It’s that time of year again, when Gen Y over-achievers pack up their iPods and flip-flops and bid Mom adieu, as they head off to their first year of law school.  Some of the lawprofs have offered sound, though official and self-serving, advice to these incoming students.  They can’t help it.  They’re lawprofs and vested in the system.

As a counterpoint, allow me to offer some advice of my own.  While I’m sure that each and every one of you is brilliant and bound to be the most successful lawyer ever, take a good look around the room during your first law school class and figure out whether you want to be the suck-up kid who blows off all the really good parties and buckles down to read the casebooks.  Remember how you were all hung up on grades in college? Well, they only matter now if you want to make law review and ultimately find your way to doing document review at some Biglaw firm for far more money than you could possible be worth, until they fire you because of a precipitous drop in profits per partner.

If you’re that kid in the classroom, then don’t bother reading the rest of this.  It doesn’t apply to you and I have no advice for you whatsoever. 

Good.  Now that they’re gone, this is for the rest of you.  Shut up and take your licking like a lawyer.  Grades don’t matter.  Do well enough to stay in school, but beyond that no one cares.  No judge, no client, no juror will ever ask you what grade you received in torts.  I promise. 

Learning the law itself is easy.  It’s a bunch of rules that changes every few years and then is made to appear as if it was always that way even though today’s law may be the exact opposite of yesterday’s.  No point wasting too much time fretting over the rule against perpetuities or the fertile octogenarian rule, except as a curiosity of how little law school has to do with reality.  Worse yet, if you should happen to develop a nuanced understanding of the law, judges will hate you for trying to make them look stupid. 

Spend your time listening to others and figuring out why they are wrong.  They will be wrong most of the time.  Not only will this make you feel good about yourself, but it will force you to think harder to avoid humiliation.  Personally humiliation is one of the core ingredients of a good law school education.  Nothing serves to better motivate a first year law student than the fear of looking like the biggest fool in the class (no small feat, to be sure).  This will serve you well as a lawyer.

Hopefully, your professors won’t be touchy-feely wimps and will use the Socratic method in order to embarrass as many students as possible and assuage their need for control.  This method, particularly when coupled with the refusal to use students names (as in lawprofs calling students “blue shirt woman” or “tattoo man ” rather than Muffy or Skippy) forces the other students to direct their attention to one person to watch as they whither and die for failure to have a clue what the lawprof is asking.  This is another critical component of a good law school education.

Lawprofs Ilya Somin and Orin Kerr over at Volokh argue about whether the Socratic method is better used to teach you to think like a lawyer, is better because it requires you to think on your feet or analyze a fact pattern to parse the relevant facts from the flotsam.  It’s a silly argument, since you have to be able to do both, and anything that embarrasses you will serve that function. 

Bruce Boyden at PrawfsBlawg argues that the Socratic method is a “demonstrably poor teaching technique,” “particularly if the aim is to purposefully confuse or intimidate the students.”  Great.  So if they don’t learn about confusion and intimidation in law school, where else are they supposed to learn it? 

Here’s the real deal.  Other than the handful of Biglaw associates whose hours will spent joyfully in law libraries until their hair turns gray, lawyers have to be able to represent clients.  When you stand up before a judge with another person’s life in your hands, there’s no time to feel sorry for yourself or to whine to the judge that you aren’t prepared to answer the question. 

Up to now, everyone has told you that you are important.  That you matter.  Not any more.  As a lawyer, you are there for someone else.  That person matters.  Some judges will be overtly abusive.  Smarter judges will be subtly abusive.  Tricky judges won’t let on that they’re abusing you at all.  The worst are the judges who abuse your client while making you feel good about yourself.  They’ve got your number.

A well-conceived law school education serves one purpose only: to prepare you to confront the abuse of being a lawyer and prevail.  How to prevail comes later.  You’re not ready for that now.  For now, you need to learn how to toughen up and take abuse without crying and whining.  How to keep a smile on your face and deflect the humiliation that is designed to make even the most macho man shrivel.  If your lawprof doesn’t abuse you, she hasn’t done her job.  If your lawprof doesn’t toughen you up, then you’ve gained nothing.

Up to this point in your educational career, the system has been designed to make you feel good about yourself and build your self-esteem.  If this isn’t changed, it will destroy you as a lawyer.  There is nothing about the legal system that will make you feel good about yourself.  It will challenge your dignity and humanity at every turn.  Your mommy is wrong when she tells you to just go up to the judge after court and tell him that he wasn’t very nice to you and you don’t appreciate it.  This is not a successful strategy.

Why is the law this way?  Well, remember when you looked around the room during your first class, the people who are really dumb are the ones who lick envelopes at the party headquarters for a decade and later become the judges.  True, licking envelopes really isn’t the best qualification for the judiciary, but it’s the only one they have.  And these dumb students are going to turn into mean, petty judges, and want nothing more than to pay you back for the humiliation they suffered in law school by showing you that they are now in control.  Get used to it.

Law school is the time to learn how to beat them at their own game.  Learn this and the rest is a snap.  And if you go to one of those law schools where they are deeply concerned about how you feel about yourself and want to foster a nurturing environment, tell them you want your money back.