Well, If You Must...
Written: Aug 05 '00 (Updated Aug 05 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Despite the leftist loons running the place, it's still a law school producing real lawyers
Cons: The lunatics are in charge of the asylum. Just ignore them
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| mshawpyle's Full Review: Washington and Lee University School of Law |
My primary advice about going to law school is, Don't. (Have you noticed the number of ex-lawyers on this site? Shouldn't that tell you something?)
Still, if you are bent and determined on ruining your life, you may as well do it as painlessly and properly as possible.
I am assuming that your insane determination to become a rodent – sorry, lawyer – is prompted by the usual motives (status, riches, and so on, lightly disguised by prattle about justice and making the world a better place), and that in consequence your goal is private practice. (The other most common motive is, of course, that the trust fund isn't empty yet and you can't think of anything else to occupy your time after college. Yes, there are a few people who plunge into law school because they truly want to serve justice and equity: they comprise most of the numerous ex-lawyers on this site.)
Still. Whether your career dreams involve becoming a trust officer for a major bank (AKA taking bluehairs to lunch for a living), academe (the casting of artificial pearls before real swine), gummint service (suckling the public teat), private practice (a trip through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat), or the only really respectable option, the Judge Advocate General's Corps, W&L Law will do you to a T.
Yes, there are perhaps more popularly, publicly prominent law schools. But sooner or later, you have to stop networking, in this life, and buckle down to real work. Judge Jerry Buchmeyer's beloved column, entitled 'etc.' and found in the back of the Texas Bar Journal, has over the years printed many of the funniest exchanges ever to occur in deposition and trial transcripts; one of the most memorable involved commercial fraud litigation to which one of the Defendants was a Yale law school alum.
Q.: Are you telling this jury, under oath, that a man with your qualifications wasn't aware of the law on this point?
A.: [said loftily, I am sure] At Yale Law, we study concepts.
Every law school in this country, all the way down to New Mexico Body & Fender and Albemarle County Community College (whoops, I mean UVa), peddles the same shtick about 'learning to think like a lawyer' (there's an oxymoron for you) and 'the Socratic Method' and all that rot. Fine. So that you can get anywhere. Why, then, W&L Law?
Background
The Lexington Law School was founded in 1849 by Judge John Brockenbrough, a hundred years after the foundation of what was, by then, Washington College. After the War, the new president of the college embarked upon a major reorganization: he invented the elective system, established the wholly student-run Honor System, created the world's first School of Journalism, and made the Law School part of the College (which proves that even General Robert Edward Lee could make the occasional mistake...).
Traditions
For a very long time, what was by then the Law School of Washington & Lee University continued, like its undergraduate counterpart, to turn out gentleman lawyers who gave considerable, if aristocratically self-deprecating, service to the Old Dominion, West Virginia, North Carolina, the District, Maryland, and the Federal Government. A handful of Supreme Court justices (Lewis F. Powell being the most recent among them), legal scholars, brilliant jurists such as John Minor Wisdom, Vice President Davis, governors, senators both State and Federal, and so on.
Like W&L as a whole, it was homogenous, conservative, highly-regarded within the circles that matter without attracting any vulgar attention, thoroughly informed by the spirit as well as the letter of the Honor Code, and an incredible bargain. (W&L's endowment history reaches back to and beyond George Washington's gift of canal company stock, that still pays through its dividends part of the cost of every student's education).
Location and Environment
W&L and its law school are located in Lexington, Virginia, on what John Cowper Powys called the most attractive college campus in America. Lexington is the county seat of Rockbridge County (qv my review), possibly the most beautiful part of the Shenandoah Valley and thus, possibly, the most beautiful place in the world.
The people of Lexington and Rockbridge are the best folks on the planet, which has resulted in their having been taken advantage of by students since everything started to go to hell in this country back in the Sixties. As a result, they are rightly reserved these days, and the average student, undergrad or law, will never get to know them. (Certainly most of the studentry will never be found fishing with the locals, shooting with the locals, riding with the Rockbridge Hunt, attending the local football games ... instead, their interactions will be with landlords, the Sheriff's and Lexington Police Departments, merchants, and so on. This is a grave mistake: you'd be missing a lot.)
Obviously, if the idea of an idyllic rural setting, small town Southern life in a conservative, church-going community,* and having no urban vices available is not for you, run, don't walk, to the exit.
Assuming however that you are capable of enjoying life away from bustle (actually the town of Bustleburg is just up Route 39, though it cannot be said to live up to its name, consisting as it does of about four farmhouses), there could be no better place to be.
The Physical Plant
Among the sorriest events of the Seventies was the decision to move the Law School off the Colonnade, and indeed to the other side of Woods Creek, which is an almost impassable psychological barrier, however negligible it may be physically. The Law School was dowered with a Bauhausy, squat building that always somehow looks grim, courtesy of Sydney and Frances Lewis, whose name the building bears (no one ever uses the name, by the way).
The Lewises, who ran Best Products until it went belly-up, were Richmond, um, newcomers who believed that they could, ah, improve their standing by an interest in what is laughingly called 'modern "art"' and by various benefactions. (Of course of all the possible ways to break into Virginia Society, this has to have been the nuttiest idea ever.) Much of their collection remains on loan at the new Law School, hung against the oh-so-trendy (thirty years ago) exposed brick loft-style walls.
