Welcome to Law School 2025

Kudos to everyone who is starting law school in this economy and during an authoritarian regime. In this annual episode, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael share their wisdom on how to survive law school. If you're not a 5-4 Premium member, you're not hearing every episode! To hear this and other Premium-only episodes, access to our Slack community, and more, join at fivefourpod.com/support http://fivefourpod.com/support. 5-4 is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto. Leon Neyfakh provides editorial support. Our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Transcriptions of each episode are available at fivefourpod.com http://fivefourpod.com/ Follow the show at @fivefourpod on most platforms. On BlueSky, find Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social, Michael @fleerultra.bsky.social, and Rhiannon @aywarhiannon.bsky.social. Our Sponsors: * Check out Mint Mobile and use my code mintmobile.com/fivefour for a great deal: https://www.mintmobile.com * Check out Quince and use my code FIVEFOUR for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Oh sweetheart, you don't need law school. Law school is for people who are boring and ugly and serious.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  Hey y'all, it's Rhiannon. Guess what? It's that time of year again. Law students across the country either going back for their two L and three L years, or if you are particularly masochistic, you are starting law school in 2025. Brand new one Ls. How you feeling? Bad? Yeah, that tracks. Anyways, since it is that time of year, we are dropping, or I should say re-dropping, our annual now episode, Welcome to Law School. We first released this episode in 2021 at the beginning of the school year. And since then, we've released it every year since

• 0:56Speaker 01

  because we find it to still be relevant, highly accurate, and hopefully helpful to those of you starting law school or just needing a reminder about what law school really is and what it really isn't. So please enjoy this 2025 version of the Welcome to Law School episode. And stay strong, stay woke. See you, guys.

• 1:25Peter Shamshiri?

  Welcome to Five to Four, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have drained our spirits like a law school orientation. I'm Peter. I'm here with Rhiannon.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 1:35Peter Shamshiri?

  And Michael.

• 1:37Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, those are pretty enervating, huh? They really just take the life out of you.

• 1:42Peter Shamshiri?

  An annual tradition here, folks. A few years ago, we put out an episode called Welcome to Law School, where we introduced you to law school, gave young aspiring law students, incoming law students, a sense of what was to come. And we've dropped it every year since. In part because it's useful and in part because it's a great, just a phenomenal reason for us not to have to record a full episode once a year.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right.

• 2:11Peter Shamshiri?

  That's right.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  No, but it's that time of year again. We've dropped this episode every year, like Peter said, since we first dropped it. It is a look at what's to come. I think it's also kind of like a rundown of like, what is law school actually in a real way? If you don't even know, if you're not even interested in going to law school. But also, I think back when we first dropped it and then all the way till today, I think the question that we get the most is, should I go to law school? And a follow-up, we get to that, not a follow-up question, but often a follow-up point of conversation we get is, I did listen to your Welcome to Law School episode. I did hear you talk about how I probably shouldn't go

• 2:55Speaker 01

  to law school. I still went to law school. I'm in law school now. And here's how things are going. So it seems still relevant. Like, I guess we still need to be dropping this every single year, you know?

• 3:08Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, it remains the seminal work on the subject of law school. The Welcome to Law School episode, followed by the Paper Chase and Legally Blonde.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  But it's like, are things really different from four or five years ago when we first dropped it, you know? I think probably when we're talking about like the structure of law school, here's how classes look and feel, that stuff is all the same. But vibes, for sure. I mean, I work at a law school, right? Like, I work at a law school now, and the school year has started. At the time of this recording, tomorrow, we will start the second week of class. And I do think vibes are a little bit different than if you were starting law school in a, in the beginning of like, the Biden administration or something.

• 3:53Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, a lot of people have been asking us, like, what's the point of going to law school now?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:00Peter Shamshiri?

  Right? Now, the, the law is so clearly a fucking joke, right? If the government doesn't have to abide by the law, then why should I go to a whole school to learn about it, right? These are valuable questions to be asking. I'm not sure that we can answer them entirely. I will just say this. If you're asking us, why go to law school? I would assume that that means that you are hoping to pursue a public interest career of some kind, right? And if the question is, is there still valuable work to be done through the law? Then the answer is unequivocally yes.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:45Peter Shamshiri?

  You can make the argument that it's more important now than it was a decade ago. You can argue that more vulnerable people are under pressure now than were in the past. So yeah, I think the utility of going to law school in terms of doing good is still there. The utility of sitting through constitutional law class is through the floor.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 5:07Peter Shamshiri?

  Why you'd be doing that, I don't know. And I'll, and I want to be clear, I didn't go, even when it did matter.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  No, the utility of sitting there and, you know, and still propping up the charade that all of this is something we agree to and all of this is some sort of like objective process and the results in all of these cases are, you know, make sense in a long line of the law, building towards some sort of like higher ideals, fairness, justice, the constitution, whatever the fuck. Like that part, yeah, completely illegitimate. Let the past few years have revealed that to you. But the utility of gaining the legal fluency, of getting the JD so that you can do a certain job that helps people who have certain problems, certain obstacles that they need to overcome,

• 5:57Speaker 01

  or of being a person who is involved in legal thought and the development of the law and the fights that are happening within the law over the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years. These are still incredibly important roles for people to be filling.

• 6:12Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 6:13Michael Liroff?

  In a lot of ways, it's almost easier, in a sense, to find meaningful work. I think 15, 20 years ago, I think you could be forgiven for thinking that like, the most impact you can have would be to do some big, like, high-impact litigation, or get a big decision on civil rights at the Supreme Court, or whatever, and put a lot of pressure on yourself to be truly exemplary. But I think it's very clear right now that the vast majority of people, if not most, or all lawyers, the most good you can do is just like asylum work, immigration work, just helping people, right?

• 6:58Michael Liroff?

  Like navigate what's coming. There's like a real opportunity, I think, to like maximize your efficiency. You know, like be a real like, you're going to do a lot of good with your career without having to, you know, go to a top firm and do shit at the Supreme Court and shit like that. You don't have to worry about any of that. That's nonsense.

• 7:23Peter Shamshiri?

  And if you wanted to do that, this doesn't really affect you at all. Fascism isn't really going to negatively affect you, except that you have to choose between law firms that signed a contract saying that they loved Donald Trump and law firms that did not.

• 7:38Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that career path is still there for you, baby. Don't worry, you know?

• 7:42Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. That's your, that's your moral fork in the road.

• 7:46Michael Liroff?

  It also means like eating, just you're going to lose all the time. Always, always going to lose. I do want to push back on something Peter said earlier. I actually think it was more important to go to law school.

• 7:57Peter Shamshiri?

  You think you should go to con law class?

• 7:59Michael Liroff?

  No, I think it was more important to go to law school 10, 15 years ago. There were no legal podcasts.

• 8:07Michael Liroff?

  And now, if anything, the market is oversaturated. Why pay a quarter million dollars when we can give it to you for five dollars a month, folks? You don't even need more than five for, and there are other legal podcasts. It's insane.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 8:22Michael Liroff?

  There are too many legal podcasts. So, think about that.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Lucky.

