Over at Prawfsblawg, Dan Markel has a post up about what rising 1Ls should be reading the summer before they start their legal education. The list has entries that include great books about current issues in legal education, great figures in the law, the Supreme Court, legal history, jurisprudence, and more.
It's a fabulous list. But I couldn't disagree more with it.
I am a firm believer in answering this question (which does get asked a lot by incoming students) with a very firm "nothing whatsoever about law." Why? Because once you start law school, your life is going to be consumed by the law. You are going to be reading nothing but law, thinking about nothing but law, and living nothing but law. Yeah, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it's not that far off. Your time to read great works or trashy novels or comic books or whatever will be seriously reduced.
So what should a rising 1L read over the summer before her first year? Read those New York Times best sellers that everyone's talking about. Read those classics that you haven't gotten to because your 11th grade teacher assigned Hemingway and Austen and not Tolstoy and Kafka. Read that Calvin and Hobbes compilation that has been sitting on your dad's bookshelf for two decades. Read the latest from Dan Brown or Tina Fey. Or read Zadie Smith's "White Teeth" because it's incredible.
Whatever it is, don't read anything that mentions Antonin Scalia or William Brennan, refers to the word "tort," or takes place roughly in the time periods surrounding 1789, 1868, or 1937.
In other words, have fun reading this summer!
Yeah, but one of the characters in "White Teeth" is named Iqbal! You can't escape the law!
Posted by: Josh | June 07, 2011 at 12:07 AM
David - I could just walk down the hall to tell you this, but I gave your exact advice to a "rising 1L" yesterday. A lovely, ambitious soon-to-be law student emailed me and wanted to know what she could do to prepare for entering law school in the fall. She reported that she had already done some "legal" reading. I told her, in short, to relax and enjoy her summer.
Posted by: Beth Haas | June 07, 2011 at 04:51 PM
I always recommend Shakespeare.
Posted by: Steven Lubet | June 07, 2011 at 05:40 PM
That's the advice I always give. Glad others do too.
Posted by: Joseph Slater | June 08, 2011 at 06:14 PM
Nice blog. I get plenty of visits to my blog http://www.soccerjerseysmall.com, but even begging on facebook has gotten me no useful comments. I like the "curse often" recommendation, but I'm trying to be family-friendly myself. Maybe the comment cluster idea...
Posted by: soccerjerseysmall | June 09, 2011 at 05:05 AM