Career Ser­vices co-hosted the Law School Pre­view last night with the Fire­stone Library in order to give stu­dents an idea of what their legal future might hold. For some­one like myself, whose knowl­edge of law school comes from The Paper Chase and Legally Blonde, the pre­view was an eye-opening experience.

The pre­view opened with a small talk from David Hol­lan­der, who is Firestone’s legal librar­ian. Hol­lan­der intro­duced the future legal stu­dents in the room to the phrase “the magic of legal research,” and pro­vided infor­ma­tion on research­ing the law. Hol­lan­der prac­ticed law for three years, and he said that knowl­edge of pri­mary (court cases, exec­u­tive reg­u­la­tions, and statutes) and sec­ondary (Law Review, trea­tises) sources was essen­tial for every law student.

The major­ity of the pre­view was con­ducted by Michael Herz, a fel­low in Princeton’s pro­gram in Law and Pub­lic Affairs (LAPA). Herz explained that he would be sim­u­lat­ing an “ordi­nary class,” though he wouldn’t focus on the Socratic method, a for­merly pop­u­lar method of teach­ing law. Instead, he said that the class would be “hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion, less that [I’m] grilling you or test­ing you, or humil­i­at­ing you.” The reports of ultra-scary law pro­fes­sors (think The Paper Chase) appar­ently have been greatly exaggerated.

The twenty or so stu­dents attend­ing the pre­view had received a packet of cases upon reg­is­ter­ing for the pre­view. Case law, Hol­lan­der had pre­vi­ously explained, cre­ated prece­dents but not statutes.

Among points cov­ered in the dis­cus­sion of the cases were the three ele­ments needed to under­stand a case: the out­come, the jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for that out­come, and the legal rule that could be extracted. “You don’t know what a case means until you’ve seen it applied,” Herz said. In the dis­cus­sion, stu­dents were asked to look for “mean­ing­ful dis­tinc­tions” between cases, or, alter­na­tively, to look for cases where the same jus­ti­fi­ca­tions could be applied. In this way, stu­dents learned how lawyers con­sider cases related or unrelated.

This is Career Service’s fourth year host­ing the Law School Pre­view, but you don’t need to wait until it comes around next year to learn more about law school. Keep an eye out for the alumni panel “What Kind of Law Will You Prac­tice?” (Tues­day, April 3, 7:00 pm at Career Ser­vices), or sched­ule an appoint­ment with Lyon Zab­sky, the career coun­selor in charge of pre-law advis­ing and all other things law-related!