• 8:27Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Look, we don't, you're not gonna ever hear us romanticize what it is that you do with a legal career, or what you do with the law for public interest, interested law students. You know, what your focus should be over the next three years is, yeah, I have to jump over these stupid fucking hurdles to get the degree, to get the door open to me so I can have these kinds of jobs. And what do I want to do with these kinds of jobs? I want to get in there. I want to be doing the work. I want to be fighting for regular people in my own community. I want to be going on the offensive for my neighbors, for my loved ones, and for my people in creative ways. And I'm not going to be able to do that legally without the dumb three years.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  But, really important, I think, like, don't let, I think, law students go into this thing. They start law school having internalized, I think, a little bit too deeply, some of the Kool-Aid, some of the bullshit that law school talks about itself. So, I was talking during orientation week with some brand-new one-else, almost one-else, right? In the week before their classes start. One of them was talking to me about a fear about how the sort of hierarchy, the ranking, the competition of law school bleeds into social interactions. Like, they were saying they really are scared of, like, how do you, how do you, like, make good friends and have positive relationships with one another when you're in the system with your,

• 9:52Speaker 01

  when you're competing with one another and where, you know, everybody's always concerned about who's better and who's not, and who's had a better grade and who's not. And to me, it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's pump the brakes. Like, whatever you've been hearing over the course of this fucking orientation, and whatever you read about law school, and whatever the, the, the super crazies are saying on Reddit right now, pump the brakes and remember something that we've always said on this podcast, which is that law students and lawyers, we are the ones who make our legal culture. So just because you're told that this is the way law school is, and now you've internalized it, and now you're afraid of everybody, all of your peers, instead of like, trying to make friends, instead of being like, oh, everybody here is a normal person, just like I am.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  And how could we be working together to be a super effective law students, or doing cool work, or talking about interesting things while we're here? Instead, you're like, oh, I step into the system and it's just the system, and I have to take it for what that is, and I have to be that. Maybe don't internalize all that shit. Maybe actually you can bring with you like your own human characteristics, and your own values and morals, and priorities, and be like, okay, I'm not gonna fully step into this part. Like, just because law school exists the way that it does, doesn't mean that's the right way to exist. And that doesn't mean that's the right way that you have to engage with it.

• 11:15Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, be a normal person, share notes, make friends, study in groups, be collaborative. And then when they let their guard down, that's when you strike.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Got him.

• 11:28Michael Liroff?

  No.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  I fooled him into thinking I was normal.

• 11:31Michael Liroff?

  There was one person in my law school like that, and that person was a freak.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  And nobody liked them, and nobody was afraid of them, and nobody was like, oh, shit.

• 11:39Michael Liroff?

  Exactly.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  I got second to the most sociopathic person here.

• 11:44Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 11:45Peter Shamshiri?

  The only thing I'll add that I'm not sure we touch on too much in the episode is, there are a lot of people that you will meet in law school, from students to professors at administration, that just take it like a little too seriously.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, that's what I'm saying.

• 12:03Peter Shamshiri?

  They're just a little too intense about it. You are, if you're going to law school, probably like in your twenties.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:11Peter Shamshiri?

  Maybe not, maybe a little later, but like, you know, you're, you are early in your professional life, and you're in grad school. You know what I mean?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:20Peter Shamshiri?

  I assure you, this is not as big of a deal as the dean of students believes it is. It's his whole life. That's why he thinks that, right? A professor who's really intense in class is like that because they are, in the real world, very weak and small.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:37Peter Shamshiri?

  And this is, this is the one space where they can assert themselves. Your most competitive classmates are like that because they don't have anything to live for besides this.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  They don't know how to turn the light switch on in the bedroom, you know?

• 12:52Peter Shamshiri?

  You don't need to play these games with these absolute freaks and weirdos. You can just be a normal person.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yes.

• 12:59Michael Liroff?

  Also, it is, in a lot of ways, a great time to be in law school because,

• 13:07Michael Liroff?

  I mean, you're gonna get like, pretty much, one of three professors. One is someone who has sort of internalized and accepted everything that's going on and will be cool. One who's three years into a nervous breakdown because their entire sense of self and the world has collapsed. Or a Federal Society freak who you don't have to respect. And you know, you know, it's like, within a week, you'll know which is which. And it'll be very easy to be in class. And easiest time to raise your hand and just be like, isn't this kind of bullshit? Whenever you feel like something's bullshit, it'll be great. It'll be, it'll be good.

• 13:51Michael Liroff?

  Don't go, but if you do go, enjoy yourself.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. If you do go, try to have a little fun with it, because it's dumb. It's bullshit, you know?

• 14:01Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 14:01Peter Shamshiri?

  There's a rule there, Michael, which is like, if your lib professor is trying to figure out the exact rule that the Supreme Court has put out, that's a trick for a new listener. If they're having a debilitating mental breakdown, that's one of ours.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:13Michael Liroff?

  Yes.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  That's a five-four fam, baby.

• 14:17Peter Shamshiri?

  All right, I think that's it. Here is our annual Welcome to Law School episode.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Smooches.

• 14:24Peter Shamshiri?

  Enjoy.

• 14:29Peter Shamshiri?

  You know, I don't think that there's any way to present a comprehensive theory of what's wrong with law school. Law schools are awash in deep systemic problems. Some of them shared with other ostensibly prestigious grad programs and some unique to law.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:45Peter Shamshiri?

  Like many institutions of higher education, law schools tend to reflect and reproduce the worst elements of the profession. And it's sort of hard to tell where the problems with law school end and the problems with law more generally begin. But we will do our best here to break the worst aspects of modern law schools into their component parts for you.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I think like we're doing a law school episode. And, you know, we went back and forth a lot during prep for this episode on whether we were going to make this like an advice episode. You know, the law school advice threads you see on Twitter. There are whole books written for whinals starting law school with advice about how to succeed in law school. You know, all that garbage. But I think we're not going to exclusively go down that road for a few reasons. One is that there's too much law school advice already, right?

• 15:43Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, and it's all gold. It's all great advice. Every book is like, if you have a baby, give the baby up for adoption.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Well, another reason is that like law school success looks a lot of different ways based on the law student, based on what goals a person has and, to be frank, what law school a person attends. So for a lot of reasons, just doing like a full episode on like, here's some advice for you. I don't think it's like particularly useful or interesting. But I do think like throughout this episode, we will be including like maybe less typical advice. Not your grandpa's law school advice, but like, you know, having been through it, what do I want law students? And young lawyers especially. And particularly if you're, if you grew up poor, if you're a person of color, if you are a queer law student.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  This is stuff that I wish I had known or wish I had known sooner.

• 16:39Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 16:40Michael Liroff?

  Sure. I'm not going to say I have a lot to offer.

• 16:42Peter Shamshiri?

  No. If you are a queer POC incoming law student, wait till me and Michael guide you through your experience.

• 16:55Peter Shamshiri?

  I think we should sort of go through the problems that modern law schools have. And lucky for us, I think there is one that I think can pretty readily be described as the main problem with law school.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, big one.

• 17:08Peter Shamshiri?

  Which is that it costs $200,000.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:12Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. That's too much money.

• 17:14Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 17:15Peter Shamshiri?

  This topic's been covered, but like, it's an institution that is just inherently going to be, because of the cost, more accessible for wealthier students.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 17:23Peter Shamshiri?

  It leads to enormous amounts of debt, which pushes students towards corporate jobs and makes the corporate path much more palatable than it might otherwise be.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  You can't deny how much the debt is a part of your life after graduating from law school. I mean, my loans are going to be with me from law school forever because of the career track that I'm on. I'm never going to make enough money to pay those down. Whereas Michael and Peter had jobs after law school that allowed you to pay down your debt, but it's still an enormous undertaking, right? For years that is with you. I am planning to get public service loan forgiveness, which means that after 10 years of paying my law school debt, the rest of my law school loans will be forgiven. But it's kind of a tenuous track. It's not really guaranteed. A lot of people have applied for the forgiveness after 10 years and not gotten it. So it's just not very sure.

