On Not Gaming the System in Law School

The other day the New York Times ran a set of op-eds from various well-known academics offering advice to students who are starting college.  It's mostly boilerplate stuff, and in some cases the byline enables one to predict with high accuracy every word of the op-ed.  (Harold Bloom: Read books.  Martha Nussbaum: Think about life, not just jobs.)  I quite liked Gerald Graff's contribution, however.  He writes:

Freshmen are often overwhelmed by the intellectual challenge of college — so many subjects to be covered, so many facts, methods and philosophical isms to sort out, so many big words to assimilate. As if that weren’t enough, what your different instructors tell you may be flatly contradictory.

Students understandably cope with this cognitive dissonance by giving each of their teachers in turn whatever he or she seems to want. Students learn to be free-market capitalists in one course and socialists in the next, universalists in the morning and relativists after lunch. This tactic has got many a student through college, but the trouble is that, even when each course is excellent in itself, jumping through a series of hoops doesn’t add up to a real socialization into the ways of intellectual culture.

What the most successful college students do, in my experience, is cut through the clutter of jargons, methods and ideological differences to locate the common practices of argument and analysis hidden behind it all.  Contrary to the cliche that no "one size fits all" educational recipe is possible, successful academics of all fields and intellectual persuasions make some key moves that you can emulate[.]

Both Graff's diagnosis and his prescription strike me as being equally applicable to law school.  No matter what general advice law professors and books offer on how to succeed generally in law school, some students will persist in believing that the way to do best is to figure out what each professors wants and play to these desires.  They are encouraged in this by upper-years students, fresh with the "wisdom" of one or two years of law school and the disenchanted perspective it brings.

It's not that they're completely wrong.  A little of this advice is useful to some extent: if your professor says, for instance, that she wants you to cover all the issues on an exam rather than delve into a few at great detail, you'd do well to listen.  But students who think this approach is the best or most efficient way to yield good grades are, I think, quite mistaken.  This approach yields few long-term benefits and only uncertain short-term benefits.  In my experience, the very best students acquire and apply a set of skills -- reading a case or an exam question carefully, thinking about all its implications, thinking about both how to unpack it and how to "pack" it into a theme or ruling, thinking about how one case or subject matter connects with others and what big picture or set of themes emerges from all of this, producing an analysis that makes use of these conclusions in a concise and targeted way -- that can be used across the board in both law school and legal practice.  They internalize the lesson that too few substantive professors teach: that the skills you pick up in your legal research and writing class are skills that will help you in your substantive courses too, that a good legal writing memo is much the same as a good exam and that if you can master these skills they will be of use in every course.  These students are not trying to suit the preferences of Professor X or Professor Y; they are simply trying to be good lawyers (or at least good law students).  They develop a skill set that gets them far better results, and with less duplication of effort, than if they had tried to game the system by figuring out each individual professor's pecadilloes.  We have them, to be sure, but ultimately we share more common views about what constitutes a good paper/exam/etc. than differences of opinion.  

This may be futile advice.  I have given it before, and to little effect.  Some students will insist stubbornly that one size does not fit all, that there is a "trick" to doing well in law school, and that the trick is about pandering to individual professors rather than picking up a set of trans-substantive skills.  A few will profit by this strategy in the short term, although I'm not sure what of value they will have picked up for the long term.  It is still dangerous and inefficient advice, however, and I believe Graff's advice is still the best, for law school as elsewhere: cut through the differences between individual professors, pick up and apply the common methods and language of legal analysis, and you will be far better off, no matter what individual professors or the skeptics of the upper years tell you.