I guess I will speak to the on-topics. I do not know how I feel about going in with an assumption of law school as a game of roulette. I find the percentage-type analyses to be weird. I find the default presumption of "not a special snowflake" to be self-defeating. I wonder if there are better question-answer protocols than "what do you want to do" where people have no fucking idea and then get regurgitated information from people who also have no idea. It's good to be conscious of debt and economic value but I wonder if reifying that doesn't make the hivemind complicit in a different way. People have a sense of the universe of possibilities as derived almost wholly from fifthhand received accounts of life that doesn't really lead to the sort of introspection that befits a lib arts major in a liminal stage. I think it's probably worth assuming more heterogeneity of values, outcomes, and interests in general. I don't know. I don't read those boards much.
I hope it will be useful. It seems more properly on topic than any other discussion item so I have put it in the general section.The point in a life where a person seriously considers law school seems like a particularly vulnerable point for indenture and rudderlessness of the sort that can turn a small quarter-life crisis into a devastating mid-life one. I do not propose a full-blown liberation theology of higher education just yet but being more precise with the terminology of the context surrounding the social forces at work is probably in order.
Mods please feel free to add scamblog links that do not operate under an assumption of mediocrity or petty bourgeois ambition
1. Rip it up
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness essential
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_t ... alienation essential
2. Start again
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/#JudVitAct
https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... ociety.htm
essential
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratio_decidendi
Lounge threadsAnonymous User wrote:I'm a later career attorney (about 7-8 years out of school) that started "on track" and veered off. I went to T-14 on a scholarship. Afterwards, I went to BigLaw. I went because I thought the people were smart and I found the opportunity to get an understanding of the internal workings of companies pretty compelling. I also like high stakes situations -- it's just more interesting when the outcome has the potential for great victory or miserable failure.
My firm loved me (I built a decent book of business from well regarded companies as a junior associate) and they let me know that they would be willing to drop a few years off the partner track if I kept going. Making partner didn't seem particularly interesting intellectually or challenging beyond the time commitment, so I left as a midlevel for a non-legal position. People thought I was insane.
I found it very hard to explain to people why leaving was the right decision for me, particularly since I was actually reasonably happy as a lawyer. I basically told people I liked being a lawyer but didn't love it, so I didn't see much point in continuing. Millenial stuff.
This is a very roundabout way of saying that BigLaw is the easy choice but it is rarely the right one. Spending some time to ask why you're going to BigLaw over other alternatives seems like a good place to start. Most people go for money or prestige. They're both pretty terrible reasons since they essentially operate as crappy proxies for actual personal satisfaction. Chasing money and prestige is rough because you're always measuring yourself relative to other people and you're always going to be on the losing end of that comparison. It was easy for me to leave law because I never particularly cared about anything other than working with smart people and learning new things. Once I stopped learning things I valued, I left.
After law, I went into startups. Eventually ran one. Sold the company. Now I'm pretty senior at a company in the middle of massive growth. People seem to think I made the right decision now, but it's largely because I've stumbled back in to money and prestige, which has very little to do with why I'm doing what I'm doing. I enjoy my work because it is complex, varied and skill determinant (rather than time being the primary factor). I'd quit tomorrow if it became something I liked but didn't love.
Casual Marxism:
http://top-law-schools.com/forums/viewt ... 0&t=238118
universal basic income actually makes sense (Posters: please don't shit this up. Mods: please save from autoprune)
http://top-law-schools.com/forums/viewt ... 0&t=238099
"You need to be productive" *destroys wealth* Libs explain
http://top-law-schools.com/forums/viewt ... 0&t=238188
ITT: justify your existence
http://top-law-schools.com/forums/viewt ... 0&t=218686
it's friday *cracks knuckles* time to post about libs all n
http://top-law-schools.com/forums/viewt ... 0&t=234230
Businesslady wrote:I meant to say thanks and maybe if anyone is reading this and wants to pass it along to their liminal friends please do now that I have a more concrete concept of what the hell I wanted to talk about. I hope there can be a special case added to "Unless" that makes people "with the numbers" want to go because I saw the best posters of my generation say "fuck this, I have better things to do with my life" and that's what the LSAC data shows too, right?twenty wrote:As a side note, have caught a couple people in class reading this thread. Doing good things here, fukr of rats.
I want to hear more about how debt itself and not the learned helplessness of underemployment fucks people up before I violate the categorical imperative and start wondering out loud and ignorantly here if "15% of discretionary income over the poverty line, three more years of relative autonomy inside of the liminal comfort of a law school in direct contact with people who know people who make laws for a living, then 20 years and a law degree to figure out how to fix the tax bomb yourself and make other shit better with hundreds of thousands of your dollars at stake" makes debt something to look at from a stock/flow perspective.
If you have grades/scores it feels like now might be a great time to go to law school. Some boomers are and were pretty cool and probably have ideas they always wanted to make happen and some of them probably went into the institutions. Which and where? Like, I mean, that's what "the transparency movement" could maybe help determine next?
Retake as praxis if USNWR is really all that powerful and make schools compete on something other than "jobs." Like, "a future"
I added 2.0 after Transparency in the title because it sounds like startup marketingspeak stuff and people eat that shit up. You can probably come up with better ideas yourselves I bet. Also, I feel weird co-opting something I never really cared about so I can change it later, or mods can if you are someone who feels like transparency is your thing and not mine. Or you can just change the discussion to be about what you think Transparency 2.0 is because all I'm doing is posting drivel and antagonizing posters. I know it is kind of a douchebag move so LMK. Here is Larry Lessig's Code in PDF form which is a cool book and better to read than refreshing status checkers.Port Huron Statement wrote:As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.