• 18:18Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, there's a very high fail rate with that.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:23Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. And for the record, I did pay off my loans pretty quickly, and I did it by having a big law job.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:29Peter Shamshiri?

  And living in the flex bedroom of a three-bedroom apartment with a 40-year-old man. And also a 23-year-old man, which is just an unbelievable combination that no human being should have to experience.

• 18:45Michael Liroff?

  I had the key to American financial stability and well-being, which is wealthy parents.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Gorgeous. We love that for you.

• 18:54Michael Liroff?

  I did have a friend who was married and he had massive undergrad and law school debt and his wife had undergrad debt. And he was like a fifth year associate at a white shoe firm. So he was making what 300 grand, maybe?

• 19:09Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, something like that.

• 19:10Michael Liroff?

  Representing huge corporate clients. And he lived in a four story walk up. He had a roommate. He and his wife slept on a mattress on the floor in like a lofted space. Like they didn't even have a fucking bedroom.

• 19:27Peter Shamshiri?

  So think before you judge fifth year associates at corporate law firm.

• 19:33Peter Shamshiri?

  So I think this might bring us to another large problem with law schools, which is that the, the people that are in them. It's a bad combination of out of touch professors.

• 19:44Michael Liroff?

  Yep.

• 19:45Peter Shamshiri?

  And students who are disproportionately wealthy climbers and a third party, completely unseen, but the most influential in all law schools, donors. And I think we should probably talk about professors first.

• 20:00Michael Liroff?

  Yes. You know, the sort of classic career track for a professor is somebody who, right now at least, went to one of a handful of schools, Harvard, Yale, Stanford. Sure. Clerked at a high level district court and one of the, you know, more prestigious circuit courts. At the very least was in the conversation for a Supreme Court clerkship, right? Probably interviewed, if not. Sure. Got one. Maybe, maybe worked in the private sector for, you know, a year. Maybe worked in government for a year. And that's it. Right. And that's all they've done. And, but they've published and now they're adjuncts or something and they're on the

• 20:43Michael Liroff?

  tenure track and they hop around from law school to law school until they get tenure. You know, you gotta be smart and driven to do that stuff for the most part, but they don't know shit about shit. I mean, I, I have, you know, worked for a judge and I can tell you that that doesn't make me qualified to like, you know, hold forth on the law.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:04Michael Liroff?

  And I have more practical experience than the vast majority of new law professors do in the field, as do Peter and Rhiannon. I guess reading a bunch of articles by a bunch of other law professors is supposed to be what gives them their authority, but I think that's kind of bullshit.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  I think that's exactly right, although we should say like, that is a culture that is fostered and expected at the top law schools, right? And so at law schools across the country, there are different professor cultures from school to school.

• 21:38Michael Liroff?

  For sure.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  You could go to a school where many of the professors have a lot of practical, real world experience, have actual law practitioner experience.

• 21:47Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, but I think what drives a lot of this is that a lot of top law schools, even, you know, 50 to 100 law schools, they've never quite figured out whether they're trade schools or not.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:59Peter Shamshiri?

  And you end up with these professors who are academics and almost philosophers, teaching students who are going down, in almost every case, a much more practical path, right?

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:13Michael Liroff?

  What you have is a lot of people who did well in law school and believe that it's good because of course they shine in it and, and what it prepares you for more than anything is to be a law professor. That is, that is what law school teaches you how to do.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And this isn't even getting into demographics of, of law professors. The field is vastly, vastly dominated by white men in particular, and it's also going to skew much older.

• 22:44Peter Shamshiri?

  I think everyone, it's like a universal experience that you have at least one professor who like, doesn't really know what's going on.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, who is ancient.

• 22:52Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 22:53Peter Shamshiri?

  I had one, I think it was fed courts, where I figured out his pattern for calling on people and then I would only come in on the days that I was being called on. And you could see on his face that he knew something was wrong, but he couldn't figure out what it was.

• 23:08Michael Liroff?

  But this stuff matters, like the cultures that are prevalent on campus. There's a law professor named Eugene Volokh, who is an eminent First Amendment scholar. And he is also, also sort of infamous for loving to say racial slurs.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a massive piece of shit is what he is.

• 23:29Michael Liroff?

  Yeah. And, and he claims it's like a point of like First Amendment principle.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:36Michael Liroff?

  And he has all these like sort of rationalizations and like backfilling about how, oh, you're going to have to hear this in court, as if any fucking law student, person of color or otherwise, needs to hear slurs from their professors to be prepared to hear them in the real world. Like, it's ridiculous.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:55Peter Shamshiri?

  And also, there's something great about it. I mean, he's trying to make this like academic point about like, we need to say the word that we're discussing.

• 24:03Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 24:03Peter Shamshiri?

  And stuff like that, right? But like, I promise your black students have heard the word much more recently than you think.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:11Michael Liroff?

  Yes.

• 24:12Peter Shamshiri?

  You're like, don't worry about it, dude. Like, we're, like, we're all hearing it.

• 24:16Michael Liroff?

  Yes.

• 24:17Peter Shamshiri?

  Like, he thinks that like, if, if we don't discuss it in this academic, like, discussion, then it's like we're ignoring it. And it's like, no, the world is not ignoring the N-word, dude.

• 24:28Michael Liroff?

  No.

• 24:28Peter Shamshiri?

  We're just trying to use it a little, a little bit less.

• 24:31Michael Liroff?

  Right. We're just trying to acknowledge the humanity of our colleagues and friends.

• 24:35Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 24:36Michael Liroff?

  But so, you know, all these, especially white male law professors who generally think of themselves as liberal and I'm sure voted for Obama and gave money to Biden and all that shit and like, think that they're like, you know, champions for their POC students. But they allow a culture that says to their POC students, you're not welcome, right? That's the message that Eugene Volokh sends, that they don't belong the way white people belong. And then they're not as welcome in the halls of academia. And by treating Volokh... As anything other than a pariah, as recognizing him as an eminent First Amendment scholar,

• 25:17Michael Liroff?

  who has important things to say and inviting him to fucking symposiums and all that bullshit.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:24Michael Liroff?

  You're saying that, you know, that's okay. Nobody buys his arguments because nobody else is saying slurs all the time and being like, pedagogically, he's got a point. I think we gotta say it, guys. Like, everybody knows it's total bullshit. And this is a major issue in a lot of places.

• 25:39Peter Shamshiri?

  And if this feels like isolated incidents, for lack of a better term, I encourage every one L to just wait it out because the affirmative action discussion in front of your black friends and colleagues, it's about to happen. It's gonna happen sooner than you think. And it's about as completely insane and out of touch and uncomfortable as it sounds.

• 26:01Michael Liroff?

  Yep.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I also wanted to say the lack of sort of demographic diversity among law school professors plays out in a lot more subtle ways every single day, right? I was a 1L in a property class whose very old, white, wealthy professor made jokes all of the time about people who live in trailers, when I knew for a fact that there were students in my 1L section who grew up in trailers, right? Made jokes all the time about a used car salesman. Guess what? That's what my dad does. He sells used cars for a living, right? And so it's not to say that it's so normal, that's just the way it is and we

• 26:44Speaker 01

  should accept it. It's just to say that if you're out there about to embark on the journey, if you can prepare yourself to expect a lot of microaggressions, racism, all of the time, that might soften the blow.

