“Do not go gentle into that good night … Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Dylan Thomas was contemplating death, old age, and human stagnation when he wrote that famous line. Yet the words are also applicable to twenty-something law students. Because a lot of us are dying.
Because law school is killing us.
Hear me out. We Harvard Law students are all quite good at narrowing our focus—at being funneled. We are funneled into the same narrow slate of extracurriculars during high school. We are funneled into one specific major in college. And finally, we are funneled into law school. This funneling process only narrows as time goes on. Our goals grow more uniform. Some students convince themselves they crave a prestigious clerkship purely because everyone else also craves that prestigious clerkship; others fall prey to the false notion, too popular on this campus, that if they want to be appointed a judge they must also become a boring automaton who holds no controversial opinions and who is driven by nothing but legal ambition; and so on.
A particularly intense professor of mine likened this process to boot camp. Law school breaks you down, and then it builds you up again in the image that it sees fit. Yet if you are not careful, the process risks taking more than it gives. In my opinion, that would be a shame, and you should resist it—you should “not go gentle into that good night.”
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t approach your profession with verve and skill. We all want to be attorneys or else we wouldn’t be tackling this grueling and expensive three-year process. It does mean, however, that in the course of becoming an attorney, you shouldn’t lose all your other defining features. Don’t squander what makes you, you. Before coming to law school, you were probably driven by legal ambition, sure, but also by a desire to learn, to love, to render the world a better place, to make friends, and to be—simply—happy. As you go through law school, don’t lose these desires so that they are replaced with only one: The desire to be an excellent attorney. You are a human, not a machine. In the immortal words of Walt Whitman, you are large. You contain multitudes.
So when others pressure you to participate in this legal journal because “everyone” does, to apply for that extracurricular because “everyone” applies, to attempt to work at this law firm because “everyone” knows it’s the best one, remember: There are many paths to becoming a successful attorney, and not all of them involve only concerning yourself with the law per se. The most creative lawyers—the most successful ones—are the ones who are also the most interesting human beings.
If you played guitar before, read fiction before, expressed your political opinions (liberal or conservative) vigorously and often before, played video games before, loved sitting outside and drawing before, enjoyed playing online chess before, whatever you loved, maintain that love. Be a person, one who would be judged interesting by all sorts of people, even those who know absolutely nothing about the legal profession.
Resist the tide. Leave Harvard Law School not as an attorney, but as a human being who happens to be an attorney. Graduate as a more interesting person than you were when you first started your law school application. It’s easy to become complacent, to follow the tide, but too much of value is lost if you surrender to law school’s various conforming pressures. If you wish to judge real people in the future, if you wish to help real people, then you must be a real person—not a mechanical legal automaton.
The best way to resist the tide of conformity is to start here in law school. And (here it comes) no organization at HLS is such a great outlet for this as the Harvard Law Record—your student newspaper, your dashboard for every debate, every uncertainty, every piece of news shaking this campus. Write for us. Write opinion pieces, write news pieces, engage in open and vigorous discussion with other students. Write regularly or write occasionally, submitting your pieces to editor@hlrecord.org. There is room for everyone here at the oldest law school student newspaper in the country.
Because we are studying the law not for the law’s sake, but for the sake of the law’s impact on the real world. And because that world is worth discussing.
Do not go gentle into that good night.