Like most graduate programs, law school is professional school. While in undergrad, most of us studied a range of topics, and most of those were in the arbitrary and theoretical areas. Our real experience came the summers, when we worked, if we worked. Law school is different in some ways: yes you will still be learning arbitrary and theoretical crap, but it's tailored arbitrary and theoretical crap. The most important thing that is tailored is your fellow classmates, who will go on to be your future colleagues.
This is a fact that many 1L's fail to comprehend: these are people that you have to work with. It doesn't matter how awesome your memo was, how thorough your research, how pithy your opinions, at the end of the day you're going to have to be able to see these people on a fairly regular basis, and if they think you're a douchebag, your life just became hell.
I mention all this to get to this point: you don't shit where you eat. Especially if you're not entirely sure where your dinner table is. It seems some 1L's have an uncanny ability to piss off a majority of their peers quicker than Kanye at an awards ceremony. It happens every year. My first year, the infamous e-mail incident gave our law school a certainly unimpressive regional reputation. Thank you 1L. Last year, an individual felt the need to blatantly break SBA election laws, so he decided to run as a write-in candidate. He had to annoy the hell out of dozens of upperclassmen over nit-picky bullshit just so that he could get a blank space on the ballot. I have more fingers than he had votes. Thank you 1L. And if you thought these were isolated incidents, think again.
Consider the case of Dumb 1L for this year's class. This particular individual could not wait a month into law school before he pissed somebody off. For those uninitiated, laptops are the pancreas of law school. Everyone has one, everyone uses one, and while we're still not sure what good they are, they do provide some good comedy material. Everyone and their sister has used a laptop in class to entertain themselves through one of the many boring lectures we're subjected to. As such, several professors have have banned the use of laptops in class in order to facilitate discussion. Considering how many people use their laptop to hide behind during class discussion, myself included, I can understand where some professors would be peeved. The individual mentioned above decided to wage a one-man war against those professors' laptop policy. He made such a fuss over it, that the administration had to convene a student/faculty panel in order to discuss the issue in great detail. (I was selected to sit on this panel, and I'm sure everyone involved regrets it to this day. I'm okay with that.)
Even though the panel did not affect any existing policies or encourage any policies in the future, one way or the other, Dumb 1L wasn't done yet... He figured that he would run for elected office in law school. He would run for an SBA position, where "real" change is made. Even though this individual goes to law school, presumably graduated from college, and is assumed to have at least one eyeball located outside his asshole, he seemed perfectly unaware that there might be rules regarding elections. One is also left to assume that he was an undergrad philosophy major, because he also thought that the election would be about the issues, and not a popularity contest.
Dumb 1L then proceeded to break several of the election code rules, insisted on toeing several others, and was asked to account for his campaign. He ignored all warnings and requests. Failing to take responsibility (i.e. pulling his head out of his ass), Dumb 1L was dealt an insurmountable penalty, dooming him to inevitable failure in the general election.
To make matters worse, Dumb 1L proceeded to follow in the tradition of Enron-great Ken Lay, and took the position that "it's not my fault for breaking the law, it's their fault for enforcing it." Oh, and he did it on his blog, so that it could be recorded and then used so that I can ridicule him. That blog can be found here: http://www.noelbagwell.com/
Let this be a lesson to you, all you budding want-to-be-lawyers: whenever you enter a situation where you're unsure how people feel, what has preceded in the past, or where momentum is going, don't assume that the system is wrong and that you are right. (I'll give you a hint, starting out, you're wrong 95% of the time, and that's not a generalization, it's a rule you should live by). That's Rule #1, as for Rule #2, do your research. That should sound redundant to a student of the law, but you would be amazed at how few people actually take the time to find out whether or not they are wrong. If you followed Rule #1, your task should be determining how you are wrong, and then you should proceed in humble stoicism. And lastly, but most importantly, is Rule #3: after ignoring Rules #1 & #2, do not proceed to piss off the people that have been around longer than you are because you were too dumb to keep your mouth closed.
Yes, I know I'm preaching humility here, and that's as rare as a Law Review orgy, which is why you should pay attention even more. There will always be somebody older, somebody better, somebody smarter, somebody better looking, somebody richer, somebody more eloquent, and somebody more pissed off (that's me) than you are. If you jump into the situation thinking you know better than everybody else, not only are you going to be wrong, but you will just prove to everyone else that you're as dumb as they thought you were in the first place. Mark Twain was a smart dude, and he had a pretty good saying: "It is better to be thought a fool, than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt."
On that note, I'm shutting my mouth.
For now...