• 26:57Peter Shamshiri?

  Maybe some macroaggressions as well.

• 27:00Michael Liroff?

  Just another way that it's gonna be harder on women, on people of color, to get through a very stressful time.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, good point.

• 27:07Michael Liroff?

  Also, Peter reminded me with the affirmative action discussion, before we continue, that another discussion you should just be bracing for yourself already is in 1L crim law. There will be at least one class where you discuss rape, and it's going to be painful.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. It's rough.

• 27:23Michael Liroff?

  There're gonna be people who say some shit or raise some questions and you're like, it's not fun.

• 27:29Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. And then that dude's gonna be like, hey, you wanna go grab a drink? And you're gonna be like, no.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Absolutely not.

• 27:36Peter Shamshiri?

  We're done. You're out of the study group, bro. All right, on maybe what you might call a less systemic note, I think we need to talk about gunners.

• 27:46Michael Liroff?

  Yes.

• 27:47Peter Shamshiri?

  Now, there are different perspectives on gunners among even the hosts of this podcast.

• 27:50Michael Liroff?

  That's right.

• 27:52Peter Shamshiri?

  I will give my opening statement, and then we will perhaps hear a rebuttal.

• 27:59Peter Shamshiri?

  I think the cleanest definition is someone who participates in class discussions to a point that might be excessive such that their classmates become irritated. The gunner takes advantage of the discussion-based format of law school to interject their own train of thought over everything. And as a result, classes are frequently derailed because they think that some perceived nuance in the law that might not even exist and definitely won't be tested is worth chasing down in a 15-minute back and forth with a professor who is so thrilled that someone is interested in his shitty class that he doesn't notice that he's simultaneously wasting the time of 75 people.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Thank you, counsel. You may be seated. Opposing counsel, do you have anything in response?

• 28:45Michael Liroff?

  Yes, I do. I won't deny that I think the behavior you described could be accurately called gunner behavior.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:52Michael Liroff?

  But to me, an important part of law school is the curve. And the idea behind the curve is that it's not how well you do, it's how much better you do than your classmates. And so, a key part of being a gunner is being someone who is trying to, like, at the very least, not help their classmates, if not straight sabotage them. And the excessive talking in class is just symptomatic of this idea that, "Well, if I am fucking raising my hand and jabbering all the time, then the professor will notice me and they'll like me and I will do better." They don't realize that there's blind grading.

• 29:36Michael Liroff?

  Because I think gunning is really more of a one-elf thing. In my experience, everybody sort of chills out after that. So, you know, it's a striving in an obnoxious way.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  If I may interject, I have a question for the responding party. Counsel Michael, could you have ever been described as a gunner?

• 29:55Michael Liroff?

  I don't think I was a gunner.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Aha.

• 29:58Peter Shamshiri?

  Rebuttal requested.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  We'll need some witnesses on this point.

• 30:03Peter Shamshiri?

  It is almost a universal truth that the gunner cannot recognize themselves as a gunner.

• 30:10Peter Shamshiri?

  Because gunners waste time with frivolous or tangential thoughts and questions. To the gunner.

• 30:15Michael Liroff?

  I did not waste time.

• 30:16Peter Shamshiri?

  Their thought or question is inherently important. That is why they must speak it. Therefore, they cannot be a gunner because they cannot perceive of themselves as frivolous. They are unable to see themselves for what they truly are because it would involve a level of self-reflection that they are constitutionally incapable of. It's almost existential. The primary tactic of the gunner when arguing about whether they are a gunner is to redefine the term to mean something more like "try hard" or something along those lines so that they can sort of cast themselves as unfairly maligned for putting in effort. You might bring up the grading curve or things of that nature.

• 30:49Michael Liroff?

  I put in effort and I won't apologize for it.

• 30:52Peter Shamshiri?

  But that is not the true nature of the critique. And I think an honest observer knows that that is not the true nature of the critique. The small number of gunners who do admit to being gunners are the handful who believe themselves to be dominating the class's time and attention because either they are uniquely smart and thoughtful or because they don't really care about the class's time because they are simply trying to climb the curve. Those people are diagnosable psychopaths, in my experience.

• 31:23Michael Liroff?

  Here's what I'll say in response. I was pretty good at law school and I wasn't interested in wasting my time, let alone everyone else's. If I asked a question in class, it's because I thought it would be important for me to know in order to understand the material and do well on the exam.

• 31:39Peter Shamshiri?

  I already addressed this. The gunner cannot perceive of his own questions as being a waste of time. I only want to say one final thing, which is that the really smart students, they don't need to do this shit. The truly smart kids, they play online poker during class, they sit in the back. And when the professor calls on them, they read "rebatum" off the outline that someone else sent them. And then when the professor throws them a curveball, they look him right in the eye and they say, "I have no idea." And you give them a look where the professor knows that he can keep pressing, but it's not going to do anyone a single bit of good.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  There's no more blood to squeeze from this turnip.

• 32:13Peter Shamshiri?

  And then you get an Amyas.

• 32:19Michael Liroff?

  The one other thing I'll say is that there is a culture in some law schools of straight aggression to other students, right?

• 32:26Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 32:27Michael Liroff?

  And there's like infamous in some schools, people will tear important pages out of books in the library so that other students won't get like the information they need to complete an assignment.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:38Michael Liroff?

  That is not only psychopathic behavior, but it is quintessentially gunner behavior.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think that's right.

• 32:45Michael Liroff?

  And I would never do something like that.

• 32:47Peter Shamshiri?

  We think you're nice, Michael. It's okay.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  We love you, Michael. Okay, yes, thank you to both parties. I will render my verdict later based on argument and briefings.

• 32:57Peter Shamshiri?

  And vibes.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and vibes.

• 33:00Peter Shamshiri?

  All right, so let's talk a little bit about law school classes. I think the first thing to go over is the required course load. Law school sort of mandates that you start off with a few specific classes, contracts, torts, criminal law.

• 33:16Michael Liroff?

  Con law.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Property.

• 33:18Michael Liroff?

  Civil procedure.

• 33:20Peter Shamshiri?

  Now, for the most part, I don't have a ton of objections here, but I would like to talk about property law a little bit. Since my time in law school, property law has been slowly yanked out of the primary curriculum at many schools. Property law is a class that's essentially about common law property principles, which

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:39Peter Shamshiri?

  is notable mostly because almost none of these principles have any practical application today as they've been replaced by actual statutes and regulations. Property law is a very American class, right? It's sort of like a

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:51Peter Shamshiri?

  vestigial remnant of a time when the concept of like who owned what land was important to Americans.

• 33:56Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 33:57Peter Shamshiri?

  And so you spend a whole semester learning about what amounts to legal philosophy because it has no practical application in your life.

• 34:02Michael Liroff?

  And what sort of conditions can you put when you transfer the land?

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 34:07Peter Shamshiri?

  Shit like that. And it's so completely detached from the reality of like the practice of law that you have to take other classes to actually get good at property. If you want to do like passing of property, you need to take like trusts and estates. I took a class about zoning laws and variances and all the laws that really govern property in this country, which means that they required me to take property law, but then they had to create an entirely new and separate class to teach like actual property law.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah.

• 34:34Peter Shamshiri?

  A great example of how much of law school is rooted in the past.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 34:38Peter Shamshiri?

