Let me preface that I have only read the first part of the chapter "Male As A Second Language" First of all, thank you Dr. Cauthen for using language in your writing that is accessible. I really enjoyed reading your work, and I can relate to it as well. I went to law school for 2 1/2 years. I did not go to a big Ivy League school like Harvard or Yale. I went to a small, private law school in Long Beach. The name of the school is Pacific Coast University School of Law. At the time that I attended, the school had not yet become accredited. As a result, after the first year of classes, students were required to take a "Baby Bar" exam, given by the State Bar Association. I took the exam three times and did not pass. When I had my professors examine my essay's, they could not understand why the State Bar graded them so low. I was allowed to continue on with my second year of school as long as I kept trying to pass the exam. I was even allowed to begin my third year upon the Dean's approval. At the time, I was also working as a paralegal in a bankruptcy law firm; surrounded by lawyer's on a daily basis. I started to think that the State Bar was failing certain students based upon age, gender, etc. I'm still not convinced that they weren't doing just that. Half way into my third year, I decided that I really didn't want to become an attorney. Working with them all day long and seeing the amount of stress and the number of hours that they worked was very unappealing to me. I dropped out of law school.
I can totally relate to Dr. Cauthen's arguments that law schools are genderized and not always female friendly. I also agree with the ways in which law school changes your personality and life perspectives. I was one of those "women who expressed liberal or feminist views, or were simply outspoken" (43). I think that because our school was so small and private, the number of female to male students and professors was pretty equal; unlike those at Harvard and Yale. These is no space within the law classroom for personal opinions or emotions. If you become passionate about a topic and start speaking in language other than legalese, you are quickly shot down and told to state the facts only and never ask "what-if." Law school requires that you learn an entirely new language, a new way of studying, and a strict set of standards that dictate human behavior. I remember on my first day of class, the dean of the school, Prof. Lewis gave a two hour lecture about how our roles as people had shifted from 'citizens' to 'officers of the courts' and that we were now being held to a much higher standard in our ways of thinking and behaving. Decorum, decorum, decorum, ad nauseum! We should avoid drinking too much and we should never do drugs. We should be highly selective with who we spent our time with. He told us that if we were married or in a relationship that we might as well say goodbye to our loved one's now because the relationship was doomed to fail since we had given over our entire lives to the world of law. This is evident in what Dr. Cauthen calls "disciplinary isolation...the moral boundaries between the private individual and the public individual" (43).
The study of law is very aggressive and antagonistic. I had graduated from UCI with a BA in English, where I was taught how to read effectively and write 10-12 page essays in an organized and efficient manner. In law school, you read a case, anywhere from 2-3 pages to 50-75 pages or longer and then you had to write a brief. Brief is the operative word in law school. My briefs were 5-6 pages long when they should have been 1-2 pages long. There was no place for words such as fair and compassionate. Only the most relevant facts are permissible to determine guilt or innocence, liability or no liability, etc. In quoting Worden, Dr. Cauthen makes this distinction with this quote: "The implicit (and sometimes explicit) message is not only that 'male voice' reasoning is a superior form of expression and understanding, but that anything else is not even communicative" (45). Dr. Cauthen goes on to say "When this is combined with the legal tendency toward very precise, very literal definitions of terms with moral valances (Foster, "Antigones" 244), we are left with a vision of law school as a closed, mathematical system, in which proper procedures lead impersonally to correct answers" (45-46). The study of law clearly enforces the end result of product and not process. There is no such thing as group work in law school. Students compete against one another rather than collaborating and working together, law students develop a very low tolerance for what they consider ignorance, and it's inevitable that you begin to debate every issue with your friends and family members to the point that you completely alienate yourself from everyone. I love the quote by Karl Llewellyn (who may be quoting Goodrich) on page 48; it resonates so truly what occurs to a first-year law school student! It's too long to add to this too long blog, but basically what it says is that first-year law students are stripped of all humanity and turned into fighting robots. Well done Dr. Cauthen, you couldn't have said it better.
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