The White Male's Guide to Law School (And Beyond!)

The White Male’s Guide to

Law School (And Beyond!)

The White Male’s Guide to

Law School (And Beyond!)

anonymous

The White Male’s Guide to Law School (And Beyond!) © 2014 by anonymous. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

First Edition

February 2014

Table of Contents

so you want to go to law school?

white males and the admissions game: getting in

improving your LSAT

the admissions essay

affirmative action

diversity seminar; or, welcome to law school

legal writing: the worst, most pointless class ever

the exam room

the conservative white male in law school

summer jobs

after law school (what this has all been leading up to)

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The White Male’s Guide to

Law School (And Beyond!)

so you want to go to law school?

I know you’ve said it already, probably dozens of times a day: I want to go to law school. This is what you tell people when they ask about your postgraduate plans.

Notice you didn’t say I want to be a lawyer—though that, undoubtedly, is what your career goals are. Instead of thinking about the work of an attorney, you are thinking about the work of a law student. Why do we do this? Why does everyone who plans to be a lawyer always say that their career goal is to go to law school?

I said the same thing about eight years ago when I applied to law school. True, you have to go to law school before you can become a lawyer. But the same is true of just about every other profession in the country. I’m interested in going to accounting school or I’m interested in going to nursing school—who says that?  No, that’s not what people say.

There is certainly a cultural mystique around law school. Movies and best-selling books have been produced that focus on the law school experience. (When’s the last time you saw a movie about a graduate accounting program?) The most famous of these cultural productions are probably the movie The Paper Chase (1973) and Scott Turow’s book, One L (1977), about his first year at Harvard Law School in 1975 and the stresses of exams, the politics of study groups, and the terror of facing Perini, his contracts professor. The competition of law school, in particular the battles between student and powerful professor, do seem to be part of this cultural mystique.

And, certainly, law school will be a challenge. It will be a challenge to get into the best school that you can, and it will be a challenge to graduate, and it certainly will be a challenge to navigate the postgraduate legal economy. But I can assure you of one thing: law school is no longer much like The Paper Chase or Turow’s One L. The professors will not be intimidating at all (most probably won’t even use the Socratic Method). Students will not hoard library material. (Principally because there is no need to—it’s all online!) And there shouldn’t be any suicides because the pressure gets too high (nor will you be having sex with Lindsay Wagner, who plays the professor’s daughter in The Paper Chase). The Paper Chase and One L are both out-of-date narratives—fun to read but not in the least any sort of guide for what you can expect once you pay your first-year’s tuition.

To get a better idea of what law school is really like, you should read Curtis Sittenfeld’s 2005 novel Prep. Although it’s about high school students at an elite prep school, the novel contains countless scenes—like this one—that you will encounter in law school:

At breakfast, Hunter Jergenson recapped a dream she’d had involving space aliens, which prompted Tab Kinkead to ask if maybe it hadn’t been a dream after all but an abduction, and then Andrea Sheldy-Smith, who was Hunter’s roommate, told a long story about how she had accidentally used Hunter’s toothbrush, and Tab said to her, So, basically you guys have made out?

Or this, when the main character, Lee, meets with her math tutor:

Aloud, I said, Do you think Gillian is pretty?

Lee, please concentrate, Aubrey said.

Gillian Hathaway, I said. Not Gillian Carson.

She’s fine. If I were you, I’d start by isolating x on this one. And what information are they giving you about x? But Aubrey was blushing, a hot shade of pink that blossomed in his face and spread down his neck.

Really pretty or just medium pretty? I said. (261)

Law school will very often seem like high school. In addition to study, students will spend a tremendous amount of time trawling for spouses (or sex) and attempting to hide their ambition through juvenile antics. Hang out at the student center on any Friday afternoon and tell me that, if you closed your eyes, you aren’t reminded of being back in high school.

Furthermore, law school is not nearly the kind of wonky, high-powered environment in which students engage in scholarly debate over the constitutionality of abortion or presidential powers. Law school will be as political as you want it to be. If you want to campaign for candidates in presidential elections—fine. If you want to spend all your days shopping, fine as well.