  God, it is, it's so fucking boring, dude.

• 34:40Michael Liroff?

  It is. It is really boring.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:43Peter Shamshiri?

  All right, let's talk about grades because almost every law school has an aggressive curve and the result is an intense focus and obsession within the administration and among the students on grades.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Yes. You know, I think something that's really important as we move into these structural, systemic critiques of law school is that law school is not so much about teaching you how to be a lawyer. It is an extended, three-year-long hazing experience. And part of that mandated cultural suffering to bring you into this prestigious, elite club, part of that is an obsession with grades. So first of all, this experience, again, is really different depending on where you go to law school, frankly, the rank and self-awareness of your law school.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  And law schools, even the elite law schools, do grading differently depending on what school you go to, you know? Harvard and Yale sort of are on these...

• 35:50Michael Liroff?

  They don't have real grades. It's fake.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Right. There's a fail and then a pass.

• 35:55Peter Shamshiri?

  You've got high pass. They've just created tiers that don't have the letters.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:00Peter Shamshiri?

  But like, it's the same thing.

• 36:01Michael Liroff?

  It's like, nice boy gets a kiss on the forehead.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Yes, that's exactly right.

• 36:05Michael Liroff?

  And nice boy has been naughty. Those are the grades.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Some schools publicly publish student ranks at the end of every semester, depending on grades, that kind of thing. All of it, I want people to know, is largely bullshit. And all of it, I want people to know, is a culture that you can, depending on where you are and depending on what your personal goals are, opt out of if you would like. So I went to a good law school and we were not ranked or anything, but people talked about their grades constantly, constantly. They talked about their grades in individual classes and they talked about their GPAs all of the time. And even though, on paper, I did very well...

• 36:54Speaker 01

  I never talked about my grades and that didn't hurt me. So to the degree that you can opt in and opt out of sort of individual, smaller aspects of the hazing culture, the prestige obsession of law school, do that.

• 37:08Michael Liroff?

  It makes everybody miserable. You should be making each other feel better and lifting each other up.

• 37:12Peter Shamshiri?

  And success in grades doesn't map onto success in 95 plus percent of the profession.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:20Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. And nor do most of the metrics that the legal field is obsessed with. Like, a lot of people will say, oh, LSAT scores are important because they are strong predictors of success in law school, which is true, but also sort of lacking in meaning. Like, you can go even farther. You can say, success in middle school is important because it's a strong predictor of grades in high school, which are strong predictors of your ability to get into good colleges and your grades in college, which in turn are solid predictors of LSAT, which in turn are solid predictors of your law school grades. All of that is like statistically provably true.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:53Peter Shamshiri?

  But what that is not a good predictor of is your ability to lead a successful life as a normal, happy human being, or even to be a good lawyer.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 38:03Peter Shamshiri?

  Like, the only thing that elite law school grades are a particularly strong indicator of is your ability to get elite law jobs after graduation.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:13Peter Shamshiri?

  The system operates primarily as its own sort of self-contained prestige gauntlet, and the only notable function of it is to churn out sociopolitical elites.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:23Peter Shamshiri?

  If your goal is to be an academic or grub for other prestigious positions your whole life, then yeah, you know, you're gonna need to get into an elite law school and work super hard and get great grades. But if you want to be a good lawyer, I would say you don't really need to worry about it too much.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:39Peter Shamshiri?

  And I have practiced with a lot of people, and I have never really noticed any sort of correlations between who I thought was a good lawyer and who did particularly well in law school.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Right, or what law school they went to.

• 38:51Michael Liroff?

  Especially what law school they went to.

• 38:52Peter Shamshiri?

  Absolutely. And if you're in, like, big law, a pretty safe bet is that someone who was at a lower-ranked law school is gonna be a better lawyer than some schmuck from Harvard.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 39:05Peter Shamshiri?

  Because they let any moron from Harvard walk into a big law job.

• 39:10Peter Shamshiri?

  But you probably had to work your ass off to get in from a lower ranked school. And, you know, the last thing I want to say about grades is if the actual goal of law school grades was to determine whether you'll be a good lawyer, there wouldn't be a curve, right? Curved grading is meant to rank you relative to your peers. But law isn't generally a relative profession. Two people can represent their clients effectively at the same time. The purpose of the curve is to drive competition. And, you know, I think you can make the argument that in something like med school, to a degree where the stakes are human life and health, you can maybe make that argument for a, for a system like that where they want people constantly striving, although they've even run into trouble in in med school with mental health, et cetera, et cetera.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. Yeah.

• 39:52Peter Shamshiri?

  But in law, it's mostly just a way to foster and reinforce a high stress environment that trains students to prioritize prestige and certain formalized metrics of success.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Yep, that's exactly right. And it brings me back all the time to remembering that law school is a business. Okay? Those businesses do better when students have prestigious clerkships that they're placed in after graduating and when students make shitloads of money, right? At base, that serves law schools in the form of big donations, right? All the alumni bullshit that serves law schools more than it does law students. And it puts enormous psychological pressure on students to engage in behaviors that are unhealthy, frankly, right? And so just remind yourself that it's all bullshit prestige obsession.

• 40:50Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 40:55Peter Shamshiri?

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• 41:39Peter Shamshiri?

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• 42:00Peter Shamshiri?

  Oh, God, I think we need to talk, unfortunately, about the Socratic method.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  Yes, the Socratic method. So Socratic method, also known as cold calling, it's the way, particularly the 1L, those doctrinal courses that Peter talked about. It's the way those classes are typically taught in law school. So the Socratic method, it's a model of teaching in which the teacher asks questions of an individual student in a dialogue, a kind of back and forth, that's supposed to support the student in like, critical thinking to arrive at or discover the conclusions that are to be drawn on their own, right? Instead of being told the answers. But the way that the Socratic method is done, right?

• 42:50Speaker 01

  And why it's called cold calling is classically in law school, you're not going to know when you're going to be called on to engage in this back and forth. And you don't know what the questions are in advance.

• 43:01Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  You know, you can see a sort of justification for having this as one sort of teaching method, but it's also really stupid. And part of that extended hazing ritual.

• 43:11Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, I think it started presumably because it resembles certain aspects of litigation and maybe like philosophical dialectics.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:19Peter Shamshiri?

  But I think the real reason that it remains popular is, yeah, because it's brutal. It puts people on the spot. It forces you to be on high alert during class. It can be awful if you get caught off guard or unprepared. And I think a lot of professors and students view it as sort of a rite of passage. And moreover, I think embedded in the adherence to the Socratic method is this sort of reactionary idea that struggle and conflict breeds strength and weed out weakness.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:50Peter Shamshiri?

  And Corey Robin wrote about this in his book, The Reactionary Mind. This is a reliable strain of conservative thought. The idea that in order for people to truly meet their potential, there must be friction and conflict. And you see it in how many professors approach the classroom.

• 44:05Michael Liroff?

  Yeah. You mentioned philosophical dialectics, and I think that's important. If you look at the educational backgrounds of law students and law professors, I think the three big ones are usually government, history, and philosophy. And philosophy is very well represented in law schools. And this is how philosophy classes are taught. And you do the reading and you come into class and then there's a discussion and people offer different points of view and the professor prompts people.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 44:34Michael Liroff?

  It's very similar to law school. But besides not being the way a lot of people learn very well and not necessarily the best way to teach this material, it also, I think, ends up enforcing the idea of law as this sort of abstract and detached and philosophical thing that's not connected

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:56Michael Liroff?

  to the material realities of the people who are affected by the laws, right?

