Samara’s Reviews > One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School > Status Update

By recognizing the variation in the law…the Supreme Court is accepting the idea that no one rule can be thought of as somehow ‘natural.’ We see the law…only as an imposed order, a response to political and social tradition and not somehow sent from heaven.

Before I came to law school, there were even times when I thought of myself as an intellectual.

Correlations between exam success and worthwhile achievements in the practice of law are speculative at best…the narrow and arbitrary nature of exams will continue to dictate a narrow and arbitrary means of selection for training for the bar. And that is a peculiar state of affairs for a profession and an education which claim to concern themselves with rationality and fairness.

Right now admissions at most American law schools are based on predictions of how well applicants will do in school, which is to say how high they will rank on exams. Those forecasts, based on statistical formulae that combine LSAT scores and college grades, are often quite accurate. But that amounts only to saying that American law schools admit people who will be good test-takers rather than good attorneys.

"But over the long haul," …”[the exams] do give you some reading on the way your mind works in certain situations— one skill. And if you're making a career choice—or if someone is making decisions about you—it's better to know that than nothing at all.”

But some people could not be convinced that lapses were expected, and walked around for weeks making wan jokes about having their bags packed.

And instead they had been intellectual quick-draw contests, frantic exercises that seemed to place no premium on the sustained insight and imagination which I most admired in others, and when they occurred, felt proudest of in myself.

Finals were regarded with an institutional earnestness which had left my classmates and me believing for months that the tests would offer some consummate evaluation, not simply of how well we'd learned, but—almost mystically-of the depths of our capacity in the law. Exams were something to point to, a proving ground for all the hard and sincere labor.