Good grades in law school for regular people

I've already written about getting good grades in law school without doing much work. Here's how the regular law school people do it.


First year's classes and professors are decided for everyone, so these people just work as hard as they can. They stay up all night reading. They join study groups to make sure they have no free time.

In the second year, they take lots of seminars and clinics. These usually are small affairs, with around ten students per class. Here is where real law students thrive, as I haven't met one yet who doesn't like the sound of his or her voice. Participation in class discussion is pretty much the grade. Whoever talks the most is virtually guaranteed an A. This works in regular classes too, but those often have a lot of people, so one doesn't get as many chances to speak as in a seminar. Why do law school classes have so much discussion? There's really no pedagogic reason, i.e., for purposes of learning. It's mainly law school professors' way of stretching five weeks of material into 15. Additionally, this is how the professors were taught when they were students, so they don't know any better.

Regular law students like seminars because the grading isn't based on a blind curve with extra participation points (in my case it was blind curve with points taken away for non-participation). Moreover, again because of the few people taking the course, kissing the professor's ass is much easier. After class, in a large course, there's usually a crowd of students accosting the professor, trying to ask some smart sounding question or saying how much they enjoyed the class. I've heard students complain that professors leave early. Seminars better facilitate eager law students' discovery of what the professor had for breakfast. I believe this activity after class is called networking. (Incidentally, my law school's career office, in its job guide, stresses asking guest speakers questions after their lectures, complimenting them, and encourages one to invite them to coffee. This is how most get their law jobs.)

Another way that students do well in class, and this applies to the large classes, is to do all of the above and cheat. There are many ways of cheating, but one in particular I found clever.

I knew one, by the name of let's say Melvin, whose father, in addition to being a lawyer is also a shrink. (Melvin went to undergrad with me and apparently took a couple of the same courses, but I never noticed him.) Melvin is a smart guy. I had all my first year and a couple of others with him. He always got the right answers and stayed on top of his reading. Very sharp guy (annoying too, but that's for another post).

I noticed that he never took tests with the rest of the class. And then I discovered him, after a test, coming from another, smaller room. His dad wrote him a letter, maybe calling him a knuckle dragger, so he would have extra time for tests. I don't know if he had extra time on the LSAT or Bar, but he did well on both. He graduated in the top 10 (not percent) of our class. Extra time always helps on tests. I myself always left early because, while I have the ability to bs when there's nothing more to say, I find law so distasteful I'd rather get a lower grade than sit in the testing room much longer. Plus, there's a long line to submit the test to the old lady proctors if one doesn't leave early. But anyway, Melvin, a smart guy, always on top of things, had an advantage. And the best part is that he did it out in the open.

I didn't cheat in any way because I was too lazy to.