I went to law school in the dark ages and never left. After a bit of dabbling, I have spent the last quarter century as a prof. Thus, I have both a reasonably good basis for opining on how one might wish to prepare (‘If I don’t know this gig by now!’) and a rather myopic one (‘But I don’t want to be a law professor; I’m going to be a real lawyer.’). And there are certainly aspects of law school that ought to be updated. For example, I’d shift the curriculum slightly in 1L, shift massively towards subject-of-practice interest in 2L, and shift almost entirely to case study and apprenticeship in 3L. (Not to mention stop teaching each particular course as if it were 1789, or even 1871.) Still, it’s not as if we law schools do everything wrong; far from it.
Importantly, as my 1L dean explained to our class comparatively long ago, when you enter law school, you engage with something special that has a very long, and sometimes-ugly-but-at-least-as-often-inspiring past. And, if you do it right, you don’t just graduate to become a lawyer—you become part of that very life of the law…part of the ever-present human struggle to be better…to be more just, to do more right, and to do less wrong…to produce a society of greater wealth, and one of more equal distribution thereof. It is the very human drama, and to be a lawyer is a good part to play, even for a cynic such as myself.
So, as you prepare to enter law school, I hope that you will take time to think on the why. Why do you want to be a lawyer? And I hope you think, like me, that there are very few wrong answers. To lessen social injustice is a right answer in my book…but so is to make money and raise a family…so is to run for political office…and so is to make a lot of money and spend it like Cleopatra. But thinking on the why now—the honest why—might help you rather a lot during law school, as you will be forced quite early to begin making choices not only about coursework, but about clinics, summer jobs, internships, and externships. Those choices often lead to post-graduation jobs, and those first jobs often practically (albeit definitely not necessarily) define a career path. So, decide for yourself now, and be true to yourself later, even in change.
Other than that, how to prepare? Read! I’d read Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges (and, for the truly ambitious, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, but leave this one until the end of my list). Antonin Scalia was a legal giant (making the SCOTUSblog final four by beating out the amazing Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan) and, love him or hate him, he did more than any other recent Justice to change the way we approach legal reasoning and argument. So, read his book(s) to get an idea of how good lawyers do good work. But do not underline, highlight, etcetera, reading as if you were in class preparing for some ultimate test. There will be time enough for that. For now, simply take in the firehose. Hopefully, you will be inspired to see the joy in striving for excellence in the many aspects of advocacy over a career, and, during law school, you might be surprised to find how much your brain actually took in. And you can see whether you agree with Scalia or Bryan Garner (American law’s premier lexicographer and writing guru) on such minutiae as contractions in legal writing or the use of inline (versus footnote) citations; lawyers tend to have strong opinions about most everything, and these two are certainly no exception.
Next, I’d read The Bramble Bush, a series of lectures given by law professor Karl Llewellyn to law students of yesteryear. For nearly a century, this has been the classic ‘start of law school’ read, and it remains the single best text on law: both what law is and what lawyers can do with it, and what law school does well and what it tends not to do. If you use the Oxford printing, it will explain Llewellyn’s occasionally outdated references, and it will warn you to overlook the genderized speech of his day—lest you otherwise miss its underlying legal message. Other than that, you can read his words uninterrupted; they were meant for you, the new student of the law.
Still, two notes before you begin. First, as I noted with the Scalia/Garner work, do not let yourself get bogged down in minutiae—even minutiae you feel you might soon need, such as how to brief a case for the law school classroom. Again, there will be time enough for that; reading prior to law school is merely ‘setting the stage’ or ‘plowing the field,’ readying yourself for the detailed learning to come.
Second, my best guess is that you will pretty nicely travel through Llewellyn’s first three chapters, that you will begin to grow annoyed with his fourth (precedent), and that you will wish to toss in the towel somewhere during his fifth (maybe as you encounter Hohfeld in the third part thereof). I understand. And this leaves two options. One, you might content yourself with his Chapters 1 to 3 and 6. This is not a bad solution, really; again, you are merely setting the stage for three years of learning. Two, you might slog through Chapters 4 and 5, and then reskim each after the slog. Like much legal reading, the lightbulb is likely to go off on the reconsideration, and matters like Hohfeldian right/duty, privilege/no-right, and power/liability are powerful constructs that many practicing lawyers will never learn. If you learn them even before law school, you have an advantage. Either way, I’d ignore his Part Two (Chapters 7 through 10).
