the law school class that changed my life.

🎶 Fly Me to the Moon - Claire Littley (Neon Genesis Evangelion ED)​

Viva Las Vegas! I'm heading to the other city that never sleeps this week for the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA) Convention. I haven't hung out with a large group of lawyers in, well, months. Come say hi if you see me! I've been to NAPABA a few times now, and I can honestly say it's one of the funnest conferences that I have ever had the pleasure of attending. I can't even imagine what having it in Vegas will be like...!

But before we fly out--this week, I reflect on the one law school class that completely changed my thinking (and my life!) and answer reader questions about how to defend riskier life decisions against detractors and whether it's possible to "have it all" when it comes to practicing law and helping people. Call me naive perhaps, but I really do wholeheartedly believe in the notion of having it all--whatever "all" means to you, at any time. See you on the Strip!

feminism made me feel unsafe.

If you had asked me during my college graduation what I thought I would be doing in law school, I would have responded: "Learning the law, of course." It didn't even occur to me that law school could be for anything else. All post-graduate studies seemed obvious to me at the time--one learned about business in business school, medicine in medical school, and law in law school. Duh.

And for the first year of law school, I was exactly right. From the core 1L curriculum, I learned in Torts that negligence was the most common civil claim and required a showing of injury, duty, breach, and causation; I learned in Civil Procedure that there was a literal book of rules that lawyers had to follow when practicing in federal court (and individual judges can even set specific rules about things like fonts and text spacing); and I learned from the other panicked 1Ls that there was a property rule called the "rule against perpetuities" that my own property professor, thankfully, did not cover.

And I loved learning the rules. I loved Big Brother. In the same way that knowing the dress code at events made me feel safer attending, learning the legal rules made me feel safer in a strange and scary world. I wanted desperately to know that as long as I knew the rules, as long as I followed the rules, then I would be safe. So I studied the cases and attendant rules with a fervor that can only be attributed to one studying as if their life depended on it--because it felt exactly like my life depended on it.

Then came Feminist Legal Theory. It wasn't a class that had been on my radar at all, to be frank, but after Nathaniel and I started dating, he encouraged me to look into the class. I didn't appreciate it at the time, but he had a better feel for who I actually was than I did, primarily due to the greater objectivity of third-party perspective and my own ongoing myopic obsession with whom I should be. In my mission for safety, I had tamped down many curiosities, pleasures, and instincts over the years. Sure, I experienced humiliation and pain less often than some of my friends did, but I also was never that excited about the happenings in my life--people whom I dated, the "black letter law" classes that I overwhelmingly enrolled in (e.g., Corporations, Taxation), the professors and lawyers whom I met as part of what I felt was obligatory networking.

Whereas most of my previous courses focused 90% on what the law was and 10% on what it could be, Feminist Legal Theory focused 100% of its time and efforts on the latter. I mean, the name really says it all--it was all theory, and case studies were only introduced as a means of evaluating the theories. By contrast, many black letter law courses rely on teaching case after case after case, only to briefly touch upon theory at the very end of the semester. The idea, I think, is to build your foundation brick by brick and then step back to take stock of what you had built, but the reality of that method meant I often laid bricks unevenly and with edges sticking out because I had absolutely no conception of what the blueprint was. When I stepped back, I had only a vague sense of what I was looking at, like the poorly restored Ecce Homo.

By focusing primarily on theory, Feminist Legal Theory challenged all of the rules that I had painstakingly learned and clung onto in life. I had eschewed the label of "feminist" in college, finding the loud bra burners whom I associated feminism with in my mind to be distasteful and anti-feminine. In class, I learned that this type of "lumping in" all feminists with one portrayal of feminism was "essentialism," the idea that there's a monolithic version of an identity. Professor Angela P. Harris described at length in her law review article, "Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory," the allure of essentialism. Essentialism is intellectually easy--it is always easier to assume that your own experiences or conception of something is representative of the thing, whereas going out into the world to discover others' experiences takes time and effort. Essentialism presents emotional safety, as well, and simplifying categories are necessary for cognitive reasons, even if the unifying experience helps organize some women at the cost of denying other women's experiences. With horror, I realized that was me--a denier of other women's experiences.

This idea that I had been flattening everything in life--myself, my goals, my views of others--shocked me. I knew I was many things, but I had never considered the prospect that I might have been intellectually lazy, of all things. But the very things I craved--knowledge, certainty, rules--lent themselves easily to essentialism on every level. In another life, I am most certainly railing against intersectionality in a gross misinterpretation of Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw's writings. But in this life, I am glad that I put down my Ayn Rand and realized that the world was large enough for me to call myself a feminist, after all.

✍️ ask cece

i did something different than everyone else. how do i not feel like a failure relative to them?

