Law School Psychology

I've been working my way through Ward Farnsworth's The Legal Analyst for the last couple of weeks and have been enjoying it a lot. Especially when I got to the section on psychology. I'm a big fan of blogs like You Are Not So Smart that talk about the biases that are inherent in everyday thinking. And I've been very, very slowly making my way through Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which covers some of the same ground, but much more in-depth. The point being: learning about this stuff is freaking fascinating.

So I was really excited to see a section dedicated to exploring some of the ways these cognitive biases influence how law is practiced. Farnsworth does a great job talking about a few different examples of those biases in the law: anchoring, the endowment effect, hindsight bias, the framing effect, and of particular interest to an incoming law student like myself, self-serving/optimism bias.

So, this last one seems pretty applicable to the discussion of incoming 1Ls like myself. Incoming law students are derided a lot for their misguided optimism about job prospects and how well they'll do while in law school, and there's been a huge wave of websites/articles whose sole purpose is to crush that optimism, trying to get the message across that law school is a bad idea for most people. I think most people set on law school must kind of imagine it like those weird statues in Labyrinth that attempt to dissuade adventurers from their true path. FOOLISH 0LS, RETURN FROM WHENCE YE CAME. ONLY PAIN AWAITS YOU IN LAW SCHOOL. Yeah, whatever, statues. I'm on my way to a fancy legal career.

But what about the students already in law school? Are they better served by realistically evaluating their slim chances at being at the top of the class, or by going in expecting that they'll blow everyone out of the water with their sparkling legal insights? I was talking to my mom the other day, and she told me I wasn't allowed to get anything less than an A while in law school. "Uh, I don't think you understand how law school works," I said. "I'm pretty sure I'd be lucky to get any As, even if I was doing really well." But maybe I'm being too realistic. Wouldn't I be better served going in with the highest expectations of myself?

(Semi-related sidenote: some law schools have adopted alternatives to the letter grading system that appear to have been put into place solely to preserve students' sense of self-worth. See Harvard's grading policy.)

In this article on the relationship between hope, optimism, and law school performance, the author reports that a study that measured hope and optimism at the beginning of 1L year shows that hope has a better correlation with law school GPA than does the LSAT. Whoa. Optimism didn't have that same correlation with GPA, though it did correlate with satisfaction with life. The way the two terms are described in the article is as follows:


"Optimism is the expectation that the future will be good, regardless of how this happens," said Kevin Rand, an assistant professor of psychology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. "Hope is the expectation about things you have actual control over." 

Okay, so hope having positive expectations of yourself, and optimism is just thinking things are going to work out fine. Got it. That makes sense; you do have to do something to get good results rather than just expecting them. But oddly, this is also in the article:


...but research specific to law school has found that pessimism, or a "healthy skepticism," actually predicted academic success. 


So which is it? Pessimism or hope? Are they mutually exclusive? I'm not really sure how these findings fit together. I'd like to think that I can be hopeful and still exercise healthy skepticism, but "pessimism" seems to imply something more than just skepticism.

related link:

"Except in One Career, Our Brains Seem Built for Optimism." article from the WSJ that brings up the issue of pessimism and law school success.

Better Off Ted

And now for the part of this blog where I geek out about something other than law school.

A few weeks ago, thanks to the almighty Netflix, I found a new love: Better Off Ted. It's a show that aired on ABC in 2009-2010 about workers in a research and development department in megacorp Veridian Dynamics, appropriately named in the great bland businessy-utopian tradition. It's not the sort of show where there are many overarching plot lines that matter very much, but that's not a problem— BOT makes up for it by being clever as pretty much anything I've seen on TV and by doing some amazing satire of office culture. And it's weird in the best sort of way. It doesn't rely on that awkwardness that programs like The Office and Peep Show are good examples of, the type that conjures up this horrible second-hand embarrassment that I personally can't handle without getting squirmy. (I love Mitchell & Webb, but haven't managed to get past the first season of Peep Show because of that. It's just too painful.) Instead, BOT is full of delightful/disturbing moments like the following:


(Linda places her hands on Phil's cheeks)

Phil: "Now I know what a beard of fingers must feel like... it's just as I had imagined."

