Lately I’ve wished that I’d taken better advantage of being in law school when I was there. I floated through those three years like a ghost. I didn’t make any good friends among my classmates; I didn’t become close to any of my professors; I didn’t join any extracurricular groups, except for the lesbian and gay law student group during my final year, the only year of law school that I was out of the closet, and that group didn’t do much. I managed to graduate without leaving any impression on anyone. I didn’t do a judicial clerkship (although I did intern with a federal judge after my first year), and I didn’t work as a summer associate with a law firm. I had no idea why I was there.
I didn’t particularly like my first-semester classes, which were all mandatory: torts, contracts, civil procedure, criminal law, and legal writing. My torts professor was a joke; my contracts professor taught the concepts in the reverse order (we didn’t even learn the definition of a contract until the end of the semester); civ pro and criminal law were manageable, or at least they would have been without the monkeywrench thrown into the works: my legal writing class. On top of that, the law school was undergoing renovations during that first semester; there was lots of plywood. Every day I had lunch with a group of male classmates in my section, but I was the odd man out, because they insisted on talking about concepts from class, which I had no desire to discuss, or sports, in which I had zero interest. Plus, several of them were married and a few years older than me, while I was only 22 and a closeted homosexual with nobody to confide in.
I asked myself why I’d been foolish enough to go to law school. The reason I went was because I spent the year after college remaining at UVa, working for the university as a temp, with no idea what to do with my life. That Thanksgiving, I went home to visit my parents, and I saw their beautiful, stable house filled with beautiful, stable furniture and their beautiful, stable marriage, while my life felt totally slapdash and directionless. I needed direction. I’d taken the LSAT during my last year of college at the prodding of my parents and I’d done well, and my mom had continued to suggest law school even after I’d graduated college. It finally seemed like the answer, so when I got back to Virginia after Thanksgiving I applied to UVa Law and nowhere else. If I got in, great; if not, no big loss.
I got in, and from the first day it seemed like a mistake.
In November, people started outlining their notes for December’s final exams. Outlining? I had no idea what that was – it seemed like everyone knew so much about law school before they’d even started, except for me. I balked at outlining my course notes; I wasn’t about to do something I’d never heard of just because everyone else was doing it. Instead I studied in my own traditional way. I wound up getting the mean grade in two classes and below the mean in two others. (Legal writing was pass/fail; fortunately I passed.)
It wasn’t until my second semester that I truly enjoyed a couple of classes: constitutional law and a course that profiled particular Supreme Court justices over the course of American history. I got an above-average grade in the latter.
I tried out for the Law Review and one other law journal that spring. I didn’t really want to, but all the other first years were doing it, and I figured that I should probably do it too. The tryout consisted of a writing assignment that was handed out on a Friday and due the following Monday. We received a packet of materials – cases, commentaries, et cetera – involving the existence or lack thereof of a constitutional right to die, and we had to turn in a sample judicial opinion resolving a made-up set of facts. Apparently I didn’t do so well, because I didn’t make it onto the law review or the other journal, even though it seemed like lots of people made it onto a journal.
It wasn’t until my final year of law school, year number three, that I enjoyed a majority of my classes: U.S. constitutional history, voting rights, federal courts, family law (mostly), and “Schools, Race and Money,” about school desegregation and school financing. I received my one law school “A” in U.S. Constitutional History to the Civil War.
(When I got that grade I was thrilled and stunned. I wanted to talk to my professor to find out what I’d done right – and also to get some praise, perhaps, which I’d ached to get from anyone for more than two years. I passed him in the hallway one afternoon and asked, “Professor H—-, are you on your way to your office?” He responded, very coldly, “No, I’m on my way to class.” I was so intimidated that I never followed up with him. He had no idea who I was; I’d never spoken to him before, and that was my one and only conversation with the professor who gave me an A.)
There are some things I truly enjoy about the law. I love constitutional law and constitutional history. I like scholarship. I like reading law review articles about it; I have a few downloaded on my computer that I want to read. I wish I could write one, even though I’m not a professor. I wish I’d had this book in law school.
Sometimes lately I think it would be fun to be a law professor, even if I’d like the research and writing aspects more than the actual teaching aspects. I don’t know if I’m a quick enough thinker to teach law, although it’s always possible that I am and I just don’t know it. And becoming a law professor is hard, I think, although I haven’t fully researched it. I didn’t have a good judicial clerkship or get great grades or anything like that.
I don’t necessarily think law school was a mistake for me, like I used to think. It’s just that I should have waited longer before going; I should have waited until I was out of the closet, and had a better idea of my interests and focus; and I should have applied to schools that might have been better suited to me socially.
Ah, well.
