How I Noticed My Shift to Critical Thinking

"C." I could not believe it. I had spent at least twenty-four hours per page on this draft memorandum assignment. English teachers loved me, my professors in philosophy told me to pursue a PhD, and yet here I was; I had chosen a profession in which my writing earned me a "C." Crestfallen, I signed up for a meeting with my legal writing teacher with plans to cry on her shoulder. Our meeting only floored me further. She told me to make a few specific changes and also told me that crushing writing grades happen to everyone, but in particular philosophers and journalists. "Why is this?" I thought to myself as I walked home through the bitterly dry cold of Boston in December. I did not have an answer then. The towering doom of finals followed by the frantic scramble of summer job applications effectively censured any philosophical thought.

Armed with solid grades from first semester, I approached my second semester advocacy memorandum writing assignment with a better arsenal. Following my professor’s precise instructions completely transformed my grade in the fall and I would do the exact same in the spring. Cocksure of my own prodigious development between the first and second writing assignments in the fall, I opted to let those less fortunate have access to my writing professor’s time. Alas, as my reader may expect, this concession funneled me into exactly the same pattern I encountered the first time around: a depressing grade on my first draft followed by a dramatic improvement on the second.

I wrote this pattern off, attributing it to the idiosyncrasies of my professor until the summer after my 1L year. The job applications paid off and I obtained a legal fellowship that allowed me to spend a great deal of time writing for a variety of audiences. I translated legalese into normal-person-speak for my employer. I wrote a little fiction on my own (side note: don’t let your creativity die in law school; our world needs creative lawyers). I wrote essays for philosophical conferences. I wrote blog posts on coffee and bicycles. But something in my writing had changed. Really changed.

Writing was easier but somehow took me longer. Always a voracious reader, I found the writing styles of other authors easier to adopt. I could no longer use just any word to express an idea, I had to find the sole word that would convey precisely what I intended. My sentences became shorter. I finally realized the function of the paragraph was to express a single cohesive idea, much like the sentence but fleshier. Citations – my favorite – rather than being drudgery, became a harmonious commentary or pensive dialogue to the primary flow of argument.

I did not realize all these changes concretely until the beginning of the following fall semester. One of my classes, a writing course entitled "Appellate Advocacy," began with the professor assigning us several hundred pages of legal theory articulating different understandings of the role of the appellate judge. He explained that in order to write well one must understand his or her audience. In that instant I understood the question I pondered at the end of my first semester: philosophers have a difficult time transitioning to legal writing because legal writing is all about form. All the writing I did prior to law school focused on the content of what I was trying to convey, not the actual conveyance. Never had a teacher forced me to write purely for the bare structure behind my ideas.

Writing for bare structure exemplifies the goal of 1L year. The goal to which all thirty-three of that year’s credit hours aspired: deep, precise analysis and formulation of thought. In this sense, focusing on the content of law school misses the point. Law school is not concerned with content. Law school aims changing the way you think about everything. Content becomes somewhat irrelevant because the subject matter doesn’t change the way you think about it. When my writing teacher had me follow a strict method, she was not concerned about the underlying content. When my property professor was driving home a key nuance in a subtle case, it was not the case itself that he was concerned about. He was interested in the formulation and relation of ideas within the case. Sure, the content of the case was useful in terms of setting up the argument, but it was the argument itself that was his primary concern. By patterning our thinking after the great legal minds of the Anglo-American tradition, we were being taught what it means to reason well.

This powerful analytic tool I was given by the crucible of 1L year made me a better writer by making me a better thinker. Context, nuance, relevance, audience, levels of proof, logic. The entire formal side of writing and thinking had been wrested from the murk of content and given to me. With it I could pattern and formulate any content I desired to understand. I can write better legal memoranda because I better understand what my audience expects. I can highlight the important aspects of a two thousand page piece of legislation because I can better discern what affects certain issues. I can write better short fiction because the elements of interest in a given story are more apparent to me.

Law school makes people better at the medium between people: words, whether written or spoken. That medium is the step between content as content and content as expressed. Because expression is an art in itself, at its core law school is a degree in idea translation. The ideas translated depend on you.

Taylor Black is currently a 2L at Boston College Law School. Originally from Seattle, he attended Gonzaga University where he majored in philosophy and classics.

Taylor Black

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