Advice to First Years: Pick it Out of the Hat
posted by Dave Hoffman
Everyone is giving advice to first-year students these days. Good stuff! I was asked to contribute some thoughts to the first-year class during their orientation, speaking for Temple’s faculty. My (short) speech, enhanced with some inspirational hyperlinks, follows.
* * *
I’m honored to have the opportunity to address you on behalf of the law school’s faculty. As you might imagine, because this is an important day, the invitation came accompanied with certain stage directions.
I was told, above all, to be brief, to try to be funny, and to express the faculty’s sense of its relationship to you.
This stage direction was necessary in part because law professors are so unused to giving lectures, or inspiring anyone with gentle humor.
Rather, our normal approach, when faced (as I am now) with a roomful of students, is to pick some likely candidate – usually someone who is looking down – and ask them what we’re supposed to be learning.
If that poor student doesn’t know the answer, I usually call on someone else, on the theory that the best way to learn judgment is to watch error. This of course is the vaunted Socratic method. I’ll confess: from my side of the room, it’s terribly fun.
I was pretty tempted to use that approach today, calling on one of you, hoping that you would be brief, funny, and wise. But this seemed cruel, and would unnecessarily put my tenure at risk. So I turned, as I often do, to one of our great works of literature for inspiration.
I assume that many of you have read the Harry Potter series … For those that haven’t, imagine that at the beginning of the school year at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a small, shabby, sentient hat sorts students into various dorms which will be their homes at school. As the hat explains, Gryffindors are brave; Hufflepuffs are just; Ravenclaws are smart; and Slytherins are cunning. The way it works is that you put the Hat on your head and it tells you what’s in your heart.
It struck me that it might be very, very cool if I had a magical hat, which could right now sort you into the lawyers you will be. Now our lawyer sorting device might not be a wizard’s hat, but instead, a small, dented, formal bowler, kind of like this one. [At this point, I brandished a bowler, sort of like the ones in the picture to the right.]
How would our law school sorting hat divide you? Coming from the perspective of someone who teaches the best-ever-subject, contracts, you’d first have the calm & wise Ravenclaws who draft complicated transactional contracts; next the brave Gryffindors who do public interest community service; the just Hufflepuffs, working in the government; and finally the crafty, Slytherian-like, advocates who try cases.
Because it’s only a small, dented, hat, these choices are too limited. After all, your opportunities leaving this law school are many, among them: drafters and courtroom stars; counselors to businesses, and businesspeople yourselves; sports agents, judges, politicians, advocates, and better-informed citizens. But even so, if we had a working Law School Sorting Hat, you wouldn’t have to agonize over these choices. You’d just put this on. [Waving the bowler in their direction]
While you might welcome this development, I am not sure I would. Why not? Well, as it turns out, the most exciting part of being a member of the law faculty is the opportunity to work with you in figuring out what kind of professional you want to be. Unlike college, we fully expect that each of you will leave Temple with the tools at hand to make a significant, immediate, impact upon the world. Most of us take great satisfaction in your success, and will do anything we can to help you for the next three years in making it possible. We expect our interactions with you over the years to be a very slow, less magical, mechanism for sorting. Getting it done today would leave us without the best parts of our jobs.
As the sorting hat explains in a later book, division and specialization has its down side, and I (like the hat) feel it necessary to warn you. While from the faculty’s perspective, sorting is guidance, both rewarding and fun, from your perspective the sorting we do may sometimes feel quite different.
If you aren’t careful, and don’t hold onto the ambitions and dreams you have today, you may be tempted to believe that the sorting we do here is comes only to this: A, B, C, D, and, sometimes, F. It’s quite easy to fall into that trap – to conflate doing well on tests with worth, and to believe that your success for the rest of your career will be predicted by your first-year grades.
Now, you can’t avoid sorting by grade, but you must refuse to let yourself be defined by your exams, even and especially if you do well. Your faculty won’t do so, because it knows that some of our most successful graduates – however defined, but including money, power, influence, fame, and happiness – haven’t been the ones who earned all Owls. Law is a profession where being the kind of person who tests well certainly helps. But caring more about your job than the next lawyer is the way to achieve long-term success.
So here’s my advice to you. Your faculty wants to be part of the first kind of sorting – wants to mentor you and waits eagerly for the day when you become colleagues at the Bar instead of students at the door. Your faculty hates the second kind of sorting – grading – recognizing it as the mind-numbing, confidence eroding, and inexact curse that it is. For our sakes, and for yours, I therefore urge you to spend time in our offices talking not just about grades and exams but also about how to find satisfying careers.
Thanks for lending me your time today: I wish you the best of luck.
August 21, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Posted in: Law School
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Responses (12)
Dan Markel - August 21, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Very nice stuff Dave!
JrL - August 21, 2008 at 2:36 pm
“some of our most successful graduates – however defined, but including money, power, influence, fame, and happiness – haven’t been the ones who earned all Owls.”
My uncle used to say that the “A” students become professors, the “B’s” judges, and the “C’s” make money. Of course that we before he became a judge….
lawprof - August 21, 2008 at 3:27 pm
This excerpt was striking because of what’s missing from the list:
But (conspicuously) not law professors, because we all know that a Temple J.D. has a slim chance of generating any attention on the faculty hiring market.