-

Phil: "I've never been this close to your neck before. Which is the perfect flesh pedestal for your head."

FLESH PEDESTAL. I can't get over this phrase. I had to pause the show for a good minute while I took it in, and then stop it several times afterwards when those words came back into my head and I started giggling uncontrollably.

-

Veronica: "A female mentor would have been very valuable for a young Veronica, bursting with potential, yet vulnerable, like a fawn in the woods, but tough, like a fawn in the woods with a machine gun."

Linda: "So you're saying you, or this terrifying, murderous fawn, could have used some guidance?"

Veronica: "Yes, we would have liked that. We're going to raise more money for this charity than it has ever seen before. The forest will run red with the blood of woodland creatures who doubted little Veronica and will now pay with their furry little lives."

-

Aside from these amazing individual moments (which each episode is full of), the premises for the individual episodes are fantastic. The AV Club did a nice write-up of the episode where the new motion-sensor system installed in the building has a glitch: it can't see black people. And then there's the episode where a man that dies on the job is turned into a messiah-like figure to increase productivity, complete with complimentary company-provided WWJD (What Would Jenkins Do?) wristbands. And there's Medieval Fight Club.

In most of the episodes, there are these little promotional segments for Veridian Dynamics, which in a lot of cases are hilariously (uncomfortably?) close to their real-life counterparts. For example:

So. I'm not sure that I had a real purpose in mind when I started writing this post; it's really just an outpouring of my love for this show that was taken from this world far too soon. I suppose my point is: you should watch it if you could potentially see the humor in a company trying to weaponize pumpkins. Because that happens. 

Things I'll Miss About Texas #1

(My brother, age 28, enters the room, walks up to me and rubs his elbow against my shoulder.)

Brother: "This is an awkward elbow rub. It's how I show affection."

(Walks to door, pauses, comes back and uses his other elbow to rub my shoulder.)

"And this is how I show disdain."

One sad thing about moving to Minneapolis for law school is that there will be significantly fewer of these stories. Yes, it will be very sad indeed.

Pre-Law School Reading

I've heard a lot advice on what you should (and shouldn't) do in your pre-1L summer. I've already decided my top priority is going to be to get settled in Minneapolis, and then to explore the city and relax before I'm sucked into the law school void. But I'm also inclined to do some law-related reading beforehand, not in the sense of trying to actually learn the law or memorize anything, but just get myself more acquainted with some other law-related stuff. My dad's recommendations are On the Nature of the Judicial Process by Benjamin Cardozo and The Bramble Bush by Karl Llewellyn, which are the things he read before going to law school. So I'll start with those and hope they're enticing enough to stick with.

I also have a couple of books that fall into the Overly-Thorough-Handbook-for-Neurotic-0Ls genre, Law School Confidential and 1L Of A Ride: A Well-Traveled Professor's Roadmap to Success in the First Year of Law School.  I had Planet Law School as some point too, but I guess I didn't think too much of it since it was tossed. I've skimmed both of these, but I don't remember much about either of them. I'll probably take the time to revisit both of those once it starts getting closer to September and my law school-related neuroses kick into full gear.

I visited BU back in March for an accepted students day thing, and one of the professors suggested his own book, The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking About the Law. I downloaded a copy and am currently about 2/3rds through it now, and it's proving to be interesting (and dense) reading. It's not about specific laws, but what sort of considerations and thought processes are behind certain types of laws and policies. I have no idea how helpful this might be in law school, but I'm enjoying it enough to where it doesn't matter. (Also, it taught me about a type of social dilemma sort of thing I hadn't heard discussed before, the stag hunt. It's worth looking into if you're interested in implications of the prisoner's dilemma and game theory.)

