Second draft...please brutalize. Forum

[thand42292]

Thanks, NoodleyOne and Richie for your help before-I don't know if what I did was exactly what you were thinking of but I sort of just rewrote the d*** thing. Be grateful to hear everyone else's thoughts. Too nerdy/wonky?

Slowly, but surely we’re shown an ideal through our media, family and schools. Go to college, get a job, get married, live in the suburbs, have two and half kids, drive to work every day, retire, die. To some extent we all chase this, our own personal eudemonia with our own little exceptions and rules (personally, I’d prefer a slightly more urban area). Yet, this only begs the natty, nagging question: what exactly are you supposed to do?
Ignoring the false starts, it was my academic research that was the linchpin in my desire to go to law school. In a class on industrial organization I offered a defense of American Airlines in its anti-trust case. As I pored over documents pulled from WestLaw, I began to investigate the interrelations between the academic subject I’ve loved since my first courses on it in high school, economics, and a potential future career, lawyering. Things I’d been using to conduct my studies previously, the illuminating power of game theory and the fearsome modeling power of statistics, specifically econometrics, could be used to ponder questions useful for the law.
When the presentation came, we were the only one that used legal sources, in addition to the class textbook and economic sources to argue our points. With my legal research, we were able to meld things together to create a fuller case and hence utterly demolish our opponents’ claims based on stretching legal definitions to fit economic models not the other way around. If one buys the right kind of equipment it’s much easier to play the game.
Additionally, my study of Game Theory in university, the science of analyzing strategic relationships between two or more individuals, is a notable reason to go to law school. I feel that my tendency to think about problems in this manner combined would allow me to approach legal questions and studies from a different angle which would profit my fellow students and community.
In my free time I began to develop idea notes. You see; if there’s one thing that’s a million times better than doing actual, immediately useful schoolwork it’s sketching out potential models and ideas and theories that will probably never be tested. I’m good at that.
Almost all the Game Theory and Law articles I could find on line tended to focus on the well-known and admittedly super-cool Prisoner’s Dilemma. However, it appeared to me that in Law there were just as many potential references to other types of games. For example, a location game between two competitors might be a perfect model for juries. However, this would require some adjustment as normally this assumes a majority-wins scenario as opposed to unanimity. Or perhaps we could think of the game theoretic models of an auction to account for jury behavior, in other words we could view each lawyer as bidding for the jury’s attention. Though understanding these factors and similar cases could be a dream achievement for me, this is near impossible for me to achieve without a better understanding of the legal system.
Under Professor Warren Sanderson, I’ve begun to help build statistical models in computer programs R to analyze demographic correlations between variables such as income, education and fertility. Empirical work has proven less fun than high theory. Certainly, I feel as though demographics could be useful to the study of law I haven’t thought of any unique ways to use it yet. However, the wider knowledge of using a standard statistical data processor to analyze and solve the problems facing academia is a skill I feel could mix well with legal research and provide me with different insights into the legal process and argumentation.
Quintessentially, I want to be admitted to your law school because of potential. Not merely the potential that every one of your admitted students has to be terrific lawyers. Rather, the potential here is to give a dreamer the opportunity to effectuate a desire expand a burgeoning legal field, in ways that are profitable and innovative to law, the wider community and humanity.