Law school is harder than grad school

I’ve been debat­ing the dif­fer­ence between law school and grad school since I started a PhD pro­gram this fall. (I’m talk­ing about the human­i­ties and social sci­ences — I don’t know if this applies in other fields!) Granted, grad school is a huge amount of dif­fi­cult and com­plex read­ing. Since it’s essen­tially pro­fes­sional train­ing for aca­d­e­mics, it also means learn­ing a new work­ing envi­ron­ment, a new kind of jar­gon, and a new bureau­cracy. What it isn’t — and what law school is — is a whole new way of think­ing about and approach­ing the world.

Now that it’s exam sea­son, and I’m fac­ing the prospect of read­ing 100 Intro to IP exam answers, I con­front again the great puz­zle: What is it about the Law that is so dif­fi­cult for peo­ple to “get”? I think I have the answer to that. The Law is hard –uniquely hard, I’m tempted to say — because you demon­strate your exper­tise not so much by dis­play­ing what you know, but by dis­play­ing what you don’t know.

via The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Why Studying Law is So Hard.

This cap­tures at least one aspect of the alter­na­tive way of think­ing that’s required by study­ing law: issue spot­ting. That is, find­ing and focus­ing on what you don’t know instead of what you do. The entire 1L year is like this: shak­ing up your analy­sis and forc­ing you to approach prob­lems in a dif­fer­ent way.

Yes, grad school requires learn­ing new approaches, new the­o­ries, new ways of think­ing. Some of this even makes your head spin. But it sim­ply doesn’t require the same rad­i­cal realign­ment that law school does. What you learned as an under­grad­u­ate applies to grad school — but not so much to law school. It’s like start­ing a new job, ver­sus emi­grat­ing to a new country.

And that’s why I think law school is harder than grad school.