Another book that's high on the to-read list is Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas by Dale Carpenter. First of all, this is supposed to be really good. It's also written by a UMN professor and is about an important case that took place in the homeland, so I really have no excuse not to read it.

Outside of those things, I kind of want to revisit some of my favorite books I haven't picked up in a while. I've been saving some of David Foster Wallace's stuff to read, and I definitely need to work some Gaiman in. And then I have a sort of tradition of taking on an enormous novel for summer reading; previous years have been Infinite Jest, 2666, and The Corrections. Maybe I should break with the pomo trend and go for something different. Hmm.

Yep, that's my summer reading plan. And like every summer reading plan I've made, I'll probably get to about two of the books I mentioned.

Happy Mother's Day

My mom's thoughts on her gift, a back massager thing that looks vaguely like a life vest:

"AGH. It feels like someone is stabbing me. It's like I'm being shot with a machine gun."

Later, as she described how it felt: "POWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOW."

Apparently my brother and I failed in our mother's day mission. Next year, I'll aim for something less likely to be described as "stabby."

Things My Father the Attorney Has Been Paid In (Other than Money, Obviously)

- a motorcycle

- pecans

- candles

- cake (as of today, two varieties)

I should have somehow worked this into my personal statement.

"I want to be a lawyer like my dad, so I can get paid in cake."

My Relationship with the LSAT: It's Complicated

I think about the LSAT a lot. It's the basis for my current job, so I guess it's unavoidable. It's kind of like I've been in a weird long-term relationship with it for the past four years, one that started when I took a free practice test on a whim my sophomore year of college.

(cue flashback sound effect)

I did really well on that test for taking it cold, and it was gratifying. I think most people tend to gravitate towards things they do well at, and I'm certainly no exception. The seed was planted. Maybe law school is for me. Okay, maybe it happened before that, in my freshman year of college, when I started listening to LSAT Logic in Everyday Life. If I take that as my first real LSAT-training, I've been thinking about the LSAT since 2006. Six years of LSAT stuff rattling in my head. Dear lord.

I took the test for real after my junior year of college, and scored well. Even so, I figured I had nothing to lose by retaking, so I did the following October. I scored a couple of points worse, which made me sad, and also kind of pissed off at the test. I hadn't put in any extra work for that retake, so I'm not sure what I expected. 

After one unsatisfactory round of law school applications (see previous post), it was time for LSAT #3. I studied my ass off. I put the work in. You could have put together a (really, really dull) Rockyesque montage of me going into various coffee shops and spending several hours of quality time with prep books.

And then I spent almost the entire night before freaking out, unable to sleep. Well done, self. Test #3 for me was an Oct. test too, so I had to be super early. Which, even if I had been on a normal person sleep schedule at the time, would not have been ideal. Sleep-deprived and with way too much caffeine in my system, i did a repeat performance of LSAT #2. Oddly enough, I remember my dinner after receiving my Sad LSAT News. I was eating broccoli, and it seemed like the saddest broccoli in the world.

I sent off another round of law school apps, this time, very early in the cycle. Again, not the results I hoped for.

For all the hard work I had put into the test, I wanted to get something out of it. So, I was back at the coffee shops for the next several months. And on LSAT #4, the stars aligned, an angel smiled down on me, and I got enough sleep the night before to not screw myself over yet again. After a month of vacillating between believing I got a perfect score and believing I messed up horribly (and checking TLS, where people spent their time trying to talk about the test without talking about the test), I got my score back and was definitely pleased. I tried to communicate to some of my roommates how a four-point increase was totally worth stressing out about the test for several months, but I think some of my joy was lost on them. 

If I consider myself to be 24 (tacking a few month on), I will have spent 1/6 of my life (or a 1/4 of it, if you take into account the podcast-listening) doing some sort of LSAT-related thing. I haven't decided quite how I feel about that yet. But I'm definitely looking forward to finishing up my current round of classes I'm teaching for this June test, so I can break up with the LSAT (or at the very least, take a much needed break) and move on to properly stressing out about my upcoming 1L year.