Glorfindel of Gondolin correctly points out that, from a pedagogical point of view, legal education is dumb. If an educator sat down and tried to design the worst possible educational system that wasn’t entirely random, they’d come up with something very close to law school.

But I think this misses the point. Law school isn’t good education because it isn’t education at all, in the usual sense of that word. Law schools, I argue, don’t care about teaching you the law. If they did, they would change the system to one that is pedagogically sound.* Instead, the purpose of law school is two-fold. First, to indoctrinate you into a culture that values hard work and long hours. And second, to test your soplisistic and analytical instincts.

In other words, law schools are designed to provide law firms with an answer to two questions, both of which measure critical skills for good lawyers: Are you self-disciplined enough to work very long hours? And can you “read” your professor and give him or her the arguments that he or she wants to hear?

That’s it. That’s law school in a nutshell. Forget about truth (nobody cares), forget about scholarship (it’s a professional school, not a PhD), forget about the games. Law school is designed to test for hard work and the right blend of analysis and solipsism. You listen to your Professor ramble for four months, and at the end of the semester you simply try to say what he or she would have said on the exam.

A brief anecdote will help make the point. During the summer after my first year of law school, I participated in a mini-Moot Court competition with my firm. This firm, as a public interest law firm, had rather definite opinions regarding what the law should be, and so they initially didn’t want to force anybody to argue on behalf of “the enemy”. So we all got the same facts and were all assigned the same client.

Always the contrarian, however, I offered to argue the other side of the case. I spent a month pouring over all the materials they had given me, and I found a flaw in the fact pattern which made it a little less one-sided. I constructed what I thought was a flawless logical argument as to why the law should be interpreted in this case in my client’s favor, and because I knew the judges, I knew that the premises of my argument wouldn’t be controversial. So during oral arguments, when confronted with questions that reflected my firm’s usual biases, I kept reframing the judges’ questions to make my logical point.

Shockingly, I lost the case.

To this day, I remain absolutely convinced that my arguments were logically sound. Compelling, even, in the sense that the judges should have had no rational choice but to accept my argument or repudiate some of their basic beliefs. But it didn’t matter, because, as Holmes famously pointed out, the life of the law isn’t logic.

Law school is the same. If Scalia is right and Tribe is wrong, you’re still not going to do very well in Tribe’s class applying Scalia’s arguments to the exam. At a minimum, you would do better (given the same amount of effort and intelligence) by applying Tribe’s arguments. That willingness to think flexibly, and to frame arguments in terms you think are flat wrong, really isn’t something that can be taught explicitly. The best you can do is test it. Couple that with the fact that law schools, like legal employers, don’t really care very much about you, and you have a strong argument for law school as a signaling mechanism rather than an educational system.

Anyway, that’s what I think about legal education. It’s pedagogically stupid because it’s real purpose is indoctrination into the legal culture, rather than education per se.

* I optimistically refuse to believe that legal academics are too blind to see what is obvious to Glorfindel of Gondolin and many others. Maybe that’s naive.

** I’m not a litigator, so take my opinion for what it’s worth.

UPDATE: On reflection, solipsism captures one element of what I think is wrong with legal reasoning. But the word I was really searching for was “sophistry”.

I take “solipsism” to indicate the belief that nothing exists outside oneself, and that “objective truth” therefore doesn’t exist. A merely analytical person may come to the conclusion that Tribe is right and Scalia is wrong, and might therefore have difficulty advancing Scalia-type arguments. They might get over it, sure, but it seems to me that a certain degree of skepticism regarding the existence of “truth” in the law makes it easier to jump back and forth, without judgment, between mutually exclusive arguments.

In my experience, the people who performed the best during law school were the least critical thinkers in the school; they were people who never bothered to ask whether they arguments they were making were “true”. They were, in other words, associative rather than analytical learners. That is what I meant by “solipsistic instincts”.

But, solipsistic instincts are only useful if one is engaging in sophistry. I use the term sophist not as the dictionary defines it, but as Plato defined it: a sophist is an individual who seeks not truth, but victory in debate. Naturally, a certain degree of solipsism (a belief that truth doesn’t exist outside oneself) tends to be amenable to producing sophistry (a desire to win without regard for objective truth).

And that is what the law is, at bottom - it is sophistry. Lawyers rarely get to choose their clients, but they always have to advocate on their behalf. So (most) lawyers need to be people who can argue any position, right or wrong, motivated only by the sheer joy of the debate. Legal training, recognizing this, rewards people who aren’t burdened with the need to dig deep and make a judgment regarding ultimate truth. If you can think quickly and analytically, driven mostly by the desire to have your argument accepted, or if you are a brilliantly clever but shallow thinker that tends to quickly and easily believe that your arguments are right, then you have a legal mind.

Which is, of course, not to say that all people who are successful in law school fit this description. Possessing these characteristics will tend to contribute to your success, all other things being equal, but all other things are rarely equal.

And, though this should go without saying, my thoughts here are not “sour grapes”. I did quite well in law school, graduating with honors and so on. I just had to fight for it, against what I felt were my better instincts.