Welcome, Box-Top Kids

If you did this the way I did this, you are secretly anxiety-ridden over not knowing why you are going to law school or what it is that lawyers even do exactly. Sure, everyone knows lawyers argue. They manufacture and sell legal arguments. And maybe all you know about legal arguments is that they can’t possibly be much like the arguments you have with your mother, brother, girlfriend, or husband. (Three years hence, you will doubt the sanity of the non-lawyers who argue in the unstructured, emotionally overwrought way that you do now.) What you don’t know is that you made your first legal argument when you were playing Monopoly or Parcheesi or Chutes and Ladders or whatever board game was en vogue when you millennials were tots. Someone rolled a double and wanted to roll again even though he was in jail or landed on Free Parking and wanted money for it, and there was a dispute. And one kid whipped out the box top and read everyone the paragraph that says rolling a double gets you out of jail but you can’t go again or the one that says that Free Parking is just that and you don’t get any money for it. And everyone was annoyed at Box-Top Kid’s pedantry because it sucked the fun right out of the room.

Box-Top Kid was you. Box-Top Kid grows up to be a lawyer. The fun kids grow up to be firefighters or professional hockey players or astronauts.

This fun-sucking skill—finding, parsing, and applying rules—is exactly what you’ll be honing in law school. The box top is much, much bigger—big enough to regulate all aspects of life. No one can ever follow all the applicable rules, so you’ll never be bored. Better still, the box top is always changing and it is the lawyers who edit it and amend it. As a result, you can never actually know what the law is. You will always have to research the box top—even after you’ve been practicing for years and years. And your family and friends (who will start asking you for free legal advice in just a few months) will fret that you never know the answers to their problems. The best part of it is that the box top is never quite definitive because the basic box-top building blocks—words themselves—are political creatures subject to manipulation by the lawyers and judges who deploy them, as David Foster Wallace explains in this brilliant piece that takes a little while to download because it’s a pretty big file but is worth reading right now.