Q: Today, I was listening to your podcast (YouTube), and I was really impressed by how you were able to discuss the topic of jealousy in such an honest way. I have always been prone to jealousy, but I can’t say that I was always that candid with others (or myself for that matter) about it. I received an invitation to a birthday party from one of my old high school classmates, and even though I won’t be able to be there because I’m studying abroad, the mere idea of going back to such an event filled me with dread. I went to a pretty good “scientific high school” (in my country, not all high schools are the same), which meant a greater focus on maths and natural sciences, but I chose to study political science at university while all my classmates went on to study safer majors such as engineering, physics, maths, economics. I feel like I wasted the opportunity of going to a good university back in my home country to study a topic that would have resulted in better job prospects later, and I feel like a failure. The idea of going back to see my classmates and having to talk about my decision to study political science is what I imagine hell to be like. I guess my question to you is: how can you defend decisions that are seen as riskier by other people? And how can you know if you are sticking to a decision because it’s something you actually want or because you simply have already invested so much time defending it to yourself and other people that questioning it would feel like everything is crumbling at your feet?

- Zoe

A: Hi Zoe! This is something that I've been thinking about a lot myself lately--while all of my colleagues and friends understood my departure from law to pursue writing, I received my fair share of ridicule from others. In my experience, I don't think that framing your life choices as something you have to "defend" to other people is a great way of living--living defensively seems appealing, because our human brains incessantly try to minimize pain, but living defensively means that we take away mental energy from living offensively--actively and proactively living. I noticed that you used the term "safer" when it comes to the STEM majors that your other classmates pursued and associated that with "better job prospects," indirectly making you feel like a "failure." That's some really loaded language there, and I can see how judgmental you are being to yourself. Your inner critic is working on overdrive.

Instead of focusing on how to defend your past decisions to others, channel your energy towards getting attuned with yourself and your own desires. Often, if others spend their time and energy questioning you about your life decisions, it's a symptom of their not being entirely certain about their own life choices, either. Your decision to deviate from the "safer" path likely threatens them in some way--I know that when I was struggling to find safety in my own life, I side-eyed people who majored in Art or Theatre Studies or Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. I told myself that I was superior to them because I majored in something "practical," when the truth was that I felt incredibly insecure about my decision, and the fact that others were majoring in something impractical made me wonder whether I really needed to choose practicality, after all. In the end, it is bizarre to spend time and energy questioning someone else's life decisions, and the only reason why anyone would do it is because your life decisions implicate theirs in a significant way that they're not revealing to you--anyone who is happy and confident in their own life would not think twice about you pursuing political science instead of STEM.

The second question is where the real work is centered. Do you actually love political science, or are you just tied to the sunk costs associated with pursuing political science? This is where journaling comes in. Every morning or evening (whichever works better for you), think about the activities that day (or the day before) and how much they engaged you, particularly where you were achieved flow--that is, where you were totally engaged in an activity, comfortable, and otherwise "in the zone." The activities do not need to be school-related--it can, and should, be anything that you did! Capture these activities over a period of a month or more, and then look back on them to identify which activities seem to consistently engage you. I like the Designing Your Life worksheets for journaling engagement and energy (i.e., did the activity give you more energy or take away energy), and it's amazing what patterns you'll see after a few weeks. (There's also an app, although I haven't used it so can't speak to its quality.) If activities related to political science (e.g., reading for class, going to office hours, discussing with classmates) repeatedly put you into flow, then there's a very good chance that you're studying political science because you want to. But if those activities consistently return low engagement and zap your energy, that could be a sign that you're falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy and should evaluate your journal to identify what, then, does excite you. It might not be subject-related at all--maybe it's conversing with others, maybe it's deep thinking, maybe it's learning new things. Knowing what excites you is key to actively living a life that you want--not the life that others are trying to get you to want so that they feel better about their own lives.

is it possible to both help people and have a legal career?

Q: I’m about to start law school (yay!) and am wondering how to incorporate humanitarian efforts into a law career. I feel like I need to be helping people in order to be fulfilled in life, but law doesn’t traditionally fall into these categories. Should I look outside of work and do things such as volunteer and donate or can I have the best of both worlds?
- Ieshia

A: Hey Ieshia! There are ways to help other people with a legal career (e.g., legal aid), but unfortunately, many of those paths don't pay much. Even in private practice, though, many lawyers are quite happy with how they are helping people--helping clients navigate the complex immigration system, finalizing divorces so that everyone can move on with their lives, assisting small businesses with legal formalities that they otherwise might not know they need. I think it is completely realistic to have the best of both worlds, as long as you are mindful about where you are looking. Any legal practice where the clients are individual people (as opposed to corporations) do, in fact, help people. I'd encourage you to explore legal practices outside of biglaw for ways in which legal practice can center individuals in their day-to-day.
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That being said, there are opportunities to help people even when primarily representing corporations. Law firms often have robust pro bono practices, and there are plenty of opportunities to volunteer and donate to causes that impact individuals. Have an ongoing conversation with yourself throughout law school, as you discover more about practice areas and employment opportunities, and don't forget to ask about opportunities to help people. There are certainly many ways to do it, but the difficulty here is always in the how, not the whether. Good luck!