Book review: The Slacker's Guide to Law School

Clearly, The Slacker's Guide to Law School is not intended for me. The author, Juan Doria, emailed me and asked if I would review it if he sent me a free book, and I said sure. Now, the slacker thing to do would be to just blow it off once I realized, wait a second, why would I spend my time reading a guide to law school when I'm a second-semester 3L? But I said I would, so I read every word.

It was actually pretty entertaining. I even laughed out loud a couple of times, like when he laid out a strategy to get other people's outlines. (If you're attractive, you can flirt, and if you're ugly but your dad is a partner at a big law firm, you can do people favors; but what if you're ugly and your dad is a bum? You'll have to read the book to find out.)

I liked the laid-back approach of this book, and agree with its philosophy that you can do fine in law school without being all stressed and competitive about it. It echoed a bunch of things I've said on this blog over the years, like: avoid the library during exam time; don't worry about what other people are doing; skip the things you think you're supposed to do if you're not really interested. It also had some great points to make about, for instance, the value of staying in your hometown for school, and the uselessness of the briefing method they teach you during your first week.

The entire first chapter is devoted to talking prospective applicants out of going to law school. Any attorney or law student will tell you this, but I don't think it can be reiterated enough that you should only go to law school if you want to be a lawyer! (The book has an alternative: if your relatives are really pressuring you and you don't have anything better to do, make them pay for it.)

The book is very autobiographical. It's based on the author's own law school experience, with a couple of anecdotes tossed in about some of his friends. So I'd recommend taking this book with a grain of salt. Actually, take any book about law school with a grain of salt, or maybe more like a salt shaker.

The autobiographical approach bothered me in some ways. The author makes clear in the first chapter that he wishes he hadn't gone to law school in the first place and that he never really wanted to be a lawyer. Then in the rest of the book, he talks about how boring and pointless law school classes and activities are, and strongly suggests that the actual work most attorneys do, like legal research and writing, is so dull that nobody could possibly enjoy it. Yeah, okay, maybe if you don't want to be a lawyer, a lawyer's education is dull, just like if you have no interest in physics, you'd snooze through a course on quantum mechanics.

He also seems to assume that most law students' primary motivation is money, and at one point says that nobody respects law school grads who go into public service or government work. I'm too lazy to look it up, but he says something like, "Nobody's going to be impressed that you took a job as a public defender." Maybe it's because I go to a school where a large firm is an easy option, or maybe it's just the people I hang out with, but I think the opposite: that people who do the virtuous work that doesn't pay get a lot more respect. There may be people who are obsessed with the rank of their firm just like they're obsessed with the rank of their law school, but I don't think that's everybody. Law grads who take noble, or radical, or off-the-beaten-path jobs at my school tend to be admired and envied by people who don't have the guts to do that.

One more quibble: I dislike the attitude that you're the consumer of your education and you don't owe your professors the courtesy of being prepared for class. A class is a community, not just a commodity that you're paying for. The professor is a person who's trying to teach you something, and it only works if students live up to their end of the bargain by engaging in the process. The best classes I've had are ones where everyone participates, even if it's forced by an aggressive Socratic method. In the worst classes, everybody's checked out and shopping or reading ESPN online. It's true that you can sometimes get decent grades without paying attention (although I'd argue that, especially at schools where you learn less black letter law, paying attention in class is at least 80% of studying for the final) but it makes for a pretty unsatisfying educational experience. Of course law school sucks if you're just trying to get through it, and so is everybody else, and nobody really cares.

Overall, I would recommend this book as a refreshing read for someone who's already stressed thinking about law school. I know I would have appreciated it back when people were telling me that I'd end up divorced and miserable after my 1L year. It has lots of valuable tips and provides reassurance that you can have a good time during law school. If you're the obsessive researching type like I am, I'd recommend reading another book like Law School Confidential to supplement this one. If you're not, just read this book. The other ones seem designed to cause anxiety; this one is the opposite. But if you get past the first chapter and decide that you still want to be a lawyer, just keep in mind that you might actually like law school. Even slackers can be nerds.

Update: Here's a great blog post for law students-to-be, in a similar vein.