CELL Blog | Center for Engaged Learning in the Law

Like many entering law students today, I came to law school with the understanding that its purpose was not to teach me rules, but to teach me how to think like a lawyer. This puzzled me because we seemed to spend a lot of class (and exam) time on rules. And I was never sure if or when I was thinking like a lawyer.

If you are or are about to be a 1L and you share my understanding of the purpose of law school, I hope what I’m about to say here is helpful. You do have to learn a lot of rules, but knowing rules is not an end in itself. You learn rules so that you can make arguments about their application to novel factual situations, and the process of making such arguments (in the classroom and on exams) is what you may consider thinking like a lawyer.

Because rules are helpful to you only insofar as you can use them to support or undermine their application to new factual contexts, you should also be suspicious about the advice to identify an opinion’s “holding.” All holdings are contingent, because their meaning depends on how they are interpreted in future cases. In other words, what a case “stands for” is a matter of argument, and an appellate court judge can no more forever determine what a case “stands for” than an author or a painter can forever determine how readers or viewers will interpret their works.

I hope that this general perspective on what law school is all about, particularly for 1L’s, is helpful to you.