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:03Peter Shamshiri?

  All right, why don't we take a quick break and we'll be back. All right, we are back and I think it's time to talk about journals.

• 45:11Michael Liroff?

  Yes.

• 45:12Peter Shamshiri?

  Law reviews.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Stuff you can do in law school.

• 45:15Peter Shamshiri?

  The beating heart of legal academia.

• 45:18Michael Liroff?

  That's right.

• 45:19Peter Shamshiri?

  Journals are publications that publish what you might call academic research to the extent that that exists in law. And the way that they're run is a small army of unpaid law students.

• 45:32Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 45:33Peter Shamshiri?

  Who field proposed articles from professors and then they select a few for publication and they edit, do citations and all the tedious stuff. Students are encouraged to do it as if it's going to be beneficial for their career. And one very practical piece of advice I have is don't do journal. If you get on Law Review, sure, go for it. That looks good on a resume. Any other journal Is irrelevant and will take up anywhere between five and 20 hours a week of your time. That time is precious. Don't throw it away to like the Journal of Business Law

• 46:15Peter Shamshiri?

  at your school. It is not worth it, I promise. And, you know, money where my mouth is. I quit journal after the first year. As soon as I realized that it was like a viable option, I quit and people are like, oh, can you do that? Like, aren't, isn't your like employer going to ask you questions about it? No, absolutely not. No one ever noticed. Not once.

• 46:32Michael Liroff?

  The other thing about journal, though, is that like for law professors, teaching is sort of secondary. Their primary job is publishing.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, writing about the law.

• 46:43Michael Liroff?

  And whether or not they get tenure is largely, and whether or not they even hired in the first place is largely based on their, you know, success in placing articles and the quality of those articles, the quality of journals they're put in and all that shit. Which means that a bunch of shithead two Ls or three Ls who don't know anything about anything are making decisions that will impact tenure for professors and shape the next generation of law professors, which is so fucking wild and backwards.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:22Peter Shamshiri?

  Not a single party involved is getting a good deal out of this.

• 47:26Michael Liroff?

  No.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  No, not at all. And that's to say nothing of the inadequacy of this kind of peer review, right? This is the lowest possible form.

• 47:36Michael Liroff?

  Students checking your citations.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Right, right. A student who has no experience practicing or doing anything with the law that you're writing about, that makes no sense. In every other field, peer review means other actual scientists, not students working for no money.

• 47:58Peter Shamshiri?

  That's law school. We should move on to the one thing in law school that you should do.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Turning to something that's maybe a little bit more useful, actually relevant to the practice of law. One thing you can do in law school is take clinics. So clinics are law school courses. You're usually getting class credit. And these are special classes that are available, usually to second year and third year law students, where you are actually doing some sort of real world lawyer work under the supervision of a clinic instructor, clinic professor, usually a practicing attorney, whose job it is to oversee the work of law students in the clinic. So I, for example, I was in three clinics in law school.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  I took the criminal defense clinic, the actual innocence clinic, and the capital punishment clinic. And in each of those clinics, you are doing sort of that area of the law. So in the criminal defense clinic, I had real life clients, people accused of crimes, misdemeanors, and I represented them for a semester or for the whole year under the supervision of the clinic instructor, right? Clinics are where you are learning how to do that work well. I talked to a few of my friends from law school in preparation for this episode. And across the board, they said that none of them regretted not doing a journal so that they could do a clinic.

• 49:27Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. Can I ask you something, Peter? Did you do a clinic? Yeah, yeah, I did a couple.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Did you do clinics, Michael?

• 49:33Peter Shamshiri?

  No, I didn't do any clinics. More of a, more of a seminar kind of. Yeah, that's right. I love, I love my seminars.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  It's like, no, I was in a back and forth with my property professor.

• 49:46Peter Shamshiri?

  So back on to the problems with law school. And I think we've peeled back a bunch of layers of this onion. And we are now at what is taught in law school. And the Problems with what is taught in law school. I think the fundamental issue for me is that law schools don't give a good understanding of the history or theory of law. They don't have enough normative discussion in most cases. But then, on the other hand, they also aren't very effective training for the practice of law. Right. Law school is hyper focused on jurisprudence, right? They want to tell you exactly what the state of the law is in most classes. The emphasis on historical and political context is often missing.

• 50:30Peter Shamshiri?

  And as a result, the presentation to law students is sort of as if the current state of the law, the status quo, is almost this force of nature, this thing that simply exists, not something that was built, but something that is simply there and you need to understand.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's a really good point, Peter, about how, on the one hand, there's a complete failure, I think, because law school pedagogy sucks ass. The way the theory is taught doesn't make sense and isn't how most people learn. And then, on the other hand, it's very easy to graduate from law school and have no idea how to draft a contract or question a witness if you don't want to learn those things, right?

• 51:12Peter Shamshiri?

  I'd go the other way. I'd say it's difficult to graduate and know.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  And know how to do it. Yeah, that's a, yeah, really, really good point. And the only way you are tested on what you've been taught, supposedly, is one exam, right? And that's it.

• 51:26Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. What law schools hold themselves out as doing is teaching you a form of analysis, right? You'll hear a lot that law schools don't teach you what to think. They teach you how to.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 51:38Peter Shamshiri?

  What they won't tell you is that built into how to think are a bunch of ethical and political presuppositions that go largely unchallenged. So, you know, law schools teach a very formulaic case analysis where there are a web of rules that can be applied in different circumstances, all intended to foster the idea that you can apply rules to facts and come out with objective answers. Something that Duncan Kennedy discusses in his extremely good piece, Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy, is the false idea that there's a difference between legal reasoning and policy analysis.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:16Peter Shamshiri?

  Policy analysis is expressly about coming to outcomes that reflect our best and foremost values.

• 52:24Peter Shamshiri?

  My policy preference is safe and accessible abortion because I value reproductive freedom, et cetera, et cetera, right? Yeah. What law schools want you to think is that legal analysis is different, that it's simply about applying rules to different situations. But those rules are value judgments. Right. When a court is weighing the interest of the state to regulate abortion in a case about reproductive freedom, that's not just a legal rule, that's a value judgment about the state's role in reproductive decisions. Right, yeah. Legal analysis is policy analysis. It is ethical analysis. It's just done through a web of rules and frameworks meant to simulate the process of reaching an objective conclusion. Right.

• 53:06Peter Shamshiri?

  One of the ways that law schools teach formalistic analysis of the law is to insist that analysis cannot be driven by outcomes. The principled lawyer must follow the legal rule wherever it takes them, even if the outcome is manifestly unfair. And I understand the idea that remaining objective might mean reaching outcomes you don't like. And I think that's true to a degree. But I think that the formalistic insistence on largely ignoring outcomes, which is often taught in law school, is very misguided. Yeah. If you apply a rule and the outcome is plainly unjust, that shows you that perhaps the rule is not a good one. Exactly. That there are circumstances it doesn't properly account for, at the very least.

• 53:50Peter Shamshiri?

  So, you know, should you work backwards from the outcome you want? No. But outcomes are how you evaluate rules. Right. Not only should they not be ignored, they should factor heavily into how you interpret legal rules, into how you do legal analysis.

• 54:03Michael Liroff?

