Law School at 51

Having had to take early disability retirement from one career (I taught college English for 24 years, starting as a grad assistant and retiring as associate professor), I was not sure I had it in me to explore another. For one thing, the illness which forced me to retire also left me with chunks of memory missing, short-term recall lapses, and something akin to ADD that wouldn't let me read.

In fact, the main reason I started studying LSAT questions -- the organizing games, formal logic analyses, and close reading exercises that comprise the law school entrance exams -- was to exercise my mind more than anything else. The questions force the student to consider objective responses and follow logical arguments to their conclusions, and the mental workout was just what I needed.

Of course, what lawyers do is nothing like answering the kind of isolated logic problems couched in consistently reliable language that are found on the LSATs, but the exercise got me thinking about what a degree in law could mean for someone looking for a job as an editor, say, in some obscure government department. I can see myself in a beige cardigan holed up in a tiny loft office with leftover files from the 1970s, where the real work gets done.

I don't see myself as a lawyer, though.

Figuring that taking the LSAT would show me how much progress I was making, I signed up at the LSAC (Law School Admissions Council), a clearing house that lets you assemble all the materials needed to apply to law schools in the US, Canada, and Australia. My pension put me in an earnings category that allowed me to join the LSAC, apply for the LSAT, and have all my application documents assembled for free.

It's expensive, otherwise. The LSAT alone is $130. Who has that kind of money? (Apart from lawyers.)

Anyway, the morning of the first test the weather decided to thunder, lighten, and rain as heavily as I've ever seen down here in the (s)Low Country. I set off with my ziplock bag full of pencils and got bogged down in traffic so reluctant to speed in the lashing rain and wind that it soon became apparent I would never make it to the test center before the time they had designated to lock the doors and start.

After wondering whether I should freak out or not I chose the latter option and then decided to apply some of that same logic and reasoning ability that gets tested in the LSAT anyway.

1. This is the South. Tardiness is a virtue.
2. They've been giving these tests for years. They know that they should get all the test takers there early enough for the inevitable round of questions, seating arrangements, safety pin requests, pencil sharpening lines, requests to go back to cars to fetch driver's license, etc., before they really lock the doors.
3. The weather really was wild; wild enough, I was guessing, for the proctors to look at each other and say, "let's keep that last classroom open and give outa-towners ten more minutes to get here."

And that was the last thing I got right all day.

The first score was so low that I was shocked, then humiliated, then embarrassed. I'm the kind of student who always used to thrive in exam situations; now I had to read sentences several times over, and while I had practiced taking the timed tests and knew I wouldn't have enough time to answer all the questions, I didn't think I'd open the booklet and find it was all written in a new kind of inside-out language (glEnhis).

After hiding under a rock for some time, and deciding that law school was for geeks, anyway, I went to see my doctor who suggested trying meds for ADD. We had been concentrating on other areas up until then, but now I saw the wisdom of at least trying Adderall.

Instant GEEKIFICATION! Concentration was now possible and boy, was it fun--sentences suddenly unfurled their tangled gnarly knotted bits, and stopped crawling off the side of the page.

High scores get you into big schools with reputations, lower scores get you into small schools that are unheard of outside the region. The second time I took the LSAT the score was ten points higher than the first time, but still ten points under what it should have been. The test was readable, except for my favorite section, the logic games. They were written in a proto-Klingon variant of an early dialect only found in sci fi movies.

I didn't even get to draw diagrams for those questions, just stared at them for a while, blankly, and then filled in the answer sheet without looking at the numbers. Oh well.

I applied at LSAC, the online clearing house, and it is an excellent service. The requirements for each school are built into the process, so you can't forget to include some important document or electronic signature. I applied to several schools out of curiosity (as many folk do, I'm sure). The programs I'm interested in involve international and comparative law, and those are only taught at the bigger schools.

In the end, though, I got lucky. I was accepted at a new school in the process of getting ABA accreditation. There are two law schools in South Carolina now, and I'm glad I got the chance to study at Charleston School of Law. It is a thoroughly well conceived institution, the teaching is excellent, and the approach to "acclimating" new students is outstanding.

The truth is that the first semester studying law is not designed to be accessible in any way. This is apparently universal, and is supposed to challenge students, weed out the lazy, etc.

It is like boot camp where all the orders are shouted in an incomprehensible language; a boot camp where you are supposed to carry out the orders [reading knotty cases and writing knotty answers to knotty problems] while simultaneously cooking French cuisine in an international competition and giving a presentation in Serbo-Croatian on the care and grooming of the Alpine Geekweasel.

It was fun to see the younger students handle the workload and still have time to party.

Me? Well. I'm 52 now, and I loved every minute of my semester at law school. It's not for me, though. I've written about the time-honored assault the law has made on the English language elsewhere. I still have to assemble all my ideas about the politics of modern tort law in the US.