-A High Schooler Review

Maybe you have decided to study law with great enthusiasm even though you are still at the very beginning of high school, but you are questioning if this decision is too early or if this is right for you. Or maybe you are at the end of high school and you want to make sure that your decision to study law is final. In fact, you may not even have decided to study law yet.

I was facing one of these situations. That’s when I came across this book during my research: How to Be Sort of Happy in Law School.

The author herself is a Stanford law graduate. Although there are great differences between law schools in different countries, studying law seems to have a international understanding. After all we share a common passion. As it writes in the book: “The law is society’s skeletal structure – the bare bones of how we create rules and procedures for behaving toward one another. And people who work on legal studies keep these bones in working together.” In our case it especially starts with the students of course. As it continues: “ (…) Many law school problems seem endemic to law studentship itself. That means this book can apply across the board to almost everyone.”

Problems? What kind of problems are we speaking of? How many problems? And will I be able to solve them without damaging my psychology?

Studying law has always been an idealistic goal for me. Coming from a country with economic crisis and a lot of constitutional problems perhaps I was hoping to be able to change some kind of stuff for my people ( Of course, it would be unrealistic to hope for changing big concepts like the constitution or the law on your own. More precisely, I wanted to be a functioning part of the system and institutions that would try to change them.).

If I couldn’t even cope with law school, how was I going to achieve these kinds of goals? So as I read the problems in the book one by one, the possibility of disappointment began to frighten me.

Professor Kathryne gives many examples on these problems. The list goes like not fitting in socially, exams, imposter syndrome, race discrimination, tough professors etc. etc.

Reading all along the book you can understand that studying law has a lot of difficulties. As author lists from neck hurts to academic problems. But I think at this point we should also take into consideration that we can encounter these problems in other university departments as well. So after considering it for a while, now I believe that they shouldn’t make us give up on our law dreams as long as we have ideals, as long as we think law is for us.

In conclusion, I can say that it is a very good and explanatory book about what awaits us in the future. It managed to answer many of my questions. It definitely deserves to be read with the author’s sincere language.

Good readings in advance!