When Is Law School Worth It? Fordham Alum Pardo, C. on Choosing (and Coping with) a Law Degree
By Elissa Johnston
Pardo, C. (they/them), currently a third-year student at Fordham Law.
If you’ve ever wondered whether law school is as challenging as people say it is, Fordham alum Pardo, C. (they/them) has an answer for you: it is. But the struggle that is law school isn’t the only factor you should consider when deciding whether to pursue a career in law.
Pardo started at Fordham’s School of Law in the fall of 2020 during the global pandemic. As an undergrad at Fordham, they participated in the English department’s Creative Writing program, Lincoln Center’s comedy club, and a disability advocacy club they started during their junior year. These experiences convinced Pardo that they needed a law degree to help people with disabilities get the accommodations they needed. “That was where I realized there was only so much you can do within the school, by talking to administrators and decision-makers… I saw that there were students who had issues with the school and eventually had to take them to court—and they won,” they told me. “And I thought, ‘well, that’s not good,’ but I realized that if I wanted to continue doing something in this vein, I had to go to law school.”
Pardo confessed that their relationship with law school was ambivalent from the start. “I went to law school thinking, ‘well, it kind of sucks that you need to sue to do this kind of thing,’ so ideally, I would be helping to make [getting accomodations] less of an expensive and long process. But until then, I thought that maybe I could help people along the way since it is so complicated.”
Once Pardo got into law school, they found that it required a certain kind of intellectual labor that didn’t come naturally to them. “Law school is the epitome of everything I disliked about higher education, concentrated to a point,” they said. “Not to say that there aren’t nice professors or people who are really trying to educate. But the law school system is very rigid, and it only works for a very specific type of person. These people are usually type A, they work fast, and they can consume information and move on; they prioritize their work and do it really efficiently.”
Law school as a system, Pardo suggested, doesn’t encourage students to be “smart and edgy thinkers,” which can contribute to stereotypes (to some extent true) of lawyers hesitating to talk about what laws actually mean.”It’s because law school doesn’t incentivize people to think about the law in smart ways,” Pardo remarked. They found that law classes don’t ask students to think critically about the laws they’re learning. This creates the illusion that laws are just “weird manifestations of legal logic” that come about apart from the sociopolitical context in which they were written.
As someone taught to think critically about the people and ideas behind texts, Pardo found this a frustrating adjustment. “Somebody wrote this!” they said, laughing. “Somebody had a perspective and something specific they wanted to, and that’s why they wrote this.” Pardo also suggested, though, that the way law school asks students to think about laws might be changing; more and more lawyers are trying to see how their standards for laws “map onto practical reality.” Pardo clarified that learning the content and precedents of the law is still useful, but that it’s also useful to think about who wrote the law—and why.
Pardo noted that it takes a very long time for lawyers to change these inherited systems: “Lawyers regulate themselves, so they’re taught to do things in a certain way. Then they run the Bar Association, and then they’re able to preserve their own traditions. So it can be difficult to change things, but it does seem like there are a lot of changes in the air. So we’ll see if any of them filter down.”
Pardo also pointed out that not all law programs work off of the same model; NYU’s Public Interest Law Center (PILC), for example, explicitly focuses on preparing its students for public service. In Pardo’s experience, though, law school seems built to prepare students for high-pressure, high-paying jobs that will allow them to pay back their student debt quickly. Pardo was quick to affirm that choosing a high-paying job is an entirely reasonable goal, and it certainly doesn’t have to be a permanent career choice. In general, though, this career trajectory helps support and perpetuate a well-established narrative about law school: “It’s terrible. People quit because it’s terrible. There are people I don’t see around anymore because they left, because it’s not easy to get accommodations. It’s an incredibly competitive environment, it’s isolating, they don’t teach you to work together, and grades are by rank.”
If, however, you know that you want the kinds of opportunities that a law degree can offer you, law school seems a necessary (and, mercifully, temporary) evil. Pardo shared some advice on how to get through law school if it isn’t a natural fit for you: “I really needed to establish healthy habits and free time, regular exercise, diet, and hanging out with people—and some people told me I needed to sacrifice visiting family—I was like, what the hell is going on?”
Pardo emphasized how important it is for people coming in with conditions triggered by stress to make sure they have support in place. “You can get accommodations, and I have them, but the way law school is structured is incredibly unfriendly to a lot of disabled folks. For me, having people there to look out for me was incredibly important. So make sure you have your doctors and therapists and medications in order ahead of time, and make sure you have people there to look out for you and talk to you. Don’t try to change things in the first year.” Pardo shared that they’re still trying to figure out how to manage their well-being in law school. There's no perfect solution, but “if you have your support network in place before you start, the whole process [of law school] won’t isolate you.”
Pardo mentioned that they wished someone had told them in their first year of law school that there were more efficient ways of handling classwork than forcing their way through all of the assigned readings. Getting outlines and notes from upper-level students can make life a lot easier, and Pardo “know[s] a lot of people who do very well in law school who don’t do all the readings.”
While Pardo didn’t find the law school experience particularly fulfilling, required internships gave them a chance to define their personal job trajectory. During the second year of law school, Pardo did a for-credit internship with the Mental Hygiene Legal Service. This organization defends the rights and interests of those in guardianships and mental health treatment programs. “These are groups of people in institutions that have been heavily taken advantage of and abused in the past, and even though things like guardianships can be necessary, we still have to make sure that people’s rights and autonomies are preserved as much as possible,” Pardo told me.
Pardo’s internship with the Mental Hygiene Legal Service gave them experience with the kind of work they would like to keep doing. “It felt like a job that was necessary. There are a lot of public interest jobs within the legal system, I think, that are stopgaps for larger societal failings. And a lot of people burn out and feel frustrated because they keep getting clients with the same problem, and they can’t address the core issue. I think that the great thing about Mental Hygiene Legal Service is that it fills a role that addresses a real issue: sometimes, people’s lives are better if they’re forcibly medicated for a little while. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t have choices they want to make, that these medications don’t have serious side effects, or that there isn’t a history of locking people up for a long time (and that’s an impulse that hasn’t gone away in today’s society). So Mental Hygiene Legal Service acts as a counterbalance to make sure that these people have a representative to prevent the kinds of abuses that we used to see thirty or forty years ago. So that’s why I liked that work: it felt like it could be part of an ideal working system.”
Law school might be an unpleasant experience for most people, but it shouldn’t keep people from the profession. “It’s three years of an atrocious experience, but it doesn’t reflect the practice unless you go into a very small minority of jobs where they pressure you to work nonstop. But you don’t need to be that person. If you can have your supports in place, I feel like you can do [law school] even if you’re not 100% committed to the idea of a legal career,” Pardo told me. “Law school is nothing like the profession at all. It’s some weird hazing ritual you go through for three years, and then you go to work.”
If you are interested in a law degree or the legal profession, law school may be financially and personally worthwhile. Just make sure you have a plan for maintaining the lifestyle habits and networks of support that you need to stay healthy. After all, as Pardo reminded us, “If you don’t take care of yourself, you will be less productive, so don’t feel bad about it. Do what you need to do. Try to be as efficient as you can, but don’t feel bad or beat yourself up about needing to sleep.”
