divine angst

Recovering Yankee gets it right. Law school is heaven when you’ve been working for a few years.

What RY says that really hits home is, “despite the truckload of reading I do seven days a week, this really is better than having to haul yourself into a meaningless job on a regular basis.”

Absolutely. Yes, the reading can be tedious. Frankly, I’m already tired of some concepts that we’re just getting started on (reliance damages? argh!). But knowing that what I am doing is for ME is so precious.

I’ve worked with a lot of different people doing a lot of different things and I’ve been lucky that most of my jobs have been the kind where I knew I was making some kind of difference. But even that knowledge couldn’t make the fire rise up in my belly as I did the same tasks over and over. Feeling good about the end result didn’t make the process any less numbing. Even worse was doing things that I knew would be rendered obsolete within a few years, either because of lack of institutional support or the forward march of technology. I could often feel good about the substance of my job while dreading the day to day process.

Why do I think my legal career will be different? Here’s why: Today, I heard our dean say something that really struck me: a legal education is a general education. Most of us won’t be in our first jobs for very long. We will move on to other stages in our multi-job careers. And we will be able to do that because of the nature of the law, because we all will have a general background. I hope my legal career leads me to a place where I enjoy the substance of my job as well as the process.