Sometime in the fall of 2010, I dropped a stack of
first-year law books onto a scale, then fetched the second armload and dropped
it on there too. The idea was to calculate somehow the degree and duration of
pressure the bad disk in my neck could withstand before it burst. But I’m no
good at math, and so I bargained with the disk instead. Three years, I told it.
That’s what I need from you.
Thirty-three months later, the disk is intact and
so am I, more or less, even if the gaping breaches in the gray matter are fully
exposed, and virtually everything I thought to be true is cast into doubt. But
that’s law school.
Prolonged stretches of boredom punctuated by
seizures of panic that a single misstep might cause the whole house of cards to
collapse. That’s law school. A vague sense that this might just be a colossal
scam, that there may never be adequate return to wipe out unspeakable debt and
make the whole enterprise a wash. That’s law school. Rare bonds of friendship,
the kind common among old campaigners who exist to assure one another that all
perception is skewed in here, after all, and that we will live to tell about this.
Maybe we’ll even laugh about it. That’s law school, too.
Law school is a long moment of desperation from
which you might emerge whole in spite of your own self-sabotaging efforts to
snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Law school is wounded ego soothed now
and then with a thin balm of success. Law school is arrogance in the rightness
of your position, inflated in direct proportion to the hard-won realization
that there is no black and white and that sometimes your hubris is all you
have.
Law school is furious vicissitudes of judgment in
which you conclude on an alternating basis that this was either the best or the
worst thing you ever did. Law school also is the prelude to what, by all
accounts, is The Worst Summer of Your Life. I have had more summers than some,
and the coming weeks will tell whether the one spent preparing for the bar exam
eclipses the others that were less than perfect.
