law students' corner
Law Students' Corner by Washburn Law School 1L Section AB NOTE: For this month’s Law Students’ Corner column, Prof. Tonya Kowalski invited students in her section of Legal Analysis, Research & Writing II to anonymously answer three questions about their 1L experience so far. This small project is the beginning of a larger inquiry into how law students’ perceptions evolve during the first year. Some responses have been very lightly edited for clarity.
A
s a 1L, what has most surprised you about law school? It might be something totally unexpected or something that was just very different than you thought it would be. Unsurprisingly, students know that grades greatly affect their careers and are concerned about fairness. • I was surprised that we are largely asked to teach ourselves. • That [apart from legal writing], the classes are basically made up of one or two grades, for example, a mid-term and final. I thought that there might be more assignments or requirements throughout the semester. • The curve has surprised me the most. I have never been graded on a curve before, even in my undergraduate studies. You earned your points individually, and not necessarily against everyone else. An "A" was actually an "A" and not a "C." • Law school professors so far are way more lenient than I thought they would be. The syllabus might say one thing, but execution of the syllabus is different. For example, if you're late to "x" number of classes, you can't sit for the final, and students will be late to that number and then some, and still sit for the final. • I expected that I would not be able to have a personal life outside of school. While I was absolutely incorrect, I have found that there is a great deal of difficulty in keeping both personal life and school in balance. After your first semester, has anything about your law studies so far changed the way you think about justice (e.g. social justice, access to justice) or the justice system itself? Professors often observe that when first year law students confront the malleability of law and narrative for the first time, it can leave them feeling disillusioned, ungrounded, or sometimes empowered: • Justice can be viewed in so many ways because of all of the various actors in creating "justice" in our legal system. There are plenty of individuals who can game the system and
secure "justice" for their client when their client was entirely wrong, but I have also noticed even more individuals who genuinely care about what justice is supposed to mean in our legal system. Justice is also a very biased thing; our legal system is interested in "the greater good" and sometimes that keeps justice from being effective for those who deserve it. • After learning about the justifications European invaders used to take possession of "undeveloped" Native American land, I was struck by the lack of justice in the government now protecting wildlands. It angers me and makes it clear that full justice is unattainable when sought via a self-serving justice system. • So far I am more cynical. Justice to me seems not about what the truth is, but who can tell lies better and/or has more money. As a law student who is beginning to think about longterm career planning, if you could ask your future employers to remember something about what it was like to be a law student, what would that be? Here again, students are acutely aware that the job market is highly competitive, and understandably fear that their strengths and potential may be overlooked in favor of only those few with the highest grades: • I would like them to remember what they went through their first year just trying to figure things out—to remember the people they met and how different life was. • How much emphasis did your first employer place on grades earned throughout law school and your G.P.A.? • When interviewers ask me to explain away my past failures, weaknesses, and underachievements, they should bear in mind that my sincerity is not only limited by truthfulness, but it is also limited by stigma. I am not free to discuss valid factors to the extent they invite prejudice and discrimination. In other words, you don't know what you don't know about my recovery from mental illness. You don't know what you don't know about the labor of stripping away my social conditioning. You don't know what you don't know about . . . me. n
www.ksbar.org | March 2018 21