A Note from the Editors-in-Chief
The law school experience has undergone a notable shift in the past two years, not just at the University of Virginia, but across the country. Recruiting has moved up, drinking has slowed down, LSAT and GPA medians have risen across the board, and the general level of anxiety for new students is now resting somewhere above a simmer but below a boil. I’m here to say, it’s simply not that serious.
All of you 1Ls at UVA Law have already achieved one of the most difficult parts of the law school experience: getting in. While it would be disingenuous to say that law school is easy (because in fact it’s pretty hard), law school, especially at UVA, can be really fun. It’s meant to be fun. You’re probably paying somewhere from forty to eighty-five thousand dollars a year for the privilege of attending this place. And, in exchange for your money, there is a dedicated fleet of people working around the clock whose near-sole purpose is the advancement of your education, and a large part of that is getting you to enjoy it.
Those of you who worked after college, particularly in some sort of dreary, gruelling, high-stress behind-a-desk job, will rightly look forward to these three years as a brief reprieve from the demands of capital-R capital-L Real Life. In Real Life, someone pays you money to do things for them—things they can’t or don’t want to do. At the Law School, the opposite is true. You are paying the School to do something you can’t or don’t want to do: that is, to teach yourself blackletter law, and to imbue in you the plasticity needed in order to think about the areas where the law turns from black to gray.
This is a soul-sucking, mind-bogglingly dull task to undertake alone. Very few people are Abraham Lincoln, John Marshall, or Andrew Jackson, who each taught themselves the law on their own, to varying degrees.1 Most of us are closer to Kim Kardashian, who has struggled to pass the bar without a traditional legal education. To remedy this, the Law School provides you many things. It surrounds you with peers going through the same things you are. It puts you in a lovely spot in the Shenandoah mountains, surrounded by foliage, wineries, wide-open skies, and rolling hills. It encourages your fellow students to cook up softball games, bookclubs, theater productions, basement parties, exercise groups, and movie nights. It brings world-class faculty, being paid top-tier moolah, to find inventive and exciting ways to teach the same Criminal Law 101 class to a new crop of students, year after year after year.
All this to say, at the risk of sounding like a condescending paternal-type figure, that you are really extremely unbelievably lucky. Even luckier than you know. I don’t expect you to feel this way on the fifth day of class, or even the fiftieth day of class. But at some time this semester, you will be sitting around a table, with people you will soon come to know as friends, and this sentiment will dawn on you, and it will well up inside you, and you may even be compelled to speak on the subject, and you and your peers will share in the moment and you’ll lean back and sip your drink and think “Damn. I am lucky as hell.” And it will be true.
This is not to tell you to indulge in this understanding. It is not to say that you should skip class or readings to go gallivanting around, especially as a 1L. It’s just to make you look up from your book at the library table, and look around, and be grateful that you don’t have to do this really difficult thing alone. And that it isn’t life-or-death whether you get the best grades, or the firm job, or the clerkship. And that this thing, though difficult, is actually pretty fun.
Hopefully, this UVA sentiment is imparted onto you. And double hopefully, you will find the time, in less dire-seeming circumstances down the line, to make it fun for everyone else too. Please accept our very warm welcome to UVA Law from the Law Weekly. We’re so glad you’re here.
