As part of this year’s inaugural issue, I’m pleased to introduce what I hope will become a regular column in your law school paper. Contempt of Course will cover the most absurd, obscene, and ridiculous aspects of legal education. The pact I propose in exchange for your readership is that I will not use these pages to be kind, reverent, or deferential to anyone who doesn’t deserve it.
Coming to you as a late-term transfer student, after having spent my 1L year in exile on the foggy Halifax peninsula, it seems appropriate to begin with an account of the journey, and an analysis of the concept of “elite schools”.
Having glided effortlessly between top-tier and somewhere-less-than-top-tier institutions, I find myself well-positioned to disabuse our student body of the idea that we are ipso facto among the best and brightest simply by virtue of our being here.
After you were accepted to study law, before actually entering the program, you probably found yourself enduring heaps of praise from proud friends and relatives. You may even have found yourself being lavished with slightly too much congratulations, as if to suggest that part of the achievement was emancipating yourself from your meaningless pre-law existence. (Those who know what I mean will know it right away.)
As an upper-year student, if you happen to transfer to a town with a more active clinic program, or just some half-decent Szechwan food, you’ll find yourself once again the victim of over-praise. Even a law professor of mine from Dalhousie beamed when he heard that I was jumping ship for U of T. “You must have done really well,” he said.
Must I have, though? He had been my professor; he must have known that that wasn’t the case. Could it be that he trusted the vague concept of elite institutions over his own professional assessment?
Being praised is embarrassing enough (especially when you know—as we all secretly do—that it’s not entirely deserved). At least it’s better than all those tiresome first-year assemblies where you’re repeatedly told “how lucky you are to be here.” I always thought that was a funny way to address paying customers.
It’s not true what they say: the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. You don’t hear about our students leaving because they’re hoping to exchange their superior job prospects for some quantity of “school spirit” or community. But no matter where you are you can be sure there’s always a greener patch out there somewhere. So one only hopes that students here feel at least as much inferiority with respect to the Ivy League as they do superiority towards their colleagues in this country.
But wait. What about the legions of intellectual welterweights who fly out of Yale and Harvard as if it’s nothing more than a finishing school for the bratty children of congressmen and oil tycoons? Notice how it’s the “top” schools that maintain “legacy” (i.e. nepotism) considerations in their admissions standards. So which is it: do they take only the best and brightest, or also their progeny?
U of T’s claim to distinction—besides those bogus magazine rankings—is largely based on it having the most discriminating admissions standards, highest average LSAT score, etc. In other words, not much. Even the mysterious figures behind the LSAT racket claim that their childish test is a meaningful measure only when combined with undergraduate marks, and even then they concede it can do no more than predict success on first year law school exams.
Still, pretend for a minute that admissions standards do reveal some general truths about students’ intellects. Limiting acceptance to only the most elite students would only serve to make a school elitist. An elite school takes pre-approved “top students” and, for a small fortune, certifies their position among the elite by calligraphing their names on oversized pieces of parchment. A good school, by comparison, would take students who don’t perform so well and, you know… teach them.
A credulous type could point to all those success stories—scholars, politicians, captains of industry—who seem so often to come out of elite schools. And yes, U of T credibly claims to have more graduates landing firm jobs and so on. But what does that really tell us? Perhaps employers can sense our alumni’s natural effervescence. Or maybe they simply do as my prof did, and let reputation supplant their own judgement. The success of U of T grads doesn’t prove that there are top schools; only that the world behaves as if there are.
It may be impossible to attach any kind of meaningful ranking to law schools. For now the most we can honestly say is that, just like Lisa Simpson, we are lucky enough to attend “the most expensive and therefore best” law school in the country.