In a participatory democracy, the political life would be based in several root principles:
that decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by public groupings;
that politics be seen positively, as the art of collectively creating an acceptable pattern of social relations;
that politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient, means of finding meaning in personal life;
that the political order should serve to clarify problems in a way instrumental to their solution; it should provide outlets for the expression of personal grievance and aspiration; opposing views should be organized so as to illuminate choices and facilities the attainment of goals; channels should be commonly available to related men to knowledge and to power so that private problems -- from bad recreation facilities to personal alienation -- are formulated as general issues.
The economic sphere would have as its basis the principles:
that work should involve incentives worthier than money or survival. It should be educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; selfdirect, not manipulated, encouraging independence; a respect for others, a sense of dignity and a willingness to accept social responsibility, since it is this experience that has crucial influence on habits, perceptions and individual ethics;
that the economic experience is so personally decisive that the individual must share in its full determination;
that the economy itself is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.
Like the political and economic ones, major social institutions -- cultural, education, rehabilitative, and others -- should be generally organized with the well-being and dignity of man as the essential measure of success.
...
If student movements for change are rarities still on the campus scene, what is commonplace there? The real campus, the familiar campus, is a place of private people, engaged in their notorious "inner emigration." It is a place of commitment to business-as-usual, getting ahead, playing it cool. It is a place of mass affirmation of the Twist, but mass reluctance toward the controversial public stance. Rules are accepted as "inevitable", bureaucracy as "just circumstances", irrelevance as "scholarship", selflessness as "martyrdom", politics as "just another way to make people, and an unprofitable one, too."
Almost no students value activity as a citizen. Passive in public, they are hardly more idealistic in arranging their private lives: Gallup concludes they will settle for "low success, and won't risk high failure." There is not much willingness to take risks (not even in business), no setting of dangerous goals, no real conception of personal identity except one manufactured in the image of others, no real urge for personal fulfillment except to be almost as successful as the very successful people. Attention is being paid to social status (the quality of shirt collars, meeting people, getting wives or husbands, making solid contacts for later on); much too, is paid to academic status (grades, honors, the med school rat-race). But neglected generally is real intellectual status, the personal cultivation of the mind.
"Students don't even give a damn about the apathy," one has said. Apathy toward apathy begets a privately-constructed universe, a place of systematic study schedules, two nights each week for beer, a girl or two, and early marriage; a framework infused with personality, warmth, and under control, no matter how unsatisfying otherwise.
Under these conditions university life loses all relevance to some. Four hundred thousand of our classmates leave college every year.
But apathy is not simply an attitude; it is a product of social institutions, and of the structure and organization of higher education itself. The extracurricular life is ordered according to in loco parentis theory, which ratifies the Administration as the moral guardian of the young. The accompanying "let's pretend" theory of student extracurricular affairs validates student government as a training center for those who want to spend their lives in political pretense, and discourages initiative from more articulate, honest, and sensitive students. The bounds and style of controversy are delimited before controversy begins. The university "prepares" the student for "citizenship" through perpetual rehearsals and, usually, through emasculation of what creative spirit there is in the individual.
The academic life contains reinforcing counterparts to the way in which extracurricular life is organized. The academic world is founded in a teacher-student relation analogous to the parent-child relation which characterizes in loco parentis. Further, academia includes a radical separation of student from the material of study. That which is studied, the social reality, is "objectified" to sterility, dividing the student from life -- just as he is restrained in active involvement by the deans controlling student government. The specialization of function and knowledge, admittedly necessary to our complex technological and social structure, has produced and exaggerated compartmentalization of study and understanding. This has contributed to: an overly parochial view, by faculty, of the role of its research and scholarship; a discontinuous and truncated understanding, by students, of the surrounding social order; a loss of personal attachment, by nearly all, to the worth of study as a humanistic enterprise.
There is, finally, the cumbersome academic bureaucracy extending throughout the academic as well as extracurricular structures, contributing to the sense of outer complexity and inner powerlessness that transforms so many students from honest searching to ratification of convention and, worse, to a numbness of present and future catastrophes. The size and financing systems of the university enhance the permanent trusteeship of the administrative bureaucracy, their power leading to a shift to the value standards of business and administrative mentality within the university. Huge foundations and other private financial interests shape under-financed colleges and universities, not only making them more commercial, but less disposed to diagnose society critically, less open to dissent. Many social and physical scientists, neglecting the liberating heritage of higher learning, develop "human relations" or morale-producing" techniques for the corporate economy, while others exercise their intellectual skills to accelerate the arms race.
Tragically, the university could serve as a significant source of social criticism and an initiator of new modes and molders of attitudes. But the actual intellectual effect of the college experience is hardly distinguishable from that of any other communications channel -- say, a television set -- passing on the stock truths of the day. Students leave college somewhat more "tolerant" than when they arrived, but basically unchallenged in their values and political orientations. With administrators ordering the institutions, and faculty the curriculum, the student learns by his isolation to accept elite rule within the university, which prepares him to accept later forms of minority control. The real function of the educational system -- as opposed to its more rhetorical function of "searching for truth" -- is to impart the key information and styles that will help the student get by, modestly but comfortably, in the big society beyond.
http://codev2.cc/download+remix/Lessig-Codev2.pdf
