Mar 102006
I had lunch today with a friend from law school. We were talking about how few of our classmates we keep in touch with. The conversation turned to our law student days and my friend said, “It [law school] was full of Republicans. I thought there would be more people like me, people who wanted to change the world, but most of them only seemed concerned with how much their paychecks would be.” And she kind of had a point. When I got to law school, I quickly realized I had no interest in any sort of private practice and I never really felt like I had much in common with most of my classmates. The few lasting friends I have from my law student days are all people who chose public interest or nontraditional career paths. I’m not implying that law school primarily attracts greedy, self-centered people (although there were times when I was ready to drop out and go to grad school), but I think the culture of law school is unavoidably geared towards preparing students for private practice. Unfortunately, those of us who were interested in other options sometimes felt a little marginalized.
