Guard Your Reputation

The first piece of advice that I would give to someone upon arriving at law school for their first year would be to guard their reputation. While people will be pretty eager to make new acquaintances and friends, they’ll be just as eager to see others fail. Exams and grades are a full semester away, so people feel the need to draw on just about anything else they can get their hands on to establish a de facto class rank.

Getting caught with your pants down (metaphorically I hope) by a professor who randomly calls on you, or slipping up when you’re on call are probably the quickest ways to shoot yourself in the foot. I once had a classmate who, in front of the entire class, meant to say that he wanted to become a public defender. But he messed up and instead said he wanted to be a public defendant. The professor couldn’t resist and said, “Whatever you do, you should never aspire to be a public defendant.” Even though it wasn’t all that funny, the whole class laughed maliciously for about two whole minutes. The guy was done. He became an instant idiot. People wrote him off, and as far as popular opinion went, his future career prospects more likely involved him as a defendant on trial than any sort of competent attorney, even a public defender.

For that reason, law students, especially at the outset, are very careful to be on top form in the classroom. But the second easiest place to tarnish your reputation, and a setting where law students tend to be much less reserved, is the bar. As much as I recommend for law students to go out and have fun, you should never forget who exactly it is you are out drinking with. The first thing you know, you’re clinging glasses and taking shots with your buddies, and all of a sudden, when you show up to class the next day, everybody is staring at you with a big smile on their face, and whispering things as you set up your laptop:

“I heard he got a girl a pregnant. And he was so traumatized by the experience that he can’t get it up anymore. So he has to take Viagra. But one time he took too many, and he had an erection for a week. He actually had to go to work with a big boner in his pants. He said something to the receptionist, she freaked out, and he got fired for sexual harassment. That’s why he’s in law school.”

“Seriously? Where’d you hear that?”

“He told everyone at the bar last night.”

So maybe you just mentioned to a few people in confidence that you had tried Viagra once. But you know how these things can snowball.

Later on, as the semesters pass, you start to figure out who your real friends are, and who you can be drunk around without having to watch what you say. But at the beginning of the first year, you have no clue. Everyone seems friendly enough. You drink a couple of beers. You feel a bond forming with your new classmates. You take a couple of shots. And then you open your big fat mouth.

On the first night of orientation, the Student Bar Association organized an outing for all the 1Ls at a local bar. I went with my new roommate since he was the only person I knew well enough. I mingled and met many new classmates, but for the most part, I hung out with my roommate and had a good time with him. So, though we had just met the day before, we gave off the impression to everybody that we were good friends. We both had too much to drink, but our reactions to the alcohol were pretty different.

My roommate started dancing all over the place. He looked like a character from Footloose, who had been forbidden to dance by a town ordinance all his life, and now, he was finally free to give in to the music. He did just that. He must have danced for an hour and a half straight. He was not a terrible dancer, but he certainly wasn’t a good one. He had a strange style – very jerky yet methodical, like a marionette fighting jujitsu. He might have been able to blend in at a rave or a dance club, but this was a low-key bar with neon beer signs and sports decorations on the walls. And he was the only one dancing.

I was just as drunk as he was, so I thought, ‘Holy shit. My new roommate is hilarious.’ Everybody else stared at him like he had set himself on fire. They were clearly thinking, ‘How did this guy get into law school? He’s obviously insane.’

As if being associated with the crazy dancing guy wasn’t bad enough, I had my own turn at making an ass of myself that night. I stumbled onto a table where I recognized a few people from my section. They were talking about Israel. It is never good to join an argument about Israel and Palestine, especially not with people you don’t know, and especially not when you’re intoxicated. But I figured I had come to law school to argue, so I dove right in. I had recently read a book by Edward Said called “The Question of Palestine.” I had read Said’s “Orientalism” in college and, intrigued to read something else by him, I bought a used copy of “The Question of Palestine” on Amazon for something like 35 cents. This was a mistake, despite the bargain price, because Amazon now thinks that I am a terrorist, and every time I log on to the website, it greets me by my first name and suggests I might be interested in some pretty outrageous Islamic fundamentalist titles. I’m somewhat paranoid that Amazon, following some kind of Patriot Act obligation, might have leaked my name to Homeland Security.

Edward Said’s book, and his pro-Palestine thesis was still fresh in my head, and though I didn’t intend to plagiarize from the book, I sort of went off and recited Said’s main ideas and didn’t bother to clarify that they were not my thoughts or beliefs, but those of a Palestinian-American comparative literature professor from Columbia. It wasn’t until I left the table to get another drink that it hit me. ‘Oh no,’ I thought, ‘I hope I didn’t come across as an anti-semite.’

But it was too late. After one day of orientation, before the first class even started, my roommate and I had stamped ourselves as the dancing fool and the bigot. Needless to say, we did not get many visitors for a while.