reasons to support it, of being given speaking awards for justifying those positions eloquently.

I never bothered putting myself in the shoes of the opponent, or finding common ground. No one ever asked me to.

And besides, they don’t give out awards for that kind of stuff.

Know someone who might enjoy this newsletter? Please share it! It’s the number one way Z-Axis is able to grow.