joining the club

On the southbound train this afternoon, I came to the end of my Torts reading for Monday and peeked ahead at the next case. It's Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad, one of those cases that demonstrates to your cocktail-party interlocutors that you went to law school.

Two professors so far have shared different versions of the urban legend where a bum approaches a lawyer and says "Hey, I went to law school too!" The lawyer rolls his eyes and tries to disengage himself from the conversation. The bum continues: "No, seriously! Pennoyer v. Neff!"

There are a few cases like these that reorient my worldview. Suddenly I'm no longer some random woman on a train with a big book in her lap. Suddenly I'm the next link in a massive gleaming chain, exulting in the commonality of the law school experience. There's not a lawyer in practice today who hasn't read Palsgraf. And now I am more like them.

I tried to explain this sense of commonality to someone, although I wasn't feeling so up on it at the time. "Think about graduate education," I said. "Look at medicine, business, engineering, even the humanities. Huge changes in the way they're taught now from a hundred years ago -- not just the technology but the teacher-student relationship, the levels of interaction in class, the responsibilities people have. The law school model, on the other hand, basically hasn't changed in the past, oh, five hundred years, except that now they use *less* Latin."

(And presumably offer training in and access to Lexis and Westlaw, although at this point I only know this secondhand.)

Think about it: a hall full of folks, being grilled on readings by a Socratic professor. Sure, there are now female students (and professors). And we've also evolved admissions criteria that pre-empt much of the flunking that happened in earlier law schools. But how different would the discussion of Pennoyer really have been, a hundred years ago? Particularly compared to the differences in a class in neurology then and now?

thus spake /jca @ October 11, 2002 08:54 PM