law school and learning

Look! Harvard students don't learn any law either!

So let's ask ourselves: what are we doing here? This question goes far beyond what I can credibly write in a short blog post. But let me offer a few alternatives, for your consideration:

• We're here for career advancement. This 'JD' thing is our ticket to a high paying, high status job. It doesn't really matter what we do here, because we'll learn everything we need to know on the job. Our target is a firm with size, money, and prestige. We select our courses and other activities for the sole purpose of making ourselves ideal law firm associates.
  
• We're here for the environment. We're not-yet-fully-jaded intellectuals who like to sit around and discuss social, political, and legal theory. We design our day-to-day lives to satisfy our intellectual curiosity of the moment; we take seminars because they are venues where our voices have less competition, and where we can show off our rhetorical abilities to the fullest. Some of us are also here for a different sort of career advancement: we want to end up as academics, so we can spend the rest of our lives in this environment.
  
• We're here because we couldn't think of anything better to do with our lives. There are no good jobs for a B.A. in English, and med school and grad school were both unappealing. We'll have some difficulty choosing classes and other activities, but there are enough people around that we'll be able to tag along with our classmates and take the classes they take. We'll end up with firm jobs where someone will just tell us what to do all the time, and our indecision and indirection will never trouble us again.
  
• We're here to fight for justice. There are problems in the world, the wrong people are deciding what to do about them, and we want to equip ourselves with the necessary tools and get ourselves into the necessary career positions to be able to combat them. A lucky few of us will find a way to fight for justice right after graduation, and will spend the rest of our lives living on $30k/year, and losing sleep and developing large ulcers as our efforts struggle against corporate lobbying and the short-term opportunism of politicians. But most of us will take firm jobs after graduation, to pay off our loans or to gain experience, and many of us will stick with them as our ideals are replaced by materialism and momentum, which we discover are far easier gods to appease.
  

Am I too harsh? I don't really think any of these paths are better than any others. Some treat the law as a calling, and some a job; both have their risks. I don't know if any of us have a choice of which path we take; I think our character makes the decision for us. But whichever path we're on, we owe it to ourselves not to hold on too tightly, or perhaps not to let it hold on to us too tightly.