  That's right. And shifting gears a little bit, something that frustrated me at my law school, and I think is pretty common, is that there aren't many or any structured paths in terms of when you get there and say, well, this is the sort of career I want. This is what I hope to do with my law degree. Where like, these are the core courses you need to take. Here are the professors you need to talk to. Here's the clinic you need to take. Instead, everything is just kind of like, well, get a bunch of credits, get a bunch of good grades, get on journal. And you're left to sort of... Grope in the dark about what would be best.

• 54:41Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, and I think one of the results of leaving students in the dark like that is that, you know, between the cost of school, the curriculum they push, the administrative services, and the fact that students don't have a lot of guidance, many schools create a paradigm where the path of least resistance is corporate law. Yes. If you want to do corporate law, it is essentially spoon fed to you. And if you don't know what you want to do, corporate law becomes the sort of default state.

• 55:07Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 55:07Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. If you want to do public interest, at least where I went to school, you have to, you know, ask some people some questions and people will point you to resources. If you want to do corporate law, you can essentially take just about any classes.

• 55:21Michael Liroff?

  Yes.

• 55:21Peter Shamshiri?

  You get emails with updates about corporate law firm hiring and, you know, all the information is provided to you. Right.

• 55:28Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 55:28Peter Shamshiri?

  It's right in your face. That creates a circumstance where a lot of students who just don't know what they want to do, they're disproportionately fed into corporate life.

• 55:38Michael Liroff?

  You spend all of one L sort of underwater, like trying to fight to, you know, keep up and get good grades. And then you're done and you're getting emails saying like, oh, on-campus interviews start in a few months. You got to get your resume uploaded to like, you know, the database. And it's like, if you don't know already what you want to do and what path you're in, it's like, okay, I guess I should upload my resume. I guess I should prepare to interview with all these big firms and do OCI. And the red carpet is laid out for you. It's not like there are alternatives. It's just like, this is what everybody does. And if you want to do something else, like, you're really on your own.

• 56:14Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. And, you know, so people know, law school's three years. After the first year, there is interviewing for corporate firm jobs. You get an offer to go be a summer associate the following summer, the summer after your second year. Almost all summer associates will ultimately be offered a full-time position. And as a result, before you enter your second year, a huge percentage of students, especially at the elite schools, know what law firm they will be working at after graduation.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:45Peter Shamshiri?

  Only one year in out of three.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:48Peter Shamshiri?

  And part of the reason that corporate law firms are doing that is to get out ahead of any career decision that you might otherwise make.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 56:56Peter Shamshiri?

  They could easily do hiring a couple of months before. Why don't they? Because this allows them to recruit as many students as possible. And it puts students in a situation where you feel like you have two choices. One, accept a corporate job right before your second year even begins. Or two, roll the dice.

• 57:16Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:17Peter Shamshiri?

  You don't know what your job prospects are going to be without it. That puts students in a precarious situation and a lot of them are going to choose to just go this, you know, quote unquote, "safe" route and become corporate lawyers.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:29Peter Shamshiri?

  I know a summer associate that put a partner into a headlock at an event jokingly and got an offer.

• 57:35Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 57:35Peter Shamshiri?

  Got an offer for full-time employment.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Gorgeous.

• 57:37Peter Shamshiri?

  It's impossible to blow it.

• 57:38Michael Liroff?

  The only summer associate I know of who didn't get an offer at my firm was at a dinner with a major client and started openly questioning the firm's litigation strategy to the client.

• 57:50Peter Shamshiri?

  Love that.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 57:51Michael Liroff?

  That's how you do it.

• 57:52Peter Shamshiri?

  King.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  Rest in power.

• 57:53Michael Liroff?

  I mean, it makes it super easy. If you can land a summer associate ship, you're set. And then you have two years to cruise.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  That brings me to another problem with law school, which is it's too long.

• 58:06Peter Shamshiri?

  Preach.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  The fact that there's three years of law school is stupid and useless. And again, only serves business interests. Law schools make more money because law school is three years long and it really does not need to be. There are really interesting alternative suggestions or restructurings of law school where everybody would still take the doctrinal courses, but part of the second year or the entire third year could be structured around apprenticeships, practical, real-world experience, where you were actually learning how to do lawyering. Because everybody in law school can agree that at least the third year is an utter scam that is useless.

• 58:51Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. The problem is that if they restructured it, they would have to potentially get professors to teach students how to practice law.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  Rut roll.

• 58:58Peter Shamshiri?

  Unfortunately, they don't know how to do that. It is a huge logistical impediment to this sort of structure. They would need to have a different set of teachers.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 59:10Peter Shamshiri?

  Because the existing set of teachers doesn't know how to teach the practice of litigation, the practice of corporate law, whatever it might be.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:20Michael Liroff?

  Yeah. You know, I can't think of a thing I learned in three L that like helped me in my job. But to be honest, I think can think of very few things I learned in two L or one L that helped me in my practical jobs either, you know?

• 59:33Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:34Michael Liroff?

  I used a lot of con law in my pro bono work and that was, that's pretty much it.

• 59:38Peter Shamshiri?

  So before we move into the very last phase of this, I want to quickly talk about something we've touched on in various regards, but the ways in which law schools foster relationships with government institutions, corporations and big law firms. It is pervasive, especially at elite schools. Law schools foster these relationships because it gives them access to money. It lets them place students into better jobs, which allows them to claw their way up the rankings. It gives them access to fancy speakers at events and so on and so on. And of course, the result is a symbiotic relationship between law schools and moneyed or powerful interests. And because of that, it's hard to conceive of law schools as they currently function

• 1:00:21Peter Shamshiri?

  as ever being willing or able to attack and undermine existing power structures. No matter how many nods to liberal principles they might make, they are just too reliant on these hegemonic institutions to ever be truly dedicated to any sort of reparative or restorative justice. You know, that's why I think the idea of like broad ideological reform of law schools, I mean, it's a lost cause. It's like talking about reforming the government.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  But is it not such an interesting and pervasive scam, though? Because I don't think that like most people know this about law school. I mean, I was one of these people. I don't know if everybody is like this, but I went to law school thinking that everybody there would sort of have, at the very least, an intellectual interest and at most, like me, a sort of passion for the idea of justice. And that is, it's just not the case when you get there.

• 1:01:20Peter Shamshiri?

  No, there's a real institutional endorsement of the idea that law is abstracted from human life.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:01:28Peter Shamshiri?

  I talk about these institutions being intertwined inextricably, but one very simple thing to do would be to prevent like corporate law firms from donating to law schools.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:37Peter Shamshiri?

  My law school had like, classrooms were for sale. Anyone could buy the name of a classroom and they would put a little plaque next to it being like the John H. Dipshit Classroom, right?

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  Right, right, yeah.

• 1:01:47Peter Shamshiri?

  And law firms would buy them.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:49Peter Shamshiri?

  And when we were near graduation, a bunch of us were drunk late night on campus and we snuck our way into administrative offices. And I found a stack of plaques with law firm names on them. They were plaques that you would put above a classroom. They weren't for a specific classroom. All of the classrooms at the time were spoken for, so to speak.

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, were donated for.

• 1:02:13Peter Shamshiri?

  So what we theorized was that they used these to try to bribe law firms. To be like, here's your plaque, all it takes.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  Look at it, it's real.

• 1:02:22Peter Shamshiri?

  Is a donation of $500,000 and we will slap this above the shittiest classroom in our basement and you'll be remembered forever. They got that shit engraved.

• 1:02:36Peter Shamshiri?

  So as we head out, we know, we didn't, again, we didn't really want to do advice because I think students are just flooded with it.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:44Peter Shamshiri?

