Law school lite - law students depending on law outlines and summaries

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1989 by Daniel Pink

What drives students to buy summaries and outlines are often the qualities that got them to law school in the first place: a mix of competitiveness and anal retentiveness. At prestige schools most students have been in the top 10

percent of their class since kindergarten, so 90 percent are in for a new experience. And at other schools, high-paying jobs go only to the top students. So competition is keen for high exam grades and spots on Law Review. Buying an Emanuel guide or a Gilbert is a way to give yourself an edge or to be sure the other students don't have one.

It is also possible that a responsible, conscientious student who has done all the hard work might still try an outline for another view of a case but won't necessarily adopt that view as his own. And some law school teaching is so opaque, confused students must seek outside sources for clarity. Sometimes outlines can even be a saving grace--like when a rough night prevents you from finishing your lengthy property assignment. Regular use and dependence are the real dangers.

It's true that many things we "learn" in law school have no bearing on our future legal practice. At one point I knew the six requirements (or are there five?) for the running of the burden of a real covenant. I can't recite them anymore and probably will die without ever having to. Yet I did learn something that will be useful in practice. I learned how the requirements developed, considered the rationale behind them, and, most important, reasoned along with the judges who wrote the opinions in these property cases. That's why any serious lawyer would rather read a case herself than have a faceless scribe at Casenote Legal Briefs tell her what it's about.

Law schools are not barber academies. They do not teach students how to practice law. At their best, law schools are thinking schools. They train future lawyers, judges, government officials, CEOs, journalists, and cabinet members how to think. Commercial outlines and canned briefs hardly serve that goal.

These law school Cliffs Notes also reflect a troubling trend in American education. Consider a typical student. In college or shortly thereafter, he decides he wants to go to law school (or that he can't think of anything better to do). Because the LSAT is important in admissions, he'll take a Stanley Kaplan cram course to prepare. Once in law school, he'll use an Emanuel to study for his exams and try to nail that Wall Street job. When he graduates he faces still another hurdle, the bar exam. To prepare for that he'll take a review course.

The system is so focused on numbers (LSAT scores, exam grades, bar results) and credentialism it has created a culture that discourages intellectual and practical skills. As a result, students will seek (and pay for) commercial outlines or anything else that will boost their scores a few points.

The problem is that clients want attorneys who can write wills and negotiate contracts, whose weapons are their minds--not their Gilberts. America needs legislators who can solve problems--not parrot Emanuel's view of strict liability.