Another important change from the 1970s is the cost of law school. Law school has become an incredible financial investment. And the costs continues to skyrocket—standard tuition is over $50,000 at most private schools and is approaching that figure for many public law schools. With living expenses thrown on top (typically $20,000, if not more, for a single person), a three-year degree will cost you over $200,000. That’s...a lot of money.

But still—you want to go to law school. You want to learn a new way of thinking. You want to compete with other highly intelligent people for grades. (Of course, you think you will come out on top.) And you dream of a challenging, or at least highly remunerative, career after law school. To make sure that white males don’t waste their money, I have written a guide to help them understand and navigate the legal environment.

why a guide for white males?

Here’s a better question: why not a guide for white males? After all, if someone wrote a book titled The Black Female’s Guide to Law School (And Beyond!), no one would raise an eyebrow. In fact, walk around your undergraduate college right now and there is probably a seminar on that topic happening this very evening. It is simply accepted that, as a group, black students as well as Latino students (and some others) face unique challenges in the law school environment and thus warrant a book that directly addresses their concerns.

In my opinion, white males warrant the same attention to their unique experiences. White males are a discrete group with unique experiences, and they will also be viewed by others as a discrete group. Law schools expect certain things from white males. And professors, other students, and even employers will likely view white males, at least initially, through a particular lens. Consistent with this fact, white males will find themselves—in law school and beyond—judged against specific preconceived notions and stereotypes, and their success will depend on defying (or at the very least not vigorously confirming) those stereotypes.

The phrase typical white male has certainly entered the American lexicon. (If you don’t know what that refers to, you are probably living out the stereotype.) Whenever a purported hate crime happens on a college campus, a typical white male is usually the first blamed. At Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, for example, a student posted a message to a LISTSERV, TrinTalk, declaring that the admission of minority students correlated with the school’s decline in its ratings. Outraged students took to message boards, many blaming white males. (It turned out the post had been authored by a Nigerian female, who wrote it as an experiment.) Similarly, in 2004 when racist and anti-Semitic graffiti appeared at College of Wooster in Ohio, students assumed that typical white males had done it.

As these examples illustrate, the typical white male is a boorish, inconsiderate, racist, sexist, homophobic frat boy who is insensitive to other people’s experiences. According to liberals in law schools, he is also completely oblivious to reality, as he has never had to live the kind of gritty, urban experience liberal law school administrators have also never lived (but like to pretend that they understand). A white male, typical or not, can expect to have law school administrators and faculty educate him about how the world supposedly works; so I want to prepare you for this.

The good news is that these stereotypes are frames, not boxes. If you conform to them—whether in person, or even worse, in electronic form that will never disappear—you are doing yourself a huge disservice. Law is a risk-averse profession, and a small one. Reputation matters about as much as competence. Nobody wants to hire an attorney with a cloud of ink trailing his name. Your success in the legal profession will depend, at least in part, on your ability to maintain a spotless reputation.

By contrast, those white males who confirm the worst stereotypes could damage their career prospects. They likely will not get into the best schools, or once there will create a damaging paper trail of hurt feelings and boorish insensitivity. As a student, attorney, and admissions consultant, I have seen white males fall into all the traps I am about to lay out for you.

Don’t believe me that white males are viewed through different frames than other groups? Then consider the different way in which the media has treated John Roberts and Sonia Sotomayor. When he was nominated to be Chief Justice on the Supreme Court, John Roberts faced a hue and cry over the fact that he had spent several decades in private practice, often representing large corporations before the Supreme Court. Almost as soon as his nomination was announced, liberals piled on. The Democratic Party circulated talking points accusing Roberts of being a friend of big business, and columnists claimed that big business hearts John Roberts—all this because the man represented large corporations as a private attorney. (Would a criminal defense lawyer be presumed to support criminal behavior for representing clients?)

By contrast, when Sonia Sotomayor published her memoir, My Beloved World, she included photographs of herself posing with a member of the wealthy Italian fashion family Fendi (who was like a brother) and detailed discussions of her trips abroad as a guest of wealthy clients.  If ever someone had announced her closeness to wealth and power, Justice Sotomayor did so in My Beloved World.

Yet, almost no one