Likewise:
But not colleagues in the true sense; i.e., on the same faculty or even within the same profession (the legal academy).
dave hoffman - August 21, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Oh sheesh, lawprof, there are lots of things missing from that list, some of which may even be conspicuous: public defenders, prosecutors, FBI agents, arbitrators, regulators, patent agents, etc.
Though Dan S.’s stats were grim for Temple JDs (along with pretty much everyone outside of a small handful of schools) in my view this is partially a selection effect, and there is something too about grooming.
Do you really think that the legal academy and lawyers are separate professions? I’m not so sure.
lawprof - August 21, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Dave: I guess that I’m bothered by the pep talks given to new law students around this time each year at hundreds of law schools saying things like “If you try/work hard enough, you can [realize your dreams and] do whatever you want [with your degree from XYZ Law School].” Now you certainly didn’t go that far in your speech. And thank goodness you did not say something like “You’re the best and brightest!”
To answer your second question: Yes, it appears to be the case. Specifically, I think law profs like to draw boundaries between themselves and practitioners. For example, look at some of the ridiculous rifts between clinical and research professors at many schools. Also, w/r/t hiring, some committees believe that there is an inverse relationship between years of practice experience (beyond a 1-2 year threshold) and the candidate’s potential to become a productive scholar.
lawyer - August 21, 2008 at 5:12 pm
The time to be honest with students about their futures is well before that 1L speech. If we know that students are adding about $90K in debt to get that degree, they ought to be told the key stats before they enroll. Told the bar passage rates (including by class rank), and told the graduates’ employment rates and salaries.
Lynn - August 21, 2008 at 5:49 pm
David,
The speech was creative, and am sure well-delivered. But I have to agree with both lawprof and lawyer that the deceit that is law school right now is borderline fraudulent (you and I had this conversation earlier this summer, as did another of your former students … you deleted her later acidic comments, but not before you had to read and digest them).
There are too many attorneys and too many law schools. Student loans are a train wreck waiting to happen, and grad student like attorneys are going to fall the hardest.
So while it was neither requested of you to address this while speaking, what a novel thing it would have been for a lawprof to be have the courage and clarity to be real about the world their students face (and that they – the profs – never did, or ever will).
I think you’re a nice guy, Dave, but I don’t know how people like your brother in law at Drexel Law sleep at night. Great for them: the experience of building a law school. What a scam for their students … I have friends doing doc review in Phila., sitting between Cornell and UPENN grads. There is no way, with the five and six established law schools in the region, that anyone is going to hire a Drexel grad.
But I abbreviate my comments >> you will neither agree with what I’ve written, nor allow it to remain posted for very long. But maybe – just maybe, David – you feel half guilty about the trade you’re engaged in.
bill - August 21, 2008 at 7:37 pm
To be fair to Dave, even if you’re teaching at Yale, the odds are against you. According to the Leiter blog data, Yale’s “per capita” score is .43 in producing law teachers, which is actually less than 10% odds (86 out of 1000 grads from 2003-07).
The next 3 producers of lawprofs, HLS, Stanford and Chicago, bunch up at .18, .17 and .15 respectively, which translates into less than half the odds of a Yalie. That is, less than 5%.
As bad as that sounds, a 1L’s odds are considerably longer anywhere else — no other school, including such elite places at Columbia, Michigan and Berkeley, breaks .10. A fine school like Penn is at .06, meaning 14 out of 1250 students got law teaching jobs, just barely more than 1 in 100.
Now not everyone wants to be a law prof; that said, if they did, the odds would be even worse.
The data on the long odds:
http://www.leiterrankings.com/jobs/2008job_teaching.shtml
lawprof - August 21, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Bill: Thanks for the data. Regarding law teaching, my point is that grads from Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago who WANT to enter law teaching at least have a chance; whereas grads from places like Temple don’t have a prayer.
Regarding Drexel, it is clear that Philly did not need another law school. At one old-guard Philly firm that I know well it is hard enough for Temple, Villanova, and Rutgers-Camden folks to even raise an eyebrow unless they’re on the law review, etc. Drexel U opened a law school because it’s a cash cow. A prof there told me a few months ago that the school even plans to boost enrollment. Amazing. And I certainly don’t buy the notion that Drexel’s co-op program will make its grads more competitive.
Lyrissa - August 21, 2008 at 8:48 pm
One of the most depressing parts of being a law professor is watching students’ enthusiasm for law die after they get their first set of grades. Some of them never recover. There are very successful lawyers out there who still have chips on their shoulders about their law school grades.
Sean M. - August 22, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Good to see we’re fighting out the entire conception of law school in a feel-good first-day speech. I think the best line was:
“I was pretty tempted to use that approach today, calling on one of you, hoping that you would be brief, funny, and wise.”
I imagine some 1L trying to say, “Uh. Pass?”
Christine Hurt - August 25, 2008 at 11:11 am
I thought your speech was very enjoyable — I bet the students will remember it!
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