How to Think Like a Lawyer
Law school’s nonsensical curriculum and teaching methods are often excused with a simple aphorism: “You’re learning to think like a lawyer.” It’s true, though–there is something to the notion of thinking like a lawyer. Thinking like a lawyer isn’t particularly unique to the legal profession, but I did learn to think like a lawyer in law school from one guy–professor and legend at Michigan, JJ White.
He was a gruff old guy, ex-Air Force, author of the authoritative treatise on commercial law (Uniform Commercial Code with Summers), and he liked to ridicule and mock students. He got away with it because he was incredibly funny. One catchphrase he had stuck with me. He’d ask a student a question of fact or law on a particular case, and as so often happened, the student would go on a verbal walkabout of legal jargon and nonsense. When the student was done, Professor White would start out with an apparent compliment: “Everything you said was true,” Professor White would say–and the student would perk up, glowing in the professor’s affirmation in front of his peers–“but none of it was useful,” Professor White would finish.
“Everything you said was true, but none of it was useful.”
That to me, is the essence of thinking like a lawyer.
There’s a type of person I like to categorize as an ineffectual intellectual. It’s someone who knows a bunch of stuff and will tell you interesting books they’ve read–and they’ve read most of them–and interesting, perhaps counterintuitive thoughts they have. It’s someone who Radiohead might satirize in their on point but heavy handed “Fitter Happier” as the “concerned (but powerless).” “An empowered and informed member of society.”
One thing that I like about law is that it requires you to make decisions. You’re supposed to be judgmental because you need to render judgments. Law students often develop this paralyzing sense of equivalentism–one the one hand there’s this, but on the other hand, there’s that–but this changes in the real world. There’s a muscularity to discourse because there’s something at stake–the point isn’t just to espouse what’s true, it’s to make decisions, hard decisions, on the basis of what’s discussed.
Usually in life, you make a decision and you find yourself eating Chinese for dinner instead of Mexican. When I was a law clerk on the federal court of appeals that’s in charge of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, I had the opportunity to see the power of a decision first-hand. We were considering the stay of the order to remove then-88-year-old accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk as we were watching live TV of immigration agents putting him an ambulance to take him to the airport where he’d be put on a plane and sent to Germany to stand trial. We granted the stay of removal, and we watched as the car turned around and drove Demjanjuk back home, all because someone waved a piece of paper with a judge’s signature on it and words that said that Demjanjuk wasn’t to be removed today.