Learning the law

Old Condon Hall

You teach yourselves the law, but I train your minds. You come in here with a skull full of mush; you leave thinking like a lawyer.
--The Paper Chase (1973) (lecture by Prof. Kingsfield)

I recently judged yet another moot court competition at the University of Washington Law School.  The competition was held in William H. Gates Hall -- named after Bill Gates's father, and the home of the law school since it was constructed in 2003.

Gates is a large, modern, efficient-feeling building.  Well designed for turning out modern, efficient attorneys for tomorrow's world.  It wasn't the building where I attended law school.  It isn't my kind of law school building.

My law school class was the last to attend all three years (with the exception of the final quarter) in the original Condon Hall -- named after the first law school dean -- part of the Upper Campus quadrangle complex.  Nothing was efficient or modern about Condon.  Its College Tudor exterior matched the well-worn, wood-paneled rooms within.  Its library stacks, accessible only to students and faculty, covered many floors, and -- in the basement -- burrowed their way beneath the history department's adjoining Smith Hall.

I loved the library from my first day in law school -- a large rectangular reading room, all walls lined with wood cabinet bookcases, filled with the volumes of the West Reporter System, all volumes in matching bindings, containing every reported appellate decision ever handed down in the United States.  I lived in that reading room and, once on the law review staff in my second year, I lived in the stacks as well.  On some weekend evenings, I was the only person using the library -- the room darkened except for the table on which I was working.

Law school today prepares students to be practicing attorneys.  Such practical knowledge was not totally ignored when I was in law school, but law school  prepared students primarily to understand and feel themselves a part of the Anglo-American legal system and traditions, handed down and developing for centuries, dating back to the Norman Conquest.

How to practice law -- how to find the courthouse, as we joked -- was something we would learn after graduation.  It would be taught to us by our benevolent law firm employers, at our employers' expense.  Or it would be learned through trial and error as solo practitioners, at our clients' expense.  In either case, our humiliation in the courtroom would be part of the learning process.

I became a trial attorney -- a fairly decent one, in my humble opinion -- but while in law school I was immersed in the dusty but glorious world of ancient legal theories and the ever-growing accretion of judicial precedents.  I had found my dream world, even if my future work as an attorney relied mainly on the thought processes learned in law school -- how to think and approach factual problems, "thinking like a lawyer" -- and not so much on the substantive knowledge taught in class.

Old Condon Hall provided the ideal ambience for learning the hoary traditions of the past and how to work within them.  New Gates Hall better motivates -- I suppose -- today's students to begin active participation in legal practice while still in law school.

The two approaches overlap to a considerable degree, and both were and are important.  But I loved and will never regret learning the law under the ancient Gothic arches -- both physical and metaphorical -- of old Condon Hall.