Law: it's just rules

A recent "survey" by Lawyers Weekly (I use the term in inverted comas as it was run through their Facebook page) found that law students are way more stressed than other uni students. Shocking!

The reasons were down to:

1. A heavy reading load;
2. The fact that many were the best students in their high school, but so was everyone else they're now studying law with; and,
3. That law is an intellectually demanding subject (of course, the last opinion is somewhat coloured by the second).

Here's the thing, the reading load for law isn't that massive. In fact, it's not really any different than Arts or Science. So why don't Arts and Science students rate as highly on the stress-o-meter? In the case of Arts, it's because you don't really have to do very many of those readings to succeed, if your so inclined and aren't merely treating it as a Bachelor of Attendance. In fact, you can pretty much read anything you want on the topic you're studying. Your lecturer/tutor will think you're awesome in writing your essays (because 99% of the time all your assessments are essays) for doing "research", by which I mean reading a few articles, following all their footnotes, and padding out your references. So long as you mount a reasonably coherent argument, that distinction is yours! Oh, and thanks to the fact you'll mostly be writing essays, you'll have weeks to think about it even if you only spend the last few days before it's due actually writing.

In Science, you have to do all your readings and understand what they mean, but the assessments and nature of the subject is far kinder to you than a law exam. For example, in my Science exams I had a large number of multiple choice questions, and even the problem questions had definite, or "Science-y" answers.

The reason law is so overwhelming is it's like all the hard parts of Arts and Science got put together, and all the easy bits were left out. In law, you have to do the all the readings like in Science, but then also mount an argument as you would in Arts, but you usually have to do it in a two hour exam, and it's likely worth 60%-70% plus of your mark...

To use a sport analogy, law is like being expected to run a marathon in the time it takes to run a 100m sprint.

As stressful as this sounds though, take a step back and realise that I'm saying the assessment is hard, not the content, because law itself is really just a collection of rules.

To return to sport, or games, think about any that you like, they all have a collection of rules governing the participants. That's all laws are. They are not difficult to understand. There's merely a lot of them to remember, and they are often poorly communicated. Both of these problems are due to the fact that the law has been made by a lot of individual people, and groups of people (judges, parliaments, etc) talking about the same things in different ways over long periods of time. It would be like, instead of having one rule book for Monopoly, you had 100 and each was written by a different person, but all of them were right. That's how people would get into fights about rules. That's why laws need courts.

Real life is, of course, far more complex than a board game or a sport (some might disagree). Therefore, the rules are more numerous. The rules however, are still just rules, and they are not difficult to understand once they have been communicated in a coherent way. Fortunately law students have access to such coherent communication: they are called textbooks, and there are enough of them out there that if you find one or two incoherent, there's always another.

So, all we are left with is the fact that the law = a large number of rules. Law students don't have to learn that many of them though. Indeed, law firms wouldn't be constantly complaining their grads didn't know anything if those grads weren't taught so little in law school. In my experience, most law students can explain and apply the law quite well to 99% of the situations that occur in real life. The problem is law exams are either written in such a way that: a) assume students are sitting on the High Court bench; or b) are phrased in such obscure ways that are designed to make it difficult to figure out the issues or the solution to the problem. The sad truth about both a) and b) type questions is they both are asking students to do the same thing: discuss the relevant law.

The problem with the "problem question" is that students think there is a solution. There isn't. There is no right or wrong answer. All the marker wants you to do is discuss how the relevant law taught in the course (and that will only be a paragraph) works, and then apply it to the facts. What most students don't realise is that if they just focus on getting the discussion right, the analysis will only be, maybe, three sentences long and will have pretty much written itself. This is because the analysis must rest on the law, and by explaining the law, they've already pretty much done the analysis.

Unfortunately, the way questions are phrased and the time in which they have to be answered, combined with how much of a student's assessment they're worth, makes an unreasonably difficult examination situation all the more so. By now though, you see my point. Law itself, the rules, are not difficult. Every time you drive a car, or pay for goods you are following the rules; obeying the law. You understand these quite clearly, and if you had to work in a situation that involved contract law, or trusts, or banking you would come to understand it very quickly too. If I were to ask you to walk into a law exam though...

So, let's stop pretending law is difficult because we enjoy that look in peoples' eyes when we say we're lawyers. The studying of law is hard because it's "designed" to be (the same way a hurricane going through a junkyard and successfully rebuilding a car would have "designed it"), and if you can get through it then you've proven... something, but let's stop pretending that anyone has proven they're smarter. They might very well be, but a law degree doesn't prove it.