Whilst I was yet an undergrad, it was a tradition to go over to Lewis Hall during a break in a poker game (after making a run for more port or shooting sherry or what have you) and laugh at the collection. I have it on, um, reliable authority that one night certain W&L men who shall remain nameless went out to the fireworks stand on Route 11 – one of those places with a sideline in cast-iron lawn jockeys, plastic flamingos, and such – and bought The Ultimate Tacky Black Velvet Painting. You know, the sort of thing that is a reproduction of da Vinci's The Last Supper, with Elvis as Christ, MLK or a Kennedy as St John the Divine, and a Spanish bullfight going on in the background, glimpsed through the colonnade. This was hung in place of one of the Lewis Collectibles, with a typed card with the usual blether. It remained there for some weeks before anyone noticed that it was a jest.**
If you did not find the foregoing a bit amusing, I would not recommend W&L Law to you, by the bye.
At any rate, the move to Lewis Hall had a deleterious effect upon undergrad - law student relations, and decreased interaction has remained in place ever since.
That said, the new building has a fine print library, plenty of sound, roomy carrel space, ample parking, classrooms far too large for a student body of 350 souls, and is of course, as they all are these days, wired to the gills.
Students and Faculty
About the time the Law School was physically moved, the ABA, in an early fit of Political Correctness, threatened to decertify it if it didn't go coed (thus ruining the Law School a decade and a half before the faculty leftists on the undergrad side shot the University into rag dolls by the same means). Shortly thereafter the Powers What Am began a calculated policy of restricting the number of seven-year men in the sacred name of 'diversity.' (Now that they've wrecked W&L as a whole, that may have changed.) It was their object to purge the Law School of its traditional base of students who had gotten their undergrad degrees from W&L, VMI, UVa, and a few other places.
In this they succeeded only in part. In my day, for instance, while W&L men were long since in the minority, they remained visible out of all proportion to their numbers. In Ann Massie's Con Law II, for instance, there were enough of us, sitting in the back row on the Far Right of the lecture room, always arguing States' Rights and Strict Construction, that we were christened The Fourth Circuit. (Now that the term 'W&L Man' has been rendered meaningless, they may be back in the majority.)
Along with this came an institutional and administrative shift to the Left. When Dean Steinheimer stepped down, there was an all-out campaign to replace him with a safe liberal, even if it meant hiring some nameless nonentity from the Platte or somewhere. Dean Fred Kirgis was an inoffensive enough fellow, though so far to the Left that many of us took to calling Lewis Hall 'The Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Kirgis-stan.' The kicker here is that, for reasons of Leftist orthodoxy, they picked the poor sod over a candidate who might have reestablished W&L's national reputation two years later: Antonin Scalia.
Despite all this idiocy, the actual teaching faculty is what makes the school. Roy Steinheimer for Commercial Transactions was an enlightenment. Dennis Brion in Real Estate was a joy. Ned Henneman, of Harvard and Yale both – 'Remembah, the fuhst principle of making a Will is to screw the gov'nm'nt. Correction, the fuhst principle is to screw y' wife, then the gov'nm'nt' – made Probate, Wills, Trusts, and Estates so much wry fun I spent a summer working for him on revisions to the Restatement Second of Trusts (my monument: the Rule Against Perpetuities and the Doctrine of Cy Pres.... Gee, I have not after all lived wholly in vain...). Not to mention Ann Massie and Joan 'Shaun' Shaughnessy, on either of whom one can hardly help but have a crush.
The list could be continued indefinitely, Uncas McThenia and Lash LaRue, Groot and Geimer, Millon and Sanders, and the retired or deceased we remember reverently, Jojo Ulrich, Timmy-Tax Philipps.... The point is these were and are teachers, friends, neighbors, fellow parishioners, drinking buddies, fellow members of the (highly conservative) local Democratic Committee, and so on. And one W&L tradition at least has remained: small classes, personal interaction, and the actual profs doing the teaching.
Now, yes, there are a couple of exceptions to that last point: exceptions that explain why after all I continue to regard W&L Law as first among equals. Legal Drafting and Moot Court are taught by adjunct professors: the best local judges.
Think about that. As I've noted, all law schools maunder interminably about 'learning to think like a lawyer' – or in the old law students' joke, 'the first year they scare you to death, the second they work you to death, and the third year they bore you to death.' The result is that the average newly-minted JD knows everything there is to know about the Rule in Shelly's Case and the Statute of Quiæ Emptores, but cannot draft a pleading or find the Courthouse (much less the deed records). Not after a W&L Law education, folks. For all the wreckage and stupidity of the past three decades, W&L Law, by God, still turns out lawyers.
And wasn't that sort of the point?
PS: Sorry about the length. But you know: lawyers are the people who write a 500-page document and call it a 'brief.'
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* Settled as it was by Ulstermen, lightly leavened by Anglican second sons and black sheep from Tidewater, Rockbridge is Ulster West, and heavily Presby. There are ample Anglicans, though, to support St Bob's parish, and there is an RC church, as well as Methodists and so on.
First Baptist, by the way, is an African-American congregation, where I once had the honor of appearing at the annual Martin Luther King Memorial Service – which, Lexington being Lexington, I attended between a service and a banquet memorializing R. E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, born on 19 and 23 January, respectively, and all three now part of the same holiday in the Commonwealth.
I believe the nearest synagogue is either in Staunton or in Roanoke. Greek Orthodox students routinely attend the Anglican services.
** The same group was allegedly responsible for decorating the new president's lawn, in 1983 or so, with pink flamingos and other white trash ornaments.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
mshawpyle
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 - Top 500 |
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Member: Markham Shaw Pyle, JD
Location: Houston, Texas
Reviews written: 539
Trusted by: 391 members
About Me:
Historian, baseballing bon vivant, Boll Weevil, W&L man; and the Walter Mitty of field sports
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