Sweet Valley Law

It is the conventional wisdom that law school is like high school. We have lockers, we have a student council, we even have a prom. Lately, however, I have started wondering whether law school is more like middle school.

Think about it: middle school is when you first discover that there is such a thing as innocence because POOF! it's already been lost. While most (not all) law students show up to 1L year savvier than their seventh-grade selves, there is something to be said about the brutality of the curve and the fierceness of its competition. I graduated from a university where it was possible to graduate without ever having taken a course for a grade; as long as you passed the requisite number of courses, then they slapped a baccalaureato on you. (In my case, in artibus.) Imagine my surprise, then, when I showed up to law school where an A- is, in fact, very different from an all-out A, and where I'm not the only one who cares about my grades. Innocence lost.

Middle school is also when I first discovered the destructiveness of gossip. People cower at the thought of dark alleys; I cower at the memory of the seventh-grade lunch table: fabricated rumors pitting friends against each other, alpha girls establishing who would be admitted to lunch that day. While I am fortunate not to attend a law school where students actively sabotage their classmates, I do recognize how quickly word spreads in a place where everybody knows everything. We talk about one another because that's a genuine way to bond in a small community. Mutual friends are common ground for people meeting for the first time. But sometimes I wonder whether it's too small a step from common ground to battleground. Never in law school have I ever been the victim of middle school-style guerilla gossip, but the proximity of law school gossip to guerilla gossip is just too close for my comfort.

(Which basically means, yeah, those girls did a doozy on me in eighth grade.)