Next, I’d read Justice Brandeis’ dissenting opinion in Olmstead v. United States. Like Scalia, Justice Brandeis made it to SCOTUSblog’s final four, and as much as any single opinion can, his words in Olmstead define what it means to be an American. (Or at least so I’ve argued.) And we can practice law school by finding it: go to Google Scholar, click the radio button to select “Case law,” type in “Olmstead v United States,” select the top entry, search for “Brandeis,” and read the section “MR. JUSTICE BRANDEIS, dissenting.” That’s a good legal opinion, and if you don’t find at least some enjoyment in reading it, law school may not be for you!
Speaking of simple legal research, if you instead Google the case name, you might first come upon Oyez (https://www.oyez.org/), a terrific site for Supreme Court caselaw and oral argument. But beware the word’s pronunciation, which is ‘oh-yay’—alas, in law school we will have to learn new vocabulary, just like the jargon of other fields.
And since you will want to begin keeping up with the doings of the United States Supreme Court, you might consider subscribing to SCOTUSblog, but I’d recommend this lighter option: LII. Opt for both the previews and notices of decision, but do not trust the student-written summaries. They simply trigger when you ought to run to the Supreme Court’s website to read a case of interest.
If you are feeling more ambitious and you already have a law school .edu email, you might subscribe to some Bloomberg Law publications, which are a terrific way to keep up with developments in the law. Definitely select The United States Law Week, and you might consider some more specialized fare. For example, someone interested in law and technology might also subscribe to The Brief – Top News of Today, Artificial Intelligence, Tech & Telecom Law News, and/or Privacy & Data Security Law News.
Finally, I’d read The Constitution: An Introduction by Michael Stokes Paulsen & Luke Paulsen. This one comes with two things you’ll want to ignore: one, the authors’ tendency to proclaim opinion as logic (which is admittedly sometimes harder to ignore unless you already know the law and history) and, two, the text boxes annoyingly inserted amid the text—maybe the book ‘grades’ at a B+. And if you’ve had an excellent civics education, you might not need this at all. But understanding the federal Constitution is critical to law school, and since so few get that excellent background education, most will benefit a great deal by reading this book. For example, you ought to struggle with President Lincoln’s always-wrong-except-when-right ‘my interpretation of the Constitution is the only one that matters’ philosophy. (Oh, and you ought to subscribe to Disney+ for a month and watch the musical Hamilton. Seriously.)
If you do all that, you should be in great shape. But if you are still wanting more (impressive!), you could toss in something from…
The substantive law on which you’ll be focusing in your first year: contracts, torts, property, civil procedure, and the criminal law. There are books that try to do all of these together, but I’d instead pick one or two and use the relevant volume from the Understanding series to get that head start; for example, Understanding Criminal Law.
If you want a bit of the historical sense of law school, you might read The Paper Chase and/or One L, two stories (one fictional and one autobiographical) of law school of yesteryear. Despite the decades having passed—and yes much is different—you might also be surprised how much you still recognize during your attendance. As a warning, there are portions of The Paper Chase that might offend, and portions of One L that might cause bouts of drowsiness.
You might read The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking About the Law, which has a wealth of good information yet is terribly hard to get through.
And you ought to read a great book or three, especially if you haven’t made the time to enjoy one in too long. Maybe Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, All the Wrong Questions by Lemony Snicket, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Empire Falls by Richard Russo, Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, A Painted House by John Grisham, A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, 1984 by George Orwell, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick, White Noise by Don DeLillo, or Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. There is so much great content to read! If you only want to spend a little time, maybe choose a play like Death of a Salesman by Athur Miller, Our Town by Thornton Wilder, or A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. Or, you could do worse than go with Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, which features a lawyer confronted with some hard questions…perhaps of how much we are our fellow human’s keeper…or how modern life can tend to dehumanize…or something else entirely. As in real life, what it’s about is for every reader to decide.
