[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation

American law schools are their own strange subculture of the education world, graduate school but not really research degrees (though a species of research is in some ways the heart of the exercise), professional schools but full of stuffy academics, and deeply, weirdly hierarchical and full of completely unearned egos. There are very few Richard Feynmans even in the finest law schools.

No one is (generally) allowed to represent clients without passing the Bar Exam, so professors feel emboldened to indulge their own personal quirks, whether that's psychologically attempting to weed people out or simply washing their hands of any responsibility for their students' success whatsoever.

I didn't actually dislike the guy (he really was quite the character), but it's fair to say that his idiosyncratic method of teaching didn't resonate with me. After a rather stressful first semester of trying to play the game exactly so, I was doing okay, but as it went on I realized that the reward for spending all your time and doing well in law school is stuff that basically makes law school never end (big commercial jobs with 2000+ billable hours, judicial clerkships, etc.), and that LAW SCHOOL SUCKS. My GPA is thus like a modestly sloped roller coaster, going up at the start and fading for the rest of the ride, finally leveling out when I took my last semester pass/fail as a visiting student to make my long-distance relationship not long-distance.