Penn Law Journal - Spring 2002

Soon enough, I figured out what an outline is (the summary of an entire course packed into fifty to eighty pages that law students use as their bibles for an exam) along with many other phrases (like “holding” and “stare decisis”) that had seemed so foreign that first day. I began to feel as if I had tapped into the secret language of lawyers. For example, lawyers do not seem to like to say words of more than one syllable, shortening class names to such abbreviations as “crim,” “con law,” “civ pro,” “con lit,” or “con crim pro.” At Penn, I began to learn about both the intellectual and technical aspects of law, quickly forgetting that non-lawyers don’t hold the same procedural fascination. For example, when I try to explain where I’ll be clerking next year, the details of the court system make a non-lawyer’s eyes immediately glaze over and I just say quickly, “it means I’m helping a Judge.”

As I progressed through my first year, a strange thing began to happen. I began to question the ideals and passions that I had taken for granted. One day in Constitutional Law I got into a debate with another very liberal student over the policies of interracial adoptions in the context of Loving v. Virginia. Passions were high. However, the professor acted as moderator and asked us both a series of questions, forcing us to justify exactly why we believed as we did. It turned out that neither of our knee jerk reactions was adequate to make a legal argument. In Civil Procedure I read World Wide Volkswagen and agreed that the car dealership should not be held liable in Oklahoma when it had only conducted business in New York. Suddenly I realized I was siding with the international corporation over the individual plaintiff. What was happening to my sense of justice?

What was happening was that I was becoming a lawyer. The public service program, journal symposia, debates and fascinating lectures have all created constant dialogue and exchange of ideas. In most of my classes, the professors created classroom environments that have bridged the gap between the intellectual and the practical aspects of law. For example, in Constitutional Litigation, my professor facilitated discussions about the Article III roots of sovereign immunity as well as problems with finding an adequate plaintiff for a civil rights lawsuit. Most professors at Penn teach not only for the academic value of the subject, but also because they expect their students to go out and change the world.