law school

1) A place where stoners and alcoholics can get a graduate degree.

2) An institution where starry eyed idealists have their dreams of upholding justice and benefiting humanity heartlessly destroyed while incurring more debt than a third world country. These poor souls, after three years of brutal Socratic torture and exposure to the cruel reality of the broken justice system and the non-existent job market, come out of law school stoners or alcoholics.

A place where students fail to recognize that law is not an exact science, and that the law is, essentially, what a jury or a powerful judge says it is. It is not uncommon for the inmates, that is to say, one's classmates, to constantly overanalyze the analyses of analyses. Moreover, regardless of a students' understanding of the law, they will fail to impress on exams, unless they use certain key terms which are only used by lawyers. These terms include: moreover, in sum, unconscionable, keen, cogent, nugget, comity, proportionality, substantial, reasonableness, as it were, precedent, stare decisis, sua sponte, de novo, and various other Latin phrases, the mispronunciation of which most likely has Marcus Aurelius turning in his grave.

An institution that steals three years of your life for three times the amount you paid for in undergraduate school. All learned there is how to party harder and longer without getting caught or at least an effective way to argue your way out of trouble.

To put it simply:

The epitome of all that is evil.

A building where you will spend three years of your life reading statutes, court cases, and legal commentary. You also will spend time arguing over politics, drinking beer, and playing poker. For the privilege of doing all this, you will pay a minimum of $30,000 per year (probably more in the Western or Northeastern U.S. states).

An institution for the study of law. Selecting candidates according to their academic qualifications and their personal character, it focuses on the professional education of lawyers and the academic study of the law. It not only teaches the law in its current form but fosters the creativity and analytic capability needed to see the law relative to all of its possible manifestations and to the static idea of justice. Thus the student learns to criticize the law, theorize it, and discover ways to change it for the better.

Where you go for to school for four years after college to learn to become a lawyer. In these four years, you will work your butt off every day, slog through endless amounts of reading, suffer through so much writing, and after you graduate, you don't get to call yourself "doctor".