Chapter 1: Decision to Apply

My decision to apply to law school was shrouded in such ignorance about the legal profession that I find it hard to reconstruct what was going through my mind. I bought one those guide-to-the-law-schools books and remember sitting cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom in my parents' house with the oversized paperback open to an outline map of the United States decorated with a couple hundred little dots scattered over it like crumbs on a table. I'd be going to one of those dots, but my imagination refused to give me a picture of what it was going to be like.

Today's applicants have the luxury of much-better-informed ignorance. They can go online and see what the campus buildings look like in bright sunshine (even if the sun never once shines during the academic year), look at the smiling mug shots of the professors (even if they never once smile in class), and take virtual tours of the libraries. But all that information still won't tell them what it's like to attend the place.

The book was crammed with information that refused to assemble itself into any recognizable pattern. Trying to follow it was like reading a novel whose pages have been shuffled—there was a story there, but it wasn't telling itself. I learned how many volumes each school's library had. To a literature major the numbers seemed very small, in the mere hundreds of thousands—and that was a full generation before the Great Age of De-acquisition brought about by the proliferation of electronic resources, which have done to historically interesting law books roughly what synthesizers did to studio-based musicians. But knowing one law school had 400,000 volumes and another had 400,001 didn't tell me which one to apply to.

I also read numbers representing student–teacher ratios, average entrance-exam scores, percentage of applicants accepted, and tuition. (Seen in retrospect legal education was virtually free in the early 1980s, though it didn't strike any of us that way at the time.) And, above all, I read numbers representing each law school's ranking.

Or, rather, RANKING, because ranking is the single most important datum about any law school. The meaninglessness of the ranking doesn't detract from its importance. Lawyers are trained to accept arbitrariness (we'll get to the why and how), and numbers don't get much more arbitrary than the annual rankings of law schools.