  But I think it's worth talking about things someone, you know, you wish someone told you. I want to say two things. One is that every year, there's a bunch of Twitter threads about like, here's my advice to one else.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:58Peter Shamshiri?

  And 80% of what you see is demonic, just absolutely without soul.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07Peter Shamshiri?

  Untouched by the light of God. The big one this year was Ian Milheiser, law and policy guy at Vox, whose work I like, by the way.

• 1:03:17Michael Liroff?

  Absolutely.

• 1:03:17Peter Shamshiri?

  And his advice was essentially neglect your mental health.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:21Peter Shamshiri?

  Neglect friendships and other relationships. Prioritize this and do nothing but work for the duration of law school, because that is how you succeed.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:31Peter Shamshiri?

  And that is an awful way to think.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:35Peter Shamshiri?

  You are, believe it or not, even if you're in law school, an actual functioning human being, and these are three years of your prime.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, sexual and otherwise.

• 1:03:44Michael Liroff?

  Person A gets a 4-0, goes to Krevath. Person B gets a 3-7, goes to Cleary Gottlieb, but gets laid many times. Who was more successful? I say person B.

• 1:04:00Peter Shamshiri?

  Like, look, I'm nearing 36.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 1:04:03Peter Shamshiri?

  My knees creak at any amount of movement. It's not like, oh, if I go in this angle or whatever. Any angle, any direction, they creak.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  Yep, uh huh, yeah.

• 1:04:12Peter Shamshiri?

  All I'm saying, all I'm saying is that before you know it, your body will start to visibly fail on you. If you're in law school, you are probably in your mid 20s. You are shiny and full of life. For the love of God, do not sacrifice three years of your 20s or early 30s, or later, if you've gone to law school later in life. Do not sacrifice that for fucking grades. Are you kidding me?

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:38Peter Shamshiri?

  And the fact that this sort of stuff can be marketed to students as advice is disgusting. And I think that it freaks students out, even students who don't want to believe that that stuff's true.

• 1:04:52Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:52Peter Shamshiri?

  When they see stuff like that, they think, well, if other people are thinking like this, then I need to too, right? I need to keep up. No, you don't.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:00Peter Shamshiri?

  You know, we've said it in various contexts. It's just the manifestation of a sick profession. A profession that doesn't know what its ideals are.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07Peter Shamshiri?

  And if I could give one practical piece of advice to young law students, it would be that Everyone treats law school like it's like a different thing. Like, I have arrived in law school and this is gonna be nothing like anything I've ever experienced. It's gonna be harder and more intense and blah, blah, blah. No, it's a class where they ask you questions in class and then there's a test at the end. Like, you're gonna be fine. Yeah. And I say this because a lot of people abandon things that like how they studied before and try to like figure out, what's the system? How do I succeed here? And they think that whatever system has worked for other people will work for them. You don't need to do that.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:45Peter Shamshiri?

  If you study a certain way, study that way.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:47Peter Shamshiri?

  Right? Find a group of friends, study with them. If you study better alone, don't. You'll be fine. Right. Like, just go with what works for you and don't overthink it. Yeah, I agree.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I agree with all of those things, Peter. And yeah, like I said, I've been thinking with some of my law school friends in preparation for this episode and asking them like what advice they wish they had heard. And across the board, people said, you know, stick to your principles, stick to the reason why you came to law school. And my friend Eva said something, shout out Eva, that was super relatable to me. She said, "An idea that was taught to me that didn't serve me well in law school was the idea of keep your nose to the grindstone." I tried that a lot, actually, and it didn't work.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  What did serve me was taking breaks to talk with people, to exchange ideas, to let my brain bump up against the lessons I was being taught and fighting the current when that felt right. Keeping my nose to the grindstone didn't serve me much at all. And so I think that's really important, especially when we are inundated with ritual law school advice, like Ian's, that's just like, you know, you gotta grind and you're gonna work all day long and it's like nothing you've ever done before and you need to work harder and be smarter than you ever have been. And I think in the process, that makes people forget what their strengths are, what brought them into law school in the first place.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  And then that makes people vulnerable to, to the brainwashing, to the, you know, sort of corporate law culture, the sort of funneling process where everybody gets put into this system where one path is made easy and pretty clear for everybody and you have to figure out everything else on your own.

• 1:07:41Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:42Michael Liroff?

  So what worked for me was treating law school like a job and sort of clocking in like nine AM every day and clocking out at five PM and, you know, go to class in between and I'll take breaks and take like a long lunch and just do my reading throughout the day in between classes and whatever. And that gave me more than enough time to keep, you know, up to date with reading and be in class and all that. But what was important about it, what was good about it was the clocking out aspect and the giving myself time every day. That was not law school time, right? That was time to hang out with new

• 1:08:21Michael Liroff?

  friends or, you know, with my girlfriend and just watch TV and fucking chill out and let my brain rest. That really helps push against like this tendency to get consumed, right? Like law school, like the prestige chase, it has like a gravitational pull. And if you're not like aware of it, it's very easy to just get like pulled into its orbit. So I personally think like the nine to five thing was very effective for me, but more important than that specifically is just making sure you mark time for yourself. That is not the law schools.

• 1:09:02Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, yeah. What worked for me was on the first day when I got to law school, I looked around, I found the biggest toughest looking guy there. I walked up to him, I said, what the fuck are you looking at? And he was like, what? I hit him with a left and a right and he went down, beat the shit out of that guy. And from that day on, no one messed with me.

• 1:09:25Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Peter Shamshiri?

  Great. You have to make a statement day one. Yep. I do have a real story about day one, class one, notoriously mean professor. Everyone's there like 20 minutes early, right? We all wait, professor comes in. About five minutes later, student walks in the door and the professor goes, "Late on the first day, I have never in my life seen this." And the student turns around, walks out, and I never saw him again.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  God.

• 1:09:56Peter Shamshiri?

  That's awesome.

• 1:09:59Peter Shamshiri?

  I don't know if he was in the wrong glass, or if he's just the coolest dude on earth. He was like, you know what? No.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  Not today.

• 1:10:06Peter Shamshiri?

  Not, not for me.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Not ever. Yeah.

• 1:10:09Peter Shamshiri?

  No, thanks.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  Goals.

• 1:10:14Peter Shamshiri?

  So, you know, I think we could probably go on about law school for a long time, but that's the basics. A, too expensive, too long, people are too awful. The shit they teach is not good. How do you address that? Stay centered and beat up the biggest guy in school on day one.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  That's it. You got it.

• 1:10:33Peter Shamshiri?

  That's it. Easy, easy. You're gonna do great, guys.

• 1:10:39Peter Shamshiri?

  And on a serious note, you know, one of the best things I did in law school was when I was just full on broke, living off loans. I was like, why don't I just take out another two grand and live off that? Why don't you take out another 10 bucks a month and just fling it over to us at 54? And, um, and we will put it to such good use, I promise. You don't even know.

• 1:11:03Peter Shamshiri?

  Follow us on Twitter at 54pod and hit us up on Patreon and subscribe. Patreon.com/54pod, all spelled out. We'll see you next time.

• 1:11:17Michael Liroff?

  Five to Four is presented by Prolog Projects. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto. Leon Nefok provides editorial support. Our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations. If you're not a Patreon member, you're not hearing every episode. To get exclusive Patreon-only episodes, discounts on merch, access to our Slack community, and more, join at Patreon.com/54pod.