Read Law

The main greeting question people used to ask me was, “Do you still run?” My move to Williamsburg has ended that 13-year tradition and I’m now usually asked some version of: “How is school?”

It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer, so my typical reply is something to the effect of, “It’s good. It keeps me busy.” Short and vague.

I suppose the difficulty arises in part because of common preconceptions about law school (for some reason it’s hard for me to give an answer when I feel like the other person is already expecting a certain type of answer). Or maybe it’s because I can’t always tell whether the questioner wants a general benchmark of my status as a law student, or a deeper, analytical reply.  Or perhaps it’s because my impulse is to share the experience rather than the technicalities; the experience is more interesting, but more difficult to put into words. And it takes a great deal of technicality to explain experience.

Well, tonight I’m going to describe one or two technicalities of law school. With any luck, that will give a small taste of the real experience.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout talks about her father going to Montgomery to “read law” (Harper Lee, Ch. 1). I have always liked the ring of that phrase. But I never knew how literal it was until I began “reading law” myself. That’s about what law school amounts to. My homework is a nightly list of items to read. For precision, I could add “talk law” and “write law” to Scout’s description, but the bulk of the work is still reading.

What do I read? Cases. Dozens of them.

I used to think law students spent a lot of time studying constitutional and statutory law – founding documents and subsequent legislation. I’d heard of casebooks, but I imagined the cases were only tangentially related, like colorful illustrations in the margins. Instead I’ve found that the constitutional clause or the statute – if there is one at all – is more like the heading of a chapter which is followed by paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of cases.

And some of those cases are crazy. Last week there was one about an armchair thrown out of a hotel window amidst V-J Day celebrations in 1945. Another case was about a steer falling through the ceiling (note to county and state fairs: please don’t put 600 pound livestock on the second floor). Then there was a case about the robbers who stole a police car in an attempt to escape, then stole another police car when the first one was disabled.

As you can tell, it can be very entertaining. (Side note: it’s remarkable how often alcohol is involved in the events that precede litigation.)

All of this reading has changed my view of what “the law” is. Before school, I would have described the law as the US Constitution, the various state constitutions, and state and federal legislative statutes, with a few regulations thrown in for good measure. But that’s only a small part of it. “The law” also includes the always evolving common law* and innumerable court decisions. I’ve been forever disabused of the grade school notion that the legislative branch makes the law, the executive branch enforces the law, and the judicial branch interprets the law. That’s a nice simplification for elementary civics, but in reality they all make law – especially the judiciary.

*The common law is for wrongful acts such as battery. Legislatures don’t need to make laws (though they can if they want to) to tell people not to hit each other.

So on any given night (unless it’s Sunday), I can be found in various places reading through a handful of cases and trying to distill from them the underlying principles and rationale of “the law.”

Good thing I like to read.

This is the bridge I drive over